The Will Is Gone?

He stared at those who were rushing to finish the final preparations for the session. Today, he was supposed to be the one holding the seminar on the topic of free will.

This was what made him so angry and upset. When he was very young, whenever he had to speak in front of a crowd, he was terrified. Adrenaline would rise in his blood to its highest level—so much that his hands and feet would tremble, and he would stammer.

But ever since he entered this university, he had participated in so many different seminars, and had been forced to speak in front of crowds that this taboo within him was broken.

But another taboo had been created in him because of his presence at this university: that human beings have no free will. And that was only because a few scientific experiments had proven that a person decides exactly a few seconds before doing something. Two main experiments:

1. Benjamin Libet’s experiment (1983): This experiment showed that brain activity (readiness potential) begins about half a second (500 milliseconds) before a person becomes consciously aware of deciding to move.

2. The advanced version (Soon et al., 2008): This experiment, using fMRI, showed that a person’s choice can be predicted up to 10 seconds before their awareness of their decision. There were also social-psychological experiments that are highly cited in the debate on “free will:”

The Milgram experiment (obedience to authority): This experiment showed that ordinary people can do terrible things under the pressure of an authority. This experiment raised deep challenges regarding “free will” and “moral responsibility.”

The Stanford Prison Experiment (Philip Zimbardo): In this experiment, ordinary students became guards and prisoners and quickly displayed cruel behavior. This too showed how much the situation could influence our “free will” and behavior.

But the reality was something else. He remembered exactly that an actress had spoken about her childhood memories. She said:

“Her father forced her to go to piano class at the age of four, but since she didn’t like it and would cry, in the end, the teacher decided not to accept her.”

This actress herself, her sister, and her father were all actors. The interesting part was that her sister, unlike her, loved music, and at the same age when she was crying, her sister was happily going to class and learning.

This directly questions the Stanford Prison Experiment. Two people from the same family, with the same father and mother, did not have the same interests. Even though they lived in the same conditions, even this woman’s brother loved music and became a musician; but she didn’t like such a thing and didn’t even want to learn music.

But no one pays attention to such experiences. Now, because in that prison, a few students in a specific situation turned into sadistic human beings, therefore human beings have no free will?

When a four-year-old child shows her free will by crying, she says in her wordless language:

“I don’t like music.”

It means everyone can show specific behaviors in different situations. It depends on their perspective and opinion. But now, no matter what he did, he couldn’t prove this. This made him extremely angry and disgusted—that because of such a thing, his entire life and decisions had been questioned.

That day, when his professor spoke about the lack of free will and all the experiments, his disgust reached such a level that when his professor said:

“Who is willing to hold the seminar on free will?”

He was the first to volunteer. All his friends blamed him for such a decision, because they thought he wanted to confirm the idea that human beings have no free will. The only one who truly knew why he had volunteered was his close friend Sona, who told him:

“Don’t do this. Don’t destroy all your years of hard work for such a theory. Only a few months left until you get your PhD.”

But he only looked at her. Because his PhD, in the face of such theories, was not real to him—when all his effort and hardship was being rendered meaningless before his eyes by just a few experiments and the behavior of a limited group of people. He was sitting on the last seat in a hall of several thousand—one of the best universities in the world.

He felt he had made a mistake. He had worked so hard to get accepted into this university. If we had no free will, why was he sitting on this seat now?

He could have been in a casino or even an insignificant place. This question gnawed at his brain like a termite: “If he has no free will, what is he doing here?

Why did he leave his family and country to study at one of the best universities in the world?

“For this reason, even at the cost of being expelled from this university and even this country, he is willing to hold this seminar—with a perspective that proves to everyone that forever, his will, his body, his mind—in fact, his human existence—is in his own hands.”

The preparations of the organizers were finished. Today, everything had to be done in the best possible way, because the university president, along with most of the professors, was going to attend this seminar.

The floral arrangements with natural flowers gave a special effect to the stage. Large glass vases had been placed all around the stage; even the lighting of the hall and the stage was special today.

Everywhere he looked, he saw signs of free will—the small glass table behind which he had to stand and say:

“What is free will?”

To him, it looked like a lie detector. Everything on the stage and in the hall reminded him of that device. Banners explaining the topic had been placed in the right and left corners of the stage, next to the three steps he had to climb to begin his speech.

But despite all these beautiful arrangements, they said: human beings have no free will. If we have no free will, why do we prefer beauty to ugliness?

Why do we chase order and discipline?

He was very afraid. Even his body trembled, just like in the past when he had to speak in front of a crowd. But all his years of effort and hardship to become the best had been questioned; he couldn’t ignore it.

It was strange to him: why did all successful people—like Bill Gates or Elon Musk—never speak about this?

Weren’t they the ones who had worked so hard to become who they are?

And with just one sentence, all their years of effort were erased. Why did no one care?

Just because this was a university, and those who said these things held academic chairs, they had the right to render meaningless the result of a lifetime of work and effort of any human being, in any position.

Two hours were still left until the session. He sat there, imagining himself defending his existence and identity with complete free will. Because he felt that if he had no free will, he had no identity—like a doll or a robot programmed to do something, with no right to interfere in that programming.

But he was not going to be a vacuum cleaner robot, polishing his professors’ words like a cleaner. He got up and left the hall. He wanted to spend these last two hours before the session walking around the university one last time.

He knew well that the speech he was about to give would leave him no way back. Everywhