Free Will

Free will is an illusion, much like God, that humans have created to comfort ourselves, and to give us the illusion that we matter, even though we don't. It's the product and folly of human conceit to think that we are greater than any other; that we actually have control over our actions. As an aspiring Chaos Theorist and cosmologist, I'm well aware of how simple systems can lead to complex behavior, given enough iterations or time. The neural impulses and biochemistry that governs our thought processes follows the same set of rules as does, say, the chemistry that allows baking soda to react with vinegar. To think that we have free will is to think that we can control this chemistry--that we can control the behavior of the atoms and the quanta they're made of, for after all, that's all we are made up of. Free will isn't a mere illusion--it's a delusion. Someone that's claiming to have free will might as well claim that they're the Avatar--as after all, if one's able to control chemistry, they'd be able to control the way nature behaves, too. Now one might think that the Wave Function allows us to have free will--but does it really? First of all, how can we be for sure that the wave function is truly random, or if there's more to it than we understand? My calculator appears to generate "random" numbers, but a closer investigation shows a rather elaborate formula generates them not randomly, but instead using many parameters that use the principle of Chaos Theory to generate quasirandom numbers. Secondly, if quantum mechanics "allows us to have free will," then why is it that we don't assert that, for instance, my pencil doesn't have free will? It too, at the subatomic level, follows the principles of quantum mechanics. Why doesn't my computer behave that way? In fact, because many transistors are of a near atomic size nowadays, there is occasionally a quantum-mechanical glitch that occurs with them. Doesn't that mean my computer too has free will? A typical free-will enthusiast would assert that it doesn't, as "free -will" is a "uniquely human characteristic" or at least "uniquely living characteristic." It is, again, the folly of human conceit, to put it in Sagan's terms, to think that we are greater than the cosmos and the rules that govern it. We are but the result of a statistical outcome that overstates its importance due to observational bias. Sometimes one needs to be reminded that they are nothing more than a sack of chemicals, clinging to a much larger sack of chemicals, flying through a vast chasm of emptiness, with occasional sacks of chemicals hanging here and there. We must not forget that at the atomic level, we're no different than everything else that surrounds us.