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Evidence for my gut feeling of “free will” :

I first started reflecting on this seriously in high school when are started reading Camus, Sartre, Nietzsche and other existentialists. These thinkers lead me to believe I would be judged on my actions and my life was a blank page. I could write what I wanted. That was the end of it (more or less) for quite some time.

Then came some experiences with animal behavior. I adapted a lab on animal choice, called a food preference test. I used Pieris rapa or White Cabbage Butterfly caterpillars to help students think about stimulus/response as well as how to distinguish between randomness and pattern using a chi-squared test of significance. What became very clear to me (not so much for my students) was the difficulty in distinguishing between pre-determined stimulus response and choice. Were these simple organism making a choice or just reacting to a particular input. How does one tell the difference between hardwired stimulus/response and free will?

At about the same time I was learning about Leech neuron randomness from colleagues at Bryn Mawr College. It seems even a single naked neuron floating in a petri dish would behave in non-deterministic ways. This is the data that Paul Grobstien showed the Brain and Behavior Institute. This data might be interpreted as a neuron making a choice to act in an unpredictable manner. but how does one tell the difference between unpredictable outputs and free will?

Another consideration comes from my studies in Chaos theory and Emergent theory. Hebbs’ rule describes how networks of neurons self-organize. A simplification of the rule is, “Neurons that fire together, wire together”. Wired together neurons are ideas, feelings and causal factors in action.

Finally, I became depressed and it began to affect my drive, relationships and happiness. Believing that neurons could be conditioned to wire differently and believing (from Damasio) that these networks are the building blocks ideas, feelings and thus action, I began to reflect my way out of depression.

Put this all together and I think we have much less free will then most believe, but we can influence our own actions with deliberate and careful conscious and unconscious reflecting.

Am curious if any of this overlaps with your experience and what other evidence you most rely on for your conclusions.