Yesterday I wrote about free will and that we don’t have it. Now, I have very few visitors who read my blog, but there are always a handful of people who do and even like it. Yesterday was the first time in 2881 days that no one liked what I had written. It is understandable, even amongst people who study us people professionally or in their free time, and even philosophers are, on the whole, defenders of some sort of free will.  Almost everybody among these thinkers knows that we are determined by where we grow up and that minor damages in the brain we have, but most of them don’t want to go all the way and call in the help of some kind of mysterious force that is not connected to our material body but can act separate from that. It is like what believers in God do when they say that God is responsible when the scientists say that they don’t know what caused, for instance, the Big Bang. It is called the God of the gaps, and that is what most people do when there is uncertainty about what the last cause is of our behavior. 

Some quotes from people who have written about our lack of free will. 

Those with free will, a wonderful illusion whereby the human being has made himself into a higher being; the highest nobility, noticeable in good as in bad. Yet already bestial. Anyone who raises himself above it, raises himself above the animal and becomes a conscious plant. The act of free will would be the miracle, the break in the chain of nature. Humans would be miracle-doers. The consciousness of a motive brings deception along with it-the intellect {is} the primeval and sole liar. Friedrich Nietzsche in The Will To Power

Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didn’t choose your gender or most of your life experiences. You had no control whatsoever over your genome or the development of your brain. And now your brain is making choices on the basis of preferences and beliefs that have been hammered into it over a lifetime – by your genes, your physical development since the moment you were conceived, and the interactions you have had with other people, events, and ideas. Where is the freedom in this? Yes, you are free to do what you want even now. But where did your desires come from? Sam Harris in Free Will

In order to prove there’s free will, you have to show that some behavior just happened out of thin air in the sense of considering all these biological precursors. It may be possible to sidestep that with some subtle philosophical arguments, but you can’t with anything known to science. Robert M. Sapolsky in Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills. In Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

Man’s life is a line that nature commands him to describe upon the surface of the earth, without his ever being able to swerve from it, even for an instant. He is born without his own consent; his organization does in nowise depend upon himself; his ideas come to him involuntarily; his habits are in the power of those who cause him to contract them; he is unceasingly modified by causes, whether visible or concealed, over which he has no control, which necessarily regulate his mode of existence, give the hue to his way of thinking, and determine his manner of acting. He is good or bad, happy or miserable, wise or foolish, reasonable or irrational, without his will being for any thing in these various states. Baron d’Holbach

Not only are there meaningless questions, but many of the problems with which the human intellect has tortured itself turn out to be only ‘pseudo problems,’ because they can be formulated only in terms of questions which are meaningless. Many of the traditional problems of philosophy, of religion, or of ethics, are of this character. Consider, for example, the problem of the freedom of the will. You maintain that you are free to take either the right- or the left-hand fork in the road. I defy you to set up a single objective criterion by which you can prove after you have made the turn that you might have made the other. The problem has no meaning in the sphere of objective activity; it only relates to my personal subjective feelings while making the decision. Percy Williams Bridgman, The Nature of Physical Theory

Which do you think is more valuable to humanity?
a. Finding ways to tell humans that they have free will despite the incontrovertible fact that their actions are completely dictated by the laws of physics as instantiated in our bodies, brains and environments? That is, engaging in the honored philosophical practice of showing that our notion of “free will” can be compatible with determinism?
or
b. Telling people, based on our scientific knowledge of physics, neurology, and behavior, that our actions are predetermined rather than dictated by some ghost in our brains, and then sussing out the consequences of that conclusion and applying them to society?
Of course my answer is b). Jerry A. Coyne

People erroneously jump to the conclusions that if I want to press it, I choose to want to. This is of course false. I don’t choose my desires. I only feel them, and act accordingly. Yuval Noah Harari in Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

Our flesh shrinks from what it dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by a purely reflex action of the nervous system. Our eyelid closes before we are aware that the fly is about to enter our eye.  James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

The conviction that a law of necessity governs human activities introduces into our conception of man and life a mildness, a reverence and an excellence, such as would be unattainable without this conviction. Albert Einstein