I love science and respect its conclusions. It can be challenging at times, given they can be pretty counter intuitive. Who would have thought the Earth is rocketing through space right now at two million kilometers an hour, and none of us notice? Or that if you and a chimp were able to trace back family trees far enough, you’d share a 250-thousandth great grandma. But the cognitive dissonance is worth it—because science deepens our understanding of reality.

But give me a break! When my favorite discipline proclaims something like, “In reality none of us fully exists,” well, to me that’s a counter-intuitive bridge too far.

There have been several books arguing this point, and Robert Sapolsky’s Determined is a recent one. As usual, the Stanford professor has produced a brilliant piece of writing, accurately elucidating a broad range of topics in biology and neuroscience. But how can I accept its fundamental conclusion that all of my decisions are determined by factors outside of me? By “me” I mean my mind, my conscious awareness—that thing that actually feels like me. If I don’t have any agency at all, then living is like being in a kind of 3D immersive non-interactive movie.

Now I don’t doubt that a lot of my choices are heavily affected by outside elements. For instance, I’m not a tea connoisseur, I’m a coffee drinker, and I accept that the reasons for that might be myriad subtle and subconscious influences that have occurred throughout my life—and perhaps a genetic tendency. And, agreed, none of these factors is under my control. But it’s a whole other matter to claim that I have absolutely zero choice when asked if I’d like a coffee or a tea. Indeed, that I have zero choice about everything in my entire life—and that my feeling of having even a minuscule amount of free will—is a complete illusion.  

I know it’s a big call, the mere science writer that I am, to take aim at the eminent Professor Sapolsky, one of the emperors of neuroscience. But, to me, it seems the emperor may not be wearing clothes. And besides, in my defense, in a determined world, targeting Sapolsky wasn’t actually my choice. So while I’m at it, I might as well not choose to aim even higher—at the great Albert Einstein.

He also felt free will must be an illusion, arguing that if the Moon had some sort of conscious awareness, like you and I do, it too would probably think it was making its own decisions—to circle the Earth, say. But, of course, we know that our heavenly neighbor has no choice—it can’t do otherwise. It’s the laws of gravity that are actually responsible for its orbit. We may be more complex entities than our lunar companion, but the same argument applies to us: all of what we feel to be our choices are, in effect, made by the laws of physics.

Stephen Hawking put it bluntly in his book The Grand Design: “It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law, so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.”

And that’s what virtually every physicist thinks. After all, there are only four known forces in nature: the force of gravity, the electrical-magnetic force, and a couple of nuclear ones. That’s it. There is no mind force. There is no way your consciousness—the part of you that feels like you, let’s remember!—can have any effect on the universe. Your mind is powerless to move even a single atom, let alone your entire arm to pick up either a latte glass or a teapot.

Now don’t get me wrong: I respect all of the physicists’—and Sapolsky’s—arguments. It’s just that their reductionist conclusion is a deduction too far for me. That’s because it runs counter to one of the fundamental things I’ve observed about the world around me; indeed, that we all have observed. And that is that we do make actual decisions. I don’t think anyone can decree that this feeling of free choice is an illusion just because it doesn’t fit with their theories.

Doing so reminds me of one of my early learning experiences as a scientist. For my astrophysics PhD I was trying to explore how stars form. The particular mechanism my supervisor and I were testing just wouldn’t produce a star, no matter how I tried. Jokingly, he quipped, “well maybe stars just don’t form.” Of course, the humor was in the absurdity—stars clearly do; that wasn’t up for disproving. Obviously, what was in error was our theory.  I think it’s the same for free will. Our daily lives show undeniably that we have it—all theories must accept this fundamental fact.

Indeed, is thought even possible? To think, we have to choose between ideas. I’m with physicist and writer Paul Davies on this one. He writes in The Cosmic Blueprint, “If mental events are denied reality, reducing humans to mere automata, then the very reasoning processes whereby the reductionist’s position is expounded are also denied reality. The argument, therefore, collapses amid its own self-reference.”

Mind you, the idea that we don’t have any free will is very liberating. No need to struggle over tough choices anymore—I could, say, flip a coin instead. That’s just as good a method as any for making pretend decisions. Cappuccino or Earl Grey? Up goes the coin. To get out of bed for work, or not? Flip on it.

And it’d be easy to justify this ridiculous way of living: “Obviously, I had no choice over suddenly taking up the coin-spinning way of life. Don’t blame me, take it up with the laws of physics.” But I’m willing to bet that even the most hard-nosed reductionist scientists would not live their lives this way. Especially if I added the challenge: if it’s “tails”, look before crossing the road, but if it’s “heads”, don’t.

I get why science has trouble accepting free will: the concept just doesn’t fit in with the materialist worldview, which the discipline assumes, where all that’s truly real are just particles and the four forces that operate between them. (Or fields, to be more precise, in today’s physics language.) We don’t really exist; just our atoms do. Enlarging science so it could encompass a phenomenon like the kind of free will we feel we have could be akin to introducing something similar to a spirit—yikes!

After all, what would you call a mind force? Our minds are immaterial, and if they were in any way able to move the machinery of our bodies to lift the atoms in a coffee mug to our lips rather than a teacup, it would be remarkable—an immaterial thing moving the material. Your mind would be operating like a ghost in the machinery of your body. Double yikes!

Now, there are some accomplished researchers who don’t conclude that free will is an illusion. Neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell from Trinity College Dublin, for example, has debated Sapolsky. In his book, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will, Mitchell argues that free will is a real and natural phenomenon produced by complex biological systems. 

Donald Hoffman has gone a step further. He’s a cognitive psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, and has flipped things around. Free will is real, he says in his book, The Case Against Reality—it’s the material universe that’s the illusion.

And there are even some physicists who disagree with the standard line on free will. University of California, Berkeley quantum theorist Henry Stapp writes in his book, Quantum Theory and Free Will, that humans do indeed have real agency, and it operates through quantum processes.

There is no doubt that free will is a very inconvenient notion for standard science, but is that sufficient reason to say it’s illusory? Its reality seems as obvious as the stars above.

There are plenty of illusory things in the world. The Earth feels stationary, and humans seem distinct from all other animals on our planet. But that these are illusions has been shown through hard evidence. Do we have hard evidence that all our decisions are determined by things outside of us, or is that a philosophical position—an unwavering commitment to materialism? It’s a question that’s haunted this humble science journalist for a long time. Discuss.

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Graham Phillips is a science journalist with a PhD in astrophysics. He has worked in science television and radio, and he currently teaches at the University of Melbourne in Australia.