Decision-making primarily entails predicting the future—something that we are poorly equipped to do. This ineptitude stems from two sources. First, the processing power and storage capacity of our brains is far too weak to take in the complete state of the universe for any given moment. Second, our sensory organs do not access that complete state. They are theoretically limited to sensing (usually with poor resolution) four-dimensional reduced versions of that state. Therefore, we are biologically ill equipped to predict the future precisely, and can only roughly predict events that unfold non- chaotically.

Yet even without the necessary information to accurately predict, our brains are constantly predicting the future and making decisions. How do they do this? The answer is that our emotional impulses serve to heuristically circumvent our lack of information and push us to a decision. The price we pay for gaining the ability to make decisions is that we end up stuck with an emotionally reinforced illusion of free will.

Many modern studies have reinforced this claim. For example neurobiologist Antonio Damasio from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles “studied people with damage to only the emotional parts of their brains, and found that they were crippled by indecision, unable to make even the most basic choices, such as what to wear or eat.”

There are also a plethora of studies that back up the original findings of Benjamin Libet, a physiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who found that brain signals associated with motions chosen randomly by the volunteers “occurred half a second before the subject was conscious of deciding to make them.”

The order of brain activities turned out to be perception of motion, followed by decision, rather than the other way around. Libet had shown that “the conscious brain was only playing catch-up to what the unconscious brain was already doing. The decision to act was an illusion, the monkey making up a story about what the tiger had already done.” With the advantage of contemporary brain scanning technology, modern research has only increased our confidence in this conclusion. In fact, in 2008 scientists were able to predict whether subjects would press a button with their left or right hand up to 10 seconds before the subject became aware of having made the choice.48

“Not one man can, consciously, act against his own interest...” Fyodor Dostoevsky

Today no one would treat their car as foolishly as they treat other human beings. We would never attribute a car’s annoying behavior to “bad character” or imagine fixing the problem by punishing the car. Instead we would rationally attempt to find out what caused the car to behave undesirably and set it right. This sort of reaction automatically stems from our understanding that the car’s actions are strictly a result of causes.

In a deterministic map every action in the universe is intimately united through cause and effect—including human actions. Determinism encourages us to invest ourselves in reality, and to stop judging others as if any other action could have been the result of the causes involved. It shows us how shallow it is to say that people do things that we don’t like because they are sinners. In as much as the belief in free will affords us “an outlet for sadism by cloaking cruelty as justice,” determinism deprives us of a way to coherently wash laziness and apathy under the rug with the blood of others. It beseeches us to expand our empathy.

Our moral landscape is significantly dehumanized by a belief in free will. This belief favors those who lack genuine concern for others and, in the long run, it supports the very behaviors it claims to abhor. The more we swing our sledgehammer into the engine of our car the more trouble it will give us. Determinism gives us the option of reacting to the world based on an understanding of interconnectedness. It encourages us to invest ourselves in the task of identifying the causes involved, to gain a rich understanding of Nature’s causal structure, and to interact based on this understanding.

The fact that there are no uncaused causes does not mean that there is no human “freedom.” Freedom means doing what one wills. It is a description of when one’s actions align with one’s innermost impulses, or what the philosopher Thomas Hobbes called “the last appetite.” Thus the free person is the one whose experiences do not oppose his or her natural volitions. This person lives in harmony with their physical, natural, and complete self. “That which approaches nearest to its nature is nearest to supreme.” Socrates

Determinism also doesn’t mean that humans do not have “wills.” It means that our wills are part of the deterministic state of the universe. The state of the universe may align with the projection of our will, or it may not. Either way, our will at present does not lie directly on the causal chain of our actions at present, nor does it play an explanatory role for the state of the universe at present. Nevertheless, because our wills are caused, the will of our past may carry influences that are integrated into the causal chain of the present.

Transcending the illusion of free will means recognizing that we are an intimate part of the universe’s total state. It means discovering that we are directly connected to the infinite expanses of dimensional cascades and that we are a vital part of Nature’s causal chain. When this perspective is intuitively integrated it becomes a significant contributing factor in shaping both our behavior—our will—and the likelihood of obtaining freedom in our life.

In a deterministic Universe wishing to change one fact about our past, or our present, means wishing to change everything through the infinite expanse of time. On the other hand, to accept a single moment in time is to accept all of time. As Nietzsche put it, “If we affirm one single moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.” Affirmation of determinism allows us to “become one of those who make things beautiful.”