Evolutionary biology and ethology have long shown that almost everything we call goodness consists of complex instinctive programs, including reciprocal altruism, kin selection, reputation management, reduction of personal anxiety, and elevation of social status, and biology implements all these mechanisms without any rational will, and the instinctive program is by no means a crude urge to hug a puppy, but can be a cold, long‑term, pragmatic calculation hardwired into the brain by millions of years of evolution, so it is necessary to clearly distinguish the instinctive good program, motivated by innate or acquired algorithms, from rational good will, which must be a conscious choice irreducible to any of those mechanisms and not dictated by genes, environment, hormones, or hidden profit, and it is precisely this distinction that we will examine.
Classical biological examples show that self‑sacrifice and altruism are perfectly explained without invoking free will, for instance, the kamikaze ground squirrel, which screams at the sight of a hawk and dies saving the colony, acts exclusively within kin selection because its genes shared with relatives are preserved at the cost of the individual’s life, and biology invented self‑sacrifice long before human morality, and the Meaney experiment with rats demonstrated that changing maternal care alters gene expression in the pups, reducing anxiety and increasing stress resistance, meaning that the environment, without any choice on the animal’s part, reprograms its biochemistry and writes a programme onto the hard drive, and the famous case of the Jim twins, who grew up in different families and knew nothing of each other, yet upon meeting at age 39 discovered that both had married women named Linda, divorced and married women named Betty, smoked the same brand of cigarettes, made identical wooden benches, and spread butter on toast in two layers, vividly demonstrates the power of genetic determinism, where the coincidence of motivations, inclinations, and even wives’ names leaves no room for free choice, and criminal law, which grants leniency to children because their prefrontal cortex is immature and sends mentally ill persons to treatment rather than prison because their script is broken, intuitively acknowledges that will and responsibility depend directly on the state of the biological hardware.
The popular criteria usually proposed to identify true good will turn out to be untenable upon closer examination, for non‑reciprocal altruism, supposedly proving freedom, is refuted by the ground squirrel example where unilateral sacrifice is perfectly explained by kin selection, and the human act of jumping on a grenade represents instinctive heroism or a learned reflex, not a rational choice made in the split second before the explosion, and helping a stranger without expecting anything in return does not save the case because anonymity does not abolish the brain’s internal reward system, which still knows about the deed and activates dopamine and oxytocin circuits, reducing existential anxiety, and acting against instincts also fails as proof because self‑control is a biological function of the prefrontal cortex, depending on neurotransmitter levels and upbringing, and quantum indeterminacy provides no loophole, since random quantum noise turns the brain into a random number generator, and freedom without intention is not freedom, while intention itself turns out to be a product of the same genes, environment, and past experience.
Instincts and biological programmes never work identically in all individuals, behavioural variation is observed even among rats in the same maze, and every person possesses a unique set of genes, hormone levels, prefrontal sensitivity, and past experience, so the biological automaton is not a standardised robot but a system with a huge number of input parameters, and reducing all biology to the individual’s instinct of self‑preservation is an outdated view, because evolutionary biology has long proved the existence of group selection, social pressure, and biochemical motivation, when donating savings gives the brain a powerful dopamine response from the awareness of belonging to the group and high social status, and this is the same biochemistry, only more complex, and why do some people donate while others do not, because the activation threshold differs, in one person sensitivity to moral dogmas and empathy produce dopamine for sacrifice, while in another the reward system is tuned to resource accumulation, and this depends on brain structure, hormones, and upbringing, not on mythical free will, and biological programmes regularly make individuals act against their own interest, like the bee that dies when stinging, but such behaviour is fixed by evolution because it benefits the colony, and in humans the role of the beehive is played by social ideas implanted in the brain.
If someone proposes to replace the scientific axiom with a religious one and assume the existence of a soul and its union with the body, even that changes nothing, because will is still not absolute, since it depends on the body’s functioning and disappears when the body breaks down, meaning will is a vulnerable function of the union, not a free gift, and even if humans have a qualitatively different spirit compared to animals, in practice most people do not use this potential and live on the autopilot of instincts, as shown by statistics on divorces and domestic tragedies, and if we recall the words “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever”, after the Flood life was shortened and meat eating was permitted, which made man more fleshly, and this is the probable moment when rational will degenerated into indistinguishability from instinctive will, so any metaphysical axiom merely shifts the problem into an unknowable realm, providing no practical criterion for distinction.
