My grandfather had a furious temper when a golf ball wouldn't go where he'd aimed it. He swore at it and threw tantrums, and it was funny, and I learned it from him. For a while I did the same thing on the golf course, until I started playing after school with my friends, where an outburst like that would have been met with endless teasing.
So I made up a rule. If you don't like the shot, drop another ball and try again. We called it Wickliffe Family Golf. It kept the game fun and not so serious, and the tantrums stopped.
I have thought about that rule for decades, because it contains the whole question of this essay in miniature. There was a cause I didn't choose, a temper handed to me. There was a condition I didn't plan, a group of friends who'd mock it. And there was something I did, which was to invent a rule that took the punishment out of a bad shot. Was that free? I don't know. I know it was better than the alternative, and I know I couldn't have done it alone.
§ 1 · Author, or witness?
A man's heart deviseth his way: but the Lord directeth his steps.
Here is the question underneath the others. When you act, are you the author of the act, the first cause, the one who could have done otherwise? Or are you the witness of a decision that was already on its way, narrating it a half second late and calling the narration choosing?
Every tradition that has taken the human seriously has had to answer it, and they have split down the middle. On one side stand those who say the self is sovereign and genuinely decides. On the other stand those who say the feeling of authorship is only a feeling, and that behind it runs an unbroken river of causes we did not pick: genes, brain chemistry, childhood, culture, even, in one famous study, the blood sugar of a judge at the moment of sentencing. That last finding, I should say, has been challenged on methodological grounds. It is a good story and a shaky result.
The question is old. Augustine fought it with the monk Pelagius around the year 400. Spinoza wrote in 1677 that we feel free only because we don't see our causes. What changed in our lifetime is that the determinist case stopped being a metaphysical hunch and started arriving with brain scans. I want to lay out both sides fairly, then say where I've landed, which is somewhere modest.
§ 2 · The machine, without the ghost
The modern case against free will is biological, and Steven Pinker states its first move cleanly: there is no ghost in the machine. No soul sits behind the eyes pulling levers free of biology. The mind is what the brain does. Pinker is careful, though, and his care matters for where this goes. Exorcising the ghost, he argues, does not abolish responsibility. Holding people accountable shapes future behavior, and it works because minds respond to consequences. He kills the soul and keeps the courtroom.
Robert Sapolsky takes the same biology to the wall. In Determined (2023), the Stanford neurobiologist argues that every choice is the output of the brain you have in that instant, which is the product of the neurons that fired a second before, the hormones that morning, the childhood that wired the circuits, the culture that shaped the childhood, and the genes that built the whole apparatus. Show me a neuron whose firing is free of that history, he says, and you'll have shown me free will. He doesn't expect anyone will. His stated aim is gentler than total denial. It is to convince you there is so much less free will than you thought that you must change how you judge, blame and praise. Sam Harris puts the lived version most sharply: look closely at any decision and you can't find the author. Thoughts simply appear.
Then the laboratory arrived. In 1983 Benjamin Libet found that a brain signal called the readiness potential began to climb roughly half a second before his subjects reported the conscious urge to move, as if the brain had set the act going before the self knew it had decided. In 2008 Chun Siong Soon and colleagues, using fMRI, reported patterns that let them predict a simple left-or-right choice several seconds ahead. The accuracy was modest, around sixty percent against a chance level of fifty, but to many the verdict seemed in. The conscious chooser arrives late, a press secretary explaining decisions already made in rooms it can't see.
§ 3 · The freedom worth wanting
For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.
The case for free will comes in two sizes. The grand version, libertarian free will, holds that some of our choices are not fixed in advance by what came before, and that we are their source. Robert Kane, its best-known defender, is careful to separate undetermined from uncaused: on his view a free choice can have a history of effort and character behind it without being settled by it. Many scientists find even that doubtful, and the usual physical rescue, quantum randomness, can look like dice rolls and not authorship, though Kane argues that it need not be mere chance. The modest case is harder to dismiss, and it starts by noticing that the laboratory verdict was read too fast.
In 2012 the neuroscientist Aaron Schurger, with Jacobo Sitt and Stanislas Dehaene, offered a quieter reading of Libet. The readiness potential may not be a decision at all. It may be spontaneous neural noise, drifting up and down, and when a person is told to move whenever they feel like it, the movement tends to happen when the drift happens to cross a threshold. On that model the rising signal isn't the brain secretly deciding before you. It is background hum. That doesn't prove free will, but it retired the thirty-year reading that Libet had disproved it. Libet himself never went as far as the headlines. He reserved a power he called free won't, the conscious veto of an act already underway. And later work suggests the readiness potential shows up before arbitrary flicks of the wrist but not before deliberate, reasoned choices, which are the ones we actually care about.
That clears room for the position most philosophers hold, compatibilism. Free will and determinism were never real enemies, it says, because we have been arguing about the wrong definition. Freedom was never the absence of causes. It is a particular kind of cause. You act freely when the action flows from your own reasons and values and deliberation, and not from coercion or compulsion or a gun at your back. David Hume framed it in the eighteenth century. Daniel Dennett built the modern case in Elbow Room (1984), arguing that free will is an evolved capacity for self-control, for responding to reasons and imagining consequences, and that like any capacity it comes in degrees.
