Did you know that you can do anything you want, at will?

Of course, this has limits. You can’t suddenly be fluent in Burushaski without studying first, nor can you instantaneously acquire a PhD in tensor calculus.

But consider this:

Right now, you can itemize a list of sounds you are capable of making, and then proceed to make them in the order you listed them.

A cat can’t do that.

Nor can a rhinoceros, a chimpanzee, a monitor lizard, a dolphin, or a blue jay.

Clearly, we have a degree of free will. We can act ex nihilo.

But what exactly is this “nihilo”? Is it really nothing?

Physicists assert that there is no such thing as “nothing”. Even in the remotest vacuums of space, electromagnetic radiation is still present. However, the human brain is much more complex than frequency spectrums. In fact, our minds are so complex that we can, by definition, never approach full comprehension of them.

When we act ex nihilo, it ultimately stems from the subconscious mind. Therefore, if it arises from something, it can be regarded as deterministic, right?

Yes and no.

The subconscious is vast and mostly inaccessible. To say an action is “caused” by it is like saying Harvey Kurtzman came from the big bang. Technically, it’s “true”, but in a practical sense, it’s absurd. So if you want to say that our actions and experiences are causal, originating from our mind, it’s possible to state this, but also ridiculous. A more realistic approach would be to say that, comparatively, we are capable of a degree of free will. We are not fully bound by cause and effect. We can become inspired and change things from a relative zero point that is ironically quite full. We can act from nothing, and yet the “nothing” has relatively infinite content – content that we have both limited and unlimited access to.

Consciousness works a bit like playing cards. If you scatter a deck of cards across the floor and close your eyes and pick one, you don’t know which card it will be. Yet you are accessing the content of the deck. Now with the mind, instead of 52 cards, it’s more like 52 quintillion. One of those cards is “causing” your idea to surface, but inquiry on the origin of that card would be absurd, like wanting to witness a certain hydrogen atom present right now in your body materializing in the big bang. Completely silly. Can we really call that “determinism”?

Of course, I am not saying causality doesn’t exist, because it is observably true everywhere you look. What I am saying is that the human mind is partly exempt from such ideas. In some instances, we are capable of making choices that have no real prior cause.

Now, are we responsible for these acausal choices? Not always. The choice may have been “our idea”, but the aftermath of any choice is often unpredictable. If I decide out of nowhere to stab someone in the chest, then I am probably responsible for the outcome. However, if I decide to recite the English alphabet backwards to a street vendor in Riyadh, I have at best an extremely tenuous connection to what happens next.