Modern neuroscience and cognitive science have long stopped guessing from external behaviour, experiments with fMRI and direct brain stimulation clearly show that the readiness potential in the motor cortex forms between 200 and 350 milliseconds before a person becomes aware of their choice, as demonstrated in Benjamin Libet’s classic 1983 experiment, and the 2008 study by Soon and colleagues using fMRI revealed that patterns of activity in the prefrontal and parietal cortex contain information about the upcoming choice from 7 to 10 seconds before the participant reports their decision, that is, the brain knows the answer long before the person thinks they freely made it, and direct cortical stimulation during open‑brain surgery causes involuntary limb movements, and patients often insist that they themselves wanted to move the hand, taking a purely physical stimulus as their own volitional act, and the case of Phineas Gage, in whom an iron rod passed through the prefrontal cortex, shows that damage to a specific area completely alters the moral profile and self‑control capacity, turning a responsible person into an impulsive one, and pharmacological data confirm this picture, since lowering serotonin predictably increases aggression and impulsivity, administering oxytocin changes trust and empathy, and blocking dopamine receptors removes motivation, consequently, if free will disappears or changes dramatically with chemistry, electrodes, and injuries, then it is entirely determined by the material substrate, and no action free of biology exists.
Equally untenable is the argument about the soldier who covers a grenade with his chest, because if soldiers are specifically trained and drilled to perform this action, then in the critical moment an automated reflex and ingrained instruction kick in, representing muscle memory and a behavioural programme, not the result of long philosophical deliberation about good will in the second before the explosion, and all so‑called overcoming of hormones is described by ordinary probability theory, as in the metaphor of the boat and the helmsman, where during system failure or a stormy surge of biochemistry the helmsman’s will fails in half the cases, and the boat switches to the autopilot of instincts, as confirmed by statistics, and if the helmsman controls the boat only half the time, then this is not a helmsman and not will, but a randomiser, and a controller that works only every other time is not a controller, similarly a tossed coin lands heads in fifty per cent of cases, but it has no free will, and calling the natural variability of brain algorithms freedom is merely giving a beautiful name to the ordinary work of a biological processor, while life circumstances affect a person exclusively through biology, through exhaustion of the prefrontal cortex, cortisol stress, and mediator rearrangement, and if the biochemical link is removed, the event becomes for the brain merely informational noise without subjective pain, as confirmed by clinical cases of lobotomy.
Many defenders of free will commit crude logical errors, which can be called Wittgensteinian conflations, for example, they jump from subtle processes of genes and hormones to a crude physical impact of a car, presenting a spinal injury as an argument against biological determinism, then they treat the limitation of our observational access as proof of will, even though from the fact that we cannot calculate all brain factors it does not follow that a spiritual helmsman appears, and finally they stretch passive submission to instincts and drifting with the wind into free choice, thereby rendering the very concept of will meaningless, and resorting to game theory or multiple alternatives does not change the essence, because if a system fails half the time, we are dealing not with a conscious controller but with an unstable mechanism, and comparing biological determinism and free will as equal hypotheses is incorrect, since the former has millions of proven causal connections, while the latter has zero physical mechanisms.
A particularly instructive example is the common claim that a person dieting and resisting hunger thereby shows free will, yet this perfectly demonstrates determinism, because when a person resists hunger or libido, this happens not because of abstract pure reason, but because another, more priority biological and social algorithm has been activated in the prefrontal cortex, whether it be the goal of losing weight for social status, and if someone asserts that the desire to lose weight originated from their will and the brain merely processed it, that is the classic illusion where the ego retroactively stamps “my personal decision” on the product of neural networks, environment, and evolutionary fear of rejection, and compatibilism is merely an attempt to rename the causal chain as freedom, since the brain does not implement your desires but creates them itself.
Equally weak is the appeal to the fortitude of animals, for example, the brown bear, when a mother bear fights a stronger male to protect her cubs, receives lacerations and fractures, but continues fighting to the end, going directly against the instinct of self‑preservation, and by the logic of free‑will advocates she displays enormous free will, yet neuroscience easily explains this without metaphysics by an oxytocin and prolactin surge that physiologically blocks fear receptors and redirects brain resources towards offspring defence, that is, a complex hormonal programme, not a spiritual feat, and the natural question arises: why should we consider the same mechanism in humans as freedom, while dolphins possess consciousness and perform heroic acts rescuing strangers, and we easily explain their behaviour by biology and social instinct, but when a human does the same, we invent a beautiful fairy tale about rational good will, even though the mechanism is exactly the same, and it does not matter which brain region is involved, because both the prefrontal cortex and ancient instincts are simply work of the biological hardware.