Harry Frankfurt sharpened what that feels like from inside. What makes us distinctly free, he proposed, is not just that we have desires but that we can have desires about our desires: the addict who wishes he did not crave, the person who wants to want better than she does. When your will lines up with the will you want to have, that alignment is freedom. Notice what it requires. You have to know yourself well enough to want differently. Paul put it in a verse long before Frankfurt, and I have never read it without recognizing myself. Hold that thread.
If you cross the two questions, is the world determined, and is freedom compatible with that, you get four camps. Hard determinists like Sapolsky and Harris say the chain is unbroken and freedom is an illusion. Libertarians like Robert Kane say freedom requires that some of our choices be undetermined. Compatibilists like Hume, Dennett and Frankfurt say freedom is self-governed action and survives determinism. And hard incompatibilists like Derk Pereboom say that neither determinism nor randomness delivers real authorship, and that we should live without it. Most working philosophers sit with the compatibilists, though philosophers are not a vote on the truth.
§ 4 · Two older answers
Long before the EEG, theologians stood where neuroscientists now stand, between a power that determines everything and a self that seems to choose. I'm not a theologian, and the comparison to modern determinism is looser than it looks, since the old debates were about grace and foreknowledge and not about neurons. I'll take two examples I can say something about.
Augustine argued against the monk Pelagius, who held that we can simply choose the good, that the will is bound and can be freed only by grace we do not earn. "Give what you command, and command what you will," he prayed. Boethius, awaiting execution a century later, faced the related puzzle of how freedom survives God's foreknowledge, and argued that God does not foresee the future as a sequence but sees all of time at once, the way you see a landscape and not a road, so that knowing is not forcing. Whatever one makes of the answer, I like the move. It refuses to let knowing and forcing be the same thing.
Judaism states the tension most economically. "Everything is foreseen, yet freedom of choice is given," taught Rabbi Akiva, both halves in one breath and with no visible anxiety about holding them together (Pirkei Avot 3:15). Maimonides later made free will a foundation: granted to every person, he wrote, and without it command, reward and repentance would mean nothing. What I take from both is not a solution but a posture. A person can hold determination and responsibility in the same hand without insisting on resolving them.
§ 5 · Perhaps both
Step back and a strange peace becomes possible. The two sides may both be right because they are answering different questions. I lean toward the determinist side on the metaphysics, as a philosophical leaning and not a settled view, and the compatibilist seems right to me about the meaning. The practical argument that follows doesn't require settling the metaphysics at all. The mistake was thinking we had to choose.
Grant the determinist everything. Every choice you make arises from a brain you did not design, shaped by a history you didn't pick. On the question of whether this act, in this exact universe with this exact brain, could have gone otherwise, the determinist says no, and the disagreement with Kane is about exactly that. And yet within that fully caused world there is a vast and meaningful difference between the person dragged by compulsion and the person acting from understood values, between the reflex and the considered choice. That difference is real. It changes lives and laws and love.
Spinoza, the most thoroughgoing determinist in the Western canon, saw both halves. Imagine a stone thrown through the air, he wrote to a correspondent in 1674: if it were conscious, it would feel certain it was flying of its own free will. We are that stone, conscious of our motion and blind to the hand that threw us. But there is a freedom still available to us: not escape from the causes, but understanding of them. Put it as a river. The water obeys gravity completely. The swimmer is still swimming.
§ 6 · What actually steals the choice
For a living human being, freedom isn't lost in the laws of physics. It is lost in the dark, in the causes that move us while we can't see them. Spinoza told us why: we feel free precisely because we're ignorant of our causes. So the cage, if there is one, isn't only causation. A great deal of it is not knowing, and some of it is simply the world: money, safety, health, support and the choices actually on offer.
Daniel Kahneman's work shows how much of mental life runs on the fast, automatic system that reacts and pattern-matches before the slower, deliberate one has arrived. Most behavior on most days is autopilot, and the autopilot was programmed by exactly the history the determinist describes. The older traditions mapped this cage precisely. Buddhism's dependent origination is as causal as anything in neuroscience: everything arises from conditions, and there is no separate sovereign self behind the arising. The Dhammapada begins by saying we are made by our thoughts. Hinduism's law of karma is a causal order of action shaping consequence. In my reading, both agree with Sapolsky on the diagnosis. The ordinary, unawakened person is run by craving, conditioning and the long groove of the past.
There is a word in the Indian traditions for a stored, unfinished pattern, samskara, and I find it more useful than the clinical vocabulary. When one fires and you snap at the person in front of you, the snapping feels chosen, but it was the past arriving on schedule. What I haven't looked at keeps steering, and I call it fate. I have watched that happen in myself.
This is the claim I want to state carefully, because it can be turned into a weapon. Freedom is better pictured as a dial than a switch, and self-knowledge is one of the things that turns it. It is not the only one. Knowing the causes does not remove every constraint. It can give me more room to respond within them. That does not make an unreflective person a lesser one. The laws are the same for everyone, and nobody earns their awareness from nothing. It means only that a pattern I cannot recognize is harder for me to interrupt.
