Micah Zarin's Blog

I will begin with the beginning, which is odd, since to begin presupposes that one had any say in the matter at all. You will insist, perhaps, that I “chose” this beginning rather than some other, but you’d be wrong. If I had chosen differently, then I would not be me, and if I were not me, then I would be someone else, and that someone else would, with equal inevitability, have made their own predictable “choice.”

To test this, observe yourself “choosing” whether to keep reading. You think you’re deliberating, but really you are the sum of your neurochemistry, your childhood traumas, your hunger levels, and the precise way your neurons fire in this moment. Neuroscience would put it Bayesianly (not a word but… I don’t care): you aren’t deciding, your brain is updating probabilities based on the current information and prior knowledge. The fact that you feel as though you are weighing options is merely what it feels like for your brain to run such a calculation (google Benjamin Libet Experiments).

Therefore, when people boast about “making better choices,” it’s like congratulating the weather for deciding to rain less this week. Admirable, yes, but also meteorologically absurd. You can do what you will, certainly: you can fling yourself at kale salads or fling yourself off metaphorical cliffs of poor decisions, but you cannot will what you will. The willing part is already predetermined by your wiring, which is itself the outcome of your parents’ wiring, which was the outcome of your grandparents’ wiring, and so on back through history until the primordial slime decided, quite without deciding, to squirm.

Most people see this as a bad thing. They think that if we don’t have free will, then nothing matters. But this reaction mistakes description for erasure. To say that you are the product of forces you didn’t choose is not to say you are meaningless; it is to describe, in more accurate language, the machinery by which meaning is produced. The absence of metaphysical choice doesn’t make experience less vivid.

In fact, when you accept that every decision, reaction, and “choice” is causally determined, you remove the emotional charge that normally freezes people in self-blame. Most people can’t change because they’re fighting themselves: they see behavior as a moral issue instead of a mechanical one. When you believe you should have been different, the cognitive and emotional systems that handle error-detection (the anterior cingulate, prefrontal control circuits, etc.) stay locked in a loop of inhibition and self-reprimand. You’re stuck issuing the same failed command: be better.

But, when you stop treating your own behavior as a moral failure and start treating it as something that happens for a reason, you finally create the conditions for change. As I said before the brain is basically a prediction machine, it’s always comparing what just happened to what it expected to happen and adjusting its model of the world to make better predictions next time. But when you’re caught in self-blame, you short-circuit that process. You’re too busy insisting that you “should’ve known better” to actually see what the system is trying to tell you.

That’s what’s so weirdly liberating about determinism. It actually makes you observant. It leads you to think in terms of inputs and conditions instead of “good” or “bad.” Like, instead of “I procrastinated because I’m lazy,” you realize it’s “I procrastinated because anxiety spikes when something feels undefined.” Then you can work with that. You change the structure that created the behavior instead of trying to will the behavior away.

And the same thing applies to how you see other people. Once you understand that everyone’s acting out the only thing they can act out given their wiring and experience, you get less angry and more analytical. You stop seeing people as villains and start seeing them as systems. Of course, that doesn’t mean you let them walk all over you; it just means you realize that blame doesn’t fix anything. Systems change when the conditions change, not when they’re condemned.