Our Free Will did not begin with us
6 views
Summary
This idea breaks down the concept of will to its basic form and explores the origins of it as it relates to us and all other living things.
Full Idea
We usually think of will as something deeply human. We think of free will as a divine gift, or at least as something tied to human consciousness, morality, choice, discipline, and responsibility. And in its most familiar form, that is how we experience it. A person decides not to give up. A parent protects a child. Someone resists an easy pleasure for a future goal. We all suffer, adapt, and keep moving forward. That is will in a form we recognize because it looks like us. But human will is not where the story starts. Animals have will too. Not always projected as far into the future, and not always wrapped in language or self-reflection, but still very real. A wolf keeps hunting through hunger and cold. A bird builds a nest. A deer runs for its life. A dog waits by the door. A mother animal protects her young against something stronger than herself. There is direction there. There is persistence. There is survival under pressure. There is a living thing trying to continue, overcome adversity, and carry something forward. That is not human free will, but it is will in a simpler form. We go one step lower and look at insects. A bee does not think about destiny. An ant does not sit there making philosophical choices. But bees and ants work, gather, build, defend, repair, organize, and sacrifice in ways that serve the hive or colony. Their will is not individual in the way ours is. It is simpler, more distributed, more instinctive. But it is still not dead matter being pushed around randomly. It has direction. Food. Shelter. Reproduction. Defense. Continuity. It doesn't stop there either. Go lower again. Bacteria do not think. They do not plan. They do not choose in the way we choose. But they move toward nutrients and away from harmful conditions. They divide. They adapt. They survive in places that would kill more complex life. At this level, will is almost completely stripped of psychology. No ambition. No emotion. No inner voice. No story. Just the most basic expression of life trying to continue through adversity. And if we keep going backward from there, we eventually reach the beginning of the whole chain.The lowest level. Before animals. Before insects. Before bacteria. Before cells. Before anything that could move toward food, away from danger, or divide in a way we would easily recognize as life. We reach the world before will had a body. The early Earth was not a peaceful little pond waiting for life to appear. It was a planet-sized experiment in chaos. Oceans, heat, pressure, lightning, minerals, volcanic vents, radiation, tides, impacts, currents, destruction, and constant motion. Organic molecules were being thrown together and torn apart. Again and again. Some combinations lasted for a moment and dissolved. Some formed tiny structures, only to be broken apart by heat, pressure, radiation, or simple instability. Some environments were gentle enough to preserve fragile formations. Others were violent enough to erase them instantly. It was random, but not meaningless. Because randomness under pressure is not the same as nothing. In that endless storm of combination and recombination, some structures lasted a little longer than others. Some shapes protected themselves better. Some arrangements made future arrangements more likely. And then, somewhere in that chaos, something crossed a line. Some patterns, under the right conditions, began to endure. They found a way to replicate. Not because they wanted to. Because that is what remains. In a world of endless combinations, whatever can copy itself and survive long enough to copy again becomes more than a moment. It becomes a chain. And that chain continues today. It has passed through ice ages, asteroid impacts, mass extinctions, and the formation and breakup of supercontinents. That is where I think the first seed of will appears. Not as a mind. Not as an emotion. Not as a conscious decision. But as life finding a way to continue. Life reacts. Life avoids harm. Life reproduces. Life adapts. Life remembers. Life learns. Life wills itself to continue. And eventually, life becomes us: beings who can look backward into the deep, distant past and wonder whether our own will is just the latest expression of something much more ancient. We like to imagine that our "free" will is some abstract concept that started with us but I think human will is the most complex version we know of an ancient force that has been running through the ages from the beginning of life. So far, our will is one of its most interesting expressions.
Comments
Log in to join the discussion.
Member
I think this is an interesting way to frame the concept of will, though I would probably define it a little differently. From an agnostic perspective, there’s no need to assume either a divine source of will or that will is merely an illusion. The idea that what we call “will” emerged gradually through evolution is plausible and consistent with what we know about life developing increasing levels of complexity over billions of years. Where I might differ is in the use of the word “will” itself. When we say that bacteria or early self-replicating molecules have will, we risk projecting human concepts onto systems that may simply be following physical and biological processes. A bacterium moving toward nutrients is not necessarily “willing” anything in the same sense that a human decides to change careers or sacrifice for a loved one. That said, I think your broader point is compelling: there appears to be a continuous thread connecting simple self-preserving processes to increasingly complex forms of behavior, cognition, and eventually conscious decision-making. Human will may not have appeared out of nowhere. It may be the latest stage in a very long evolutionary story… As an agnostic, I’d say the evidence supports the continuity you describe, but it remains an open question whether consciousness and free will are merely emergent properties of biological complexity or whether they represent something more fundamental about reality that we do not yet understand. In other words, I can agree that human will likely has deep evolutionary roots while remaining uncertain about what will ultimately is. The mystery isn’t removed by tracing its history, it just gets pushed further back to the question of why matter, life, and consciousness became capable of producing beings who can reflect on their own choices in the first place? 🤔 I really enjoyed reading this! Very thought provoking
T. Calder
I agree that calling what a bacteria does while it moves towards nutrients "will" can feel like I'm projecting human concepts onto simple life forms. However, the whole point of this post is that the concept of "will" is not exclusively human in it's basic form. I do acknowledge several times in the idea that human "will" is the most complex form of it but at it's core, the concept of "will" is the same at all levels. Besides, if you were a bacteria and a juicy piece of nutrients was over to your right, who knows how strongly you would feel that "will" power to move towards it? Per unit of mass, it may actually be a lot stronger that what we normally experience ;)