Historical examples of self‑sacrifice often cited in defence of free will, such as Giordano Bruno, who refused to recant his ideas and accepted death, also fail, because such an argument reduces to a children’s explanation: the hero is strong because he has strength of spirit, but in reality death for an idea is absolutely meaningless and speaks not of greatness of spirit but of plain stupidity, trading life for an idea that will be obsolete in a hundred years is not a feat but a glitch in the priority programme, and this glitch is not freedom but rather demonstrates that the programme exists and sometimes breaks, and if a person suffers a glitch in the priority system and chooses death, then by the same logic any computer that freezes due to process conflict also possesses free will, which is absurd, and moreover, such one‑off acts are incomparable to the requirement of long‑term endurance, because a genuine test requires not a single impulse but daily suppression of instincts over many years, when biology daily pressures the person and offers easy pleasure, and this would be a far more impressive display of willpower because it needs not a single outburst but continuous control, yet such cases do not occur in reality, because biology always wins.
To make the test maximally rigorous and exclude any social or hormonal rewards, one can formulate a specific crash test with six conditions: the couple dated for only a year with no vows or obligations, then the woman falls into a coma for seven years with no sign of consciousness, the man is actively seduced by another woman who arouses genuine passion and desire, parents pressure him to marry the other woman, he has no religious prohibitions, and the only thing holding him is an inner feeling that betrayal is wrong, and if rational will existed, we would know about such cases, but no one has heard of them, and in reality they simply do not exist, and when someone tries to cite a story about an eight‑year engagement, it turns out that the coma lasted only a little over a year, he visited her daily and received strong social support from her family, and after the coma she was alive and tried to remember him, so it was a classic dopamine drama with hope and reciprocity, not pure will, and even in that example there was no challenge of active seducers, so it fails the test, and this is not nitpicking but the very essence of the test: if rational will exists, it must manifest not in comfortable conditions but precisely where biology screams “give up” and no social or hormonal reward works.
The crash test with the seven‑year coma shows that such cases do not exist in reality because the limit of human endurance always stops at biology, and even will in animals, such as in the bear, is entirely instinctive and biochemical, while humans cannot maintain their ideological positions at one hundred per cent and on average fulfil them only half the time due to fatigue and biochemical failures, therefore there is no will independent of the body, only different thresholds of organismal endurance, and the definition of freedom as the capacity to initiate a causal series outside the laws of nature, going back to Kant and fixed by Peter van Inwagen, remains the only logically consistent one, and if choice is not free from preceding biochemical causes, then it is fully determined by them, and attempts to redefine freedom as independence from other people or as the ability to choose among several alternatives are substitutions, because a woman in a harem has only one choice, to obey, but that does not negate her reason, and then freedom becomes a function of external conditions rather than a property of personality, and this is no longer will but a mathematics of options, and turning to fundamental physics and theology only emphasises the absence of independent freedom, because the no‑cloning theorem in quantum mechanics establishes the uniqueness of the system but does not make it an autonomous agent, and in theology God’s absolute foreknowledge implies predetermination of the path, and the highest will consists in submission to God, while ordinary angels have no will of their own, and rebellion was performed only by the highest ranks, and man can attain at most the third level of the hierarchy, and if the path is known in advance, then any choice is predetermined.
Thus the burden of proof lies on whoever asserts the existence of a non‑biological factor, and until at least one real example of behaviour that cannot be explained by neural networks and past experience is presented, the hypothesis of free will remains unnecessary, and although our civilisation, laws, and morality are built on the presumption of this freedom, this is merely a convenient social illusion that allows punishment and reward, but convenience is not truth, just as it was once convenient to think that the Sun revolves around the Earth, and now we must recognise that rational good will is merely a beautiful label on a complex biophysical automaton, and each of us is a product of evolution, genes, epigenetics, neural connections, and current hormonal background, while the subjective feeling of freedom arises after the neural algorithm has already initiated the action.
Any attempt to find an example of genuine rational will ends either with references to unreliable or criteria‑defying stories, or with a retreat into metaphysics that explains nothing at the level of practical distinction, and in the end only one thing remains: to admit that we find no case that unequivocally requires a non‑biological factor, and all so‑called acts of freedom, upon detailed analysis, decompose into genetics, neurochemistry, environment, and learning, and it is precisely this absence of exceptions that is the most convincing evidence that rational good will is nothing more than an illusion generated by the brain post hoc, when all decisions have long been made at the subconscious level.