§ 7 · The key is knowing
Here is the argument the rest was built toward, and it is a modest one. Whatever quantity of free will we have, the amount we can use goes up with self-knowledge. Awareness widens the gap between cause and act, and into the widening gap, choice flows.
Spinoza gave us the practice even as he denied us the metaphysics. Freedom is the understanding of necessity. The more clearly you see the cause moving you, name it, trace it, feel it in the body before it becomes an act, the less it owns you. What you can observe, you are no longer simply identical with. Between an impulse and what I do with it there is sometimes a small space, and the width of that space is part of what I mean by freedom.
I have a small, concrete example. When I first sat for thirty minutes in silence with a room of strangers, I found out how loud my head was. I had no idea I was that noisy. Nothing in me changed that evening. But I could see the noise, and what I could see I could begin to decline. In the same way, I have learned that when my sons push me far enough I erupt in a loud Goddamn it, and I startle myself more than them. The eruption is a cause, arriving from somewhere I didn't choose. The startling is the gap. It is small, and it is not nothing.
Every tradition that has freed anyone seems to converge here. Frankfurt's philosophy: you become free as your will aligns with the will you actually want, which requires knowing yourself. The Stoics: Epictetus taught that some things are up to us and some are not, and that all of freedom lies in knowing which is which. And for Buddhism and Vedanta, liberation isn't the winning of an uncaused power to choose. It is waking up, seeing the conditioning so clearly that you are no longer driven blindly by it. You are still in the current, but now you can feel it and choose your stroke.
The practice, as I understand it, has five movements. Notice the impulse as it rises: the tightening, the urge, the old story. Trace the cause: ask what is actually moving you, the fear under the anger, the pattern under the reflex. Pause in the gap, because the pause is most of the freedom. Choose from your values, acting from the will you actually want to have. And integrate: bring the disowned part back in, because what stays split off keeps steering from the dark, and what is integrated can finally be steered. I offer that as a discipline I'm trying to live and not as an established method. The evidence that mindfulness training changes behavior is real but modest, and I'd rather say so.
I need to keep the nuance honest. Awareness doesn't lift you out of the causal chain. Nothing does. The self-aware person is still influenced, still a creature of biology and history. The freedom that opens is a wider gap, not an exit. There is even a humbling recursion in it: the impulse to look inward, the temperament and circumstance that let you do the work, are themselves partly given and partly luck. Sapolsky is right about that. And still, each cause you bring into the light becomes contestable. You didn't author the self that began to look, but the looking, once begun, hands back more of the life than was handed to you.
§ 8 · What can be prepared
I never believed in the God of religion, but I always felt something larger in nature, and I cannot say the question is closed either way. The traditions that have helped me most were the ones that did not insist I settle it. My childhood contained a double bind, a place where whatever I did was punished, which means a place where agency was removed entirely. The first spiritual tradition I could trust was one whose first instruction was that I could reject any part of it. That told me something about what freedom is. It is not a power I either have or lack. It is a condition that has to be built up, and it has to be built up around you by people who leave the door open.
I also run a platform, SportsFlow, built on a hypothesis connected to this essay: that helping people see their own patterns, the triggers, the tells, the conditions under which they tighten, is a way of widening the gap. That is a hypothesis. The tools I've built for it need independent testing, and a founder's conviction is no substitute for it.
Back to the golf course
Nobody handed me the rule on the golf course. I made it up with my friends: if you don't like the shot, drop another ball. It took a temper I didn't choose, people who would tease me out of it, and a small invented rule. That is about as much freedom as I have ever been able to point to, and it was enough to change a Saturday. I don't know whether I authored it or witnessed it. I know I had company, and that what I did with the company mattered. I suspect that is how most of the freedom worth having gets made.
Sources and further reading
Spinoza, B. Ethics (1677); Letter 58 to Schuller (1674). Freedom as understanding of necessity; the conscious stone.
Pinker, S. (2002). The Blank Slate, esp. ch. 10, "The Fear of Determinism."
Sapolsky, R. M. (2023). Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. Penguin.
Harris, S. (2012). Free Will. Free Press.
Libet, B., Gleason, C. A., Wright, E. W. & Pearl, D. K. (1983). Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity. Brain, 106.
Soon, C. S., Brass, M., Heinze, H.-J. & Haynes, J.-D. (2008). Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. Nature Neuroscience, 11.
Schurger, A., Sitt, J. D. & Dehaene, S. (2012). An accumulator model for spontaneous neural activity prior to self-initiated movement. PNAS, 109.
Dennett, D. C. (1984). Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting. MIT Press.
Frankfurt, H. G. (1971). Freedom of the will and the concept of a person. Journal of Philosophy, 68.
Hume, D. (1748). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sec. VIII.
Kane, R. (1996). The Significance of Free Will; Pereboom, D. (2001). Living Without Free Will.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Augustine, Confessions and the anti-Pelagian writings; Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy; Pirkei Avot 3:15; Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Teshuvah.
Epictetus, Enchiridion; the Dhammapada; Bhagavad Gita on karma.