Why Popular Biologist Claim There Is No Free Will

Free Will, Soul, and the Limits of Biological Stories

Discussions of free will are legion. Human beings have been debating, discussing, and philosophizing different notions of free will for thousands and thousands of years, possibly even longer. Of course, it’s hard to know what ancient tribal hunter-gatherers from the Paleolithic era were discussing in terms of consciousness or philosophy of consciousness, but as far as we can tell, free will has been an important idea in the human conceptual framework of life for a very long time.

So what is free will?

Free will would be the ability to choose some kind of directionality, some kind of trajectory, that falls outside the scope of mechanical conditioning. That is, there are patterns set in place that control, constrict, and bind us as human beings, and free will is the ability to step out of those patterns and make a decision that is truly sovereign, in a manner of speaking. A decision chosen by whatever the individual essence actually is.

And we have to recognize that there is a great deal of mechanical conditioning acting on us as individuals.

There is ancestral conditioning. Billions of years of evolution have given you a physical body with certain tendencies, desires, and impulses that are simply part of being alive. There is familial conditioning, patterns absorbed from your family. There is conditioning from religion, society, culture, and from the people around you. All of these factors come into play when we talk about what free will actually is.

Because free will is acting inside all of these patterns that were not really chosen by you, and that you are acting out on a consistent, day-to-day basis. A large part of your life has been crafted by these mechanical patterns regardless of whether or not you believe in free will.

One of the patterns I’ve been noticing lately in discussions around free will is the claim, often made by biologists or people trained in classical biology who now fancy themselves consciousness researchers, that there is no such thing as free will.

This claim isn’t new. It’s been around for a long time, and people have arrived at it for many different reasons and from many different disciplines. I’m not suggesting that it’s unique. It’s simply the version I want to speak to today, specifically modern biological thinking in the 21st century and how it frames the human being.

Within this framework, the human is seen as a collection of selfish genetics interested only in reproduction, emerging from an evolutionary mechanism that is inherently random and meaningless. From this view, we are essentially flesh robots, machines run by mechanical nature, layered on top of all the other forms of conditioning we already discussed.

Within that context, the conclusion makes sense. We are programmed flesh machines, driven by greedy genetics, with civilization, hormones, neurotransmitters, and social conditioning running the show. We are, again, just along for the ride.

Many of these notions are really just contemporary stories about the nature of the world.

I recently wrote an article on my Substack called War, Sex, and Broken Narratives About Our Ancestors, where I look at biological research showing that there isn’t even a clear-cut definition of what it means to be an individual on a genetic level. In fact, we may be massive colonies of many forces joined together, some human, some bacterial, some viral, some parasitic. Defining a single genome as the leader of life is a much shakier proposition than it’s often presented as.

But that’s not what I want to explore here. I mention it only to introduce a little doubt into the idea that the world is so clean-cut and settled.

Let’s step back and look at this from a different angle.

The real reason many biologists claim there is no free will is because free will is a function of the soul.

Within the modern Western scientific paradigm, there is no model for the soul. There is no language for the soul. There is no understanding of the soul. Many would say there is no such thing as a soul at all, that it’s a fanciful illusion.

Indigenous, tribal, and traditional wisdom cultures around the world would say the opposite: that the belief that there is no soul is the illusion. The soul, in many of these traditions, is the most real aspect of what we are, and one of the most important faculties to cultivate.

If we view ourselves purely as flesh machines, then of course there is no free will. The body does not have free will. It is the soul, which animates the body, that carries free will. The soul allows us to tap into something beyond mechanical conditioning and choose a different trajectory.

Soul is both innate and cultivatable. It is present, and it can be developed. Not everyone has the same capacity to be in touch with their soul or to transmit soul into the world. This is something we instinctively know.

We’ve all encountered individuals who have a lot of soul. We can sense it. We can feel it. Some cultures have more soul than others. There are also cultures and individuals that are, in a sense, soulless. Much of modern consumerist civilization is soulless, a hungry ghost that can never be satisfied.

What this means is that some people, and even some cultures, have more free will than others.

That’s a difficult idea for many people to accept, especially for those who want everything to be measurable and evenly distributed. Soul is not a homogenized force. It emerges more strongly in some people than others, and it can be cultivated through certain practices and life experiences.

Some experiences give you more soul, or at least more access to it, more capacity to transmit it. Soul is also, in many ways, a mystery.

Understanding free will as a function of soul forces us to ask deeper questions about what the soul is connected to, and that leads inevitably to questions about divinity and consciousness from a perspective beyond the body.

Many biologists today claim that consciousness emerges from the body, and they search endlessly for the precise mechanism in the brain that creates it. Yet no singular location or process has ever been identified.

What if it’s the reverse, as many indigenous and traditional cultures suggest? What if matter emerges from consciousness, rather than consciousness from matter?

So yes, you do have free will. No, it is not the same as everyone else’s. Free will is not equivalent. And yes, you can cultivate free will by cultivating the soul.

Your free will does not act in a vacuum. Just because you have free will does not mean that every decision you make is rooted in it. Much of what we do remains mechanical. But the more you cultivate your soul, the more capacity you gain to choose from that place of free will.

The real questions then become: What do you choose? How do you choose? And why?

That leads into something I call wayfinding, which is beyond the scope of this particular podcast.

For now, I simply wanted to address the claim that free will does not exist. Many people defer to biologists as if they hold the complete truth about life. But they are people with a particular perspective, just as I am.

The difference is that this perspective is echoed by many cultures across vast stretches of time, cultures that asked these questions long before modern assumptions shaped the answers.