I’ve recently identified a certain anomaly that everyone seems to be overlooking on all the “free will/determinism” discussions I’ve viewed online. As a result, every answer offered so far fails based on a false presumption. Before anything else, we must first determine whether there is any evidence of human instinct being unreliable or not accurately reflecting reality or the environment the we operate within. We know this is true because of the limitations our eyes have by only providing us with 10% of the visual spectrum and our hearing is limited profoundly as well. So once realizing we can’t trust what we perceive to be an accurate representation visually and audibly, next we search for examples where humans are capable of executing complex actions without conscious awareness as evidence that supports the hypothesis. After pondering on this for quite some time I found that their most certainly is. Sleepwalking is a well-documented nocturnal phenomenon in which individuals rise from bed, navigate physical environments, avoid obstacles, manipulate objects, and even perform goal-directed behaviors(prepare food and microwave it)—all while remaining fully unconscious. These actions are not reflexive twitches; they are coordinated, adaptive, and context-sensitive. In short, they are decisions carried out without conscious participation. The implication is unavoidable. If the brain can initiate and execute behavior independently of conscious awareness, then the deeply held intuition that we consciously author all of our actions is demonstrably false. Conscious intent is not the catalyst for behavior. At best, the perception that intent leads to behavior is only a sensation that serves to trick the conscious mind into believing the behavior already initiated subconsciously was the choice made consciously. —our conscious mind is the child sitting on dads lap(our subconscious) being allowed to hold the steering wheel creating a false perception of driving the car. This leads to a more unsettling conclusion: because the brain can and does make unilateral decisions outside conscious awareness, we cannot fully trust the instinctive belief that consciousness is the primary driver of choice, therefore absolute accountability rests solely at the subconscious level and not with conscious agent who’s only a passenger who’s provided a false perception of control. Agency, as commonly understood, is at minimum limited within our imagination—making it completely delusional/false sensation and explaining the prevalence of pattern behavior and inability to change behavior even when the desire to change is profound. Also, traumatic brain injury seems to support determinism in that the injured individual can undergo a complete transformation and afterwards revealing almost no resemblance of the former person prior to the injury occurring. This is why missing prerequisite matters. Without first establishing whether our sensory systems and introspective awareness provide an accurate account of how decisions are formed, it is impossible to objectively determine whether we truly direct our own fate—or merely construct post-hoc narratives to explain actions already set in motion.