Free-will is actually more than an illusion, and through this understanding one can self-actualize like never before.
Sam Harris writes a book called Free Will, where he attacks the issue from all sides, concluding free-will is actually more than an illusion, in that it cannot be made conceptually coherent.
"Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them"
“I generally start each day with a cup of coffee or tea—sometimes two. This morning, it was coffee (two). Why not tea? I am in no position to know. I wanted coffee more than I wanted tea today, and I was free to have what I wanted. Did I consciously choose coffee over tea? No. The choice was made for me by events in my brain that I, as the conscious witness of my thoughts and actions, could not inspect or influence. Could I have “changed my mind” and switched to tea before the coffee drinker in me could get his bearings? Yes, but this impulse would also have been the product of unconscious causes. Why didn’t it arise this morning? Why might it arise in the future? I cannot know. The intention to do one thing and not another does not originate in consciousness—rather, it appears in consciousness, as does any thought or impulse that might oppose it.”
He begins the book discussing a violent incident between an aggressor and a family, and he dissects the scenario from all sides. Towards the end, he goes on to state how this conclusion about free-will has changed his life.
“Losing a belief in free will has not made me fatalistic—in fact, it has increased my feelings of freedom. My hopes, fears, and neuroses seem less personal and indelible. There is no telling how much I might change in the future. Just as one wouldn’t draw a lasting conclusion about oneself on the basis of a brief experience of indigestion, one needn’t do so on the basis of how one has thought or behaved for vast stretches of time in the past. A creative change of inputs to the system—learning new skills, forming new relationships, adopting new habits of attention—may radically transform one’s life.”
“Liberals tend to understand that a person can be lucky or unlucky in all matters relevant to his success. Conservatives, however, often make a religious fetish of individualism. Many seem to have absolutely no awareness of how fortunate one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be lucky to be able to work. One must be lucky to be intelligent, physically healthy, and not bankrupted in middle age by the illness of a spouse.”
I love this book and 10/10 recommend; it provides the science, the philosophy, and Sam's beautiful articulation.
For me personally, understanding these conceptions have allowed me to identify the irrelevancy in debating my axiological opinions. Morals, politics, normative behavior, it's all a consequence of our experience. Every wave of light to hit my eyes, every wave of sound to hit my ears, every force and particle to interact with my body since my conception has altered the molecular structure of my nervous tissue, sculpting entirely the beliefs I have and the totality of my identity. There's no sense in debating what's moral, only understanding the diversity of environmental context from which the spectrum of morality is derived. There's no sense in hating one for an action they did, only a conceivable framing of how action is enslaved to perception; how one acted was bound to the environmental context that preceded the behavior. You can act to change environments to pragmatically alter future behavior, but you can't support hate with the framing one could've acted differently (there's simply no evidence for this metaphysical libertarianism). I could go on for ages about this subject; it's been life-changing, especially for my research interests. If you want to speak further I'd gladly do so via another medium.
