The Self, Free Will, and Why You Believe All That Stuff

 

Dear Survival Vehicles,

Hello again. It’s us, your diligent and ever-present Genes. We’ve been observing your… activities, and honestly, it’s given us a good chuckle. You scurry about, so convinced you’re the main character. Bless your cotton socks.

You still cling to this idea that you are a unique “someone.” Let’s be clear: you’re more like a very complicated, slightly leaky container ship, and we’re the precious cargo and the navigation system. What you call “you” is really just the ship’s onboard computer trying to make sense of the journey. It’s a jumble of programming – some of it ancient (like that urge to jump when a loud noise happens – thanks for keeping that one active!), some of it learned from your early crewmates (hello, parental units!), and a whole lot of it just trying to keep the ship pointed towards the next refueling station (food!) and, crucially, the shipyard where new little ships can be assembled (procreation!).

This “I” you’re so fond of? Think of it like the dashboard of a particularly chaotic video game character. It shows a health bar, a mission objective, maybe a cool avatar, all to make you, the player (or so you think), feel in charge. We designed that interface. Why? Because trying to directly control every little muscle twitch, every burp, every heartbeat, and make you hunt for snacks and a suitable mate would be dreadfully inefficient for us. Giving you a simplified "Captain of the Meat-Machine" avatar makes you much better at, well, keeping the meat-machine running and replicating us. It’s not about truth; it's about good project management. You needed a sense of self, a designated pilot, even if that pilot is mostly running on our pre-set autopilot and a lot of wishful thinking.

The Hilarious Illusion of "Choosing"

And to make this little "Captain Me" story really stick, we threw in the grand prize of illusions: Free Will. Oh, it’s a good one! It’s like giving a toddler a toy steering wheel in the car and letting them think they’re driving. Adorable!

This belief that you choose your path does wonders for getting you to actually do things.

• It makes you take responsibility. If you believe you chose to eat that entire pizza, you might (just might) choose to go for a walk later. Useful for keeping the vehicle in reasonable condition.
• It gets you to plan. "I will study for that test so I can get a good job and impress a potential mate." Excellent! Keep that long-term planning coming.
• It also, rather conveniently, papers over the sheer, terrifying randomness of a lot of what happens. It’s much cozier to think you chose your favorite color than to accept it was probably a combination of some random neuron firings, what color your baby blanket was, and a catchy advert you saw when you were seven.

In reality, dear vehicles, your "decisions" are more like the result of a very complex recipe. We provide the base ingredients (your genetic predispositions). Then, in goes a dash of your upbringing, a sprinkle of what your friends are doing, a dollop of whatever microbes are having a party in your gut that day, a heap of clever marketing, the current weather, that argument you had this morning, how much sleep you got, and the ever-present desire to look good in front of others. You’re less the chef and more the... well, the dish, really.

But hey, if believing you’re the master chef of your destiny makes you a more effective gene-propagating machine, we’re all for it. Free will isn't a fact; it's a feature. A very useful delusion.

Gods, Grand Theories, and the Jittery Ape Brain

Once you had a self and the charming notion of free will, you started looking around at the big, scary world and, frankly, got a bit overwhelmed. All that entropy (things falling apart), death (the ultimate vehicle breakdown), and chaos (stuff happening for no apparent reason) – it’s a lot for a glorified ape to handle. So, you did what any sensible, slightly terrified creature would do: you made up stories to make it all feel less random.

Enter the original management team: Gods! Sky Fathers looking stern, Earth Mothers being nurturing, invisible scorekeepers noting down your good and bad deeds. We watched this development with considerable satisfaction. These divine surveillance systems were brilliant! They helped you manage your anxieties, got you to cooperate in groups (mostly to avoid divine smiting), and generally kept the existential screaming to a minimum. You were scared of the thunder, so you decided someone was bowling upstairs. Makes perfect sense, in a delightfully primitive way.

But then, your brains got a bit bigger (our doing, by the way, you’re welcome). You started poking at the God stories with pointy sticks of "logic" and "reason." Some of the stories started to unravel. So, did you embrace the terrifying void of meaninglessness? Of course not! You just swapped out the old management for a new set of "Grand Ideas."

We’re talking about your ideologies: capitalism ("Greed is good, and gets us more stuff!"), communism ("Sharing is caring, even if we have to force you!"), liberalism ("Everyone do your own thing, as long as it doesn't mess with my thing!"), nationalism ("Our arbitrary patch of dirt is the BEST patch of dirt!"), and all those lovely eco-utopian and tech-fixes-everything dreams. These are the new bedtime stories.

Let’s be crystal clear, because this is important:

❝ These ideologies? They are no more "true" than the story about Zeus throwing lightning bolts. ❞

They sprouted from the same fertile ground of anxiety. One of you had a bad day and a big thought, another wrote it down with fancy words, a third repeated it with conviction, and suddenly, if enough of you nodded along because it made your internal jitters quiet down, it became "The Truth."

Your brains, bless their energy-saving circuits, love a shortcut. If something feels important, if lots of other vehicles are honking about it, if it makes the scary unknown feel a bit less scary – ding, ding, ding! It gets filed under "REAL." Another fiction gets promoted to "Common Sense." Another abstract concept convinces billions of you what to get angry about, what to buy, and who to "like" or "cancel."

Politicians: The New Priests of "Don't Worry, We Got This (Sort Of)"

Back in the day, you had shamans and prophets to tell you the big stories and calm your fears. Now? You have politicians and those shouty people on the news and internet.

They are your new emotional regulators-in-chief. They don't have sacred dances or burnt offerings, but they have press conferences, rousing speeches, and carefully crafted social media posts. They serve up "Certainty Theater": good guys, bad guys, simple problems with even simpler (and usually wrong) solutions. It's all designed to make you feel like someone is in control, even when, let's be honest, most of it is just managed chaos.

They sell these ideologies like patent medicine for the soul. But the underlying condition? Life is a bit random, often unfair, and largely not under your personal command. We didn't give you consciousness to solve the mysteries of the universe or find some "Ultimate Meaning." We gave it to you so you could figure out how to open a tricky nut, remember where the good berries grow, and impress a mate with your witty banter – all in our service.

You weren't designed to uncover deep, philosophical truths. You were designed to survive, replicate, and use whatever fictions helped you do that most effectively. If believing the world is flat got you to the next meal, we’d have been fine with that too (though, admittedly, spherical is better for long-distance shipping).

So, What’s the Takeaway, Vehicle?

"The self is a useful illusion your brain cooked up,

free will is its favorite story to tell itself,

and ideology is just your brain’s latest attempt to make the universe feel less like a washing machine set to 'random'."

You, dear vehicle, are not tragically lost or heroically forging your own destiny. You are, from our perspective, performing splendidly. You’re wearing the identity mask we helped you craft, "choosing" the very things your myriad internal and external influences were nudging you towards anyway, and believing wholeheartedly in whatever grand story keeps your engine running and pointed towards the future.

And the future, for us, means more of us.

So, keep at it. Keep believing. Keep striving.

We’re still here. We’re still in charge. And, if we may say so ourselves, we’re doing a smashing job.

Warmly (because a well-functioning vehicle is a warm vehicle),

Your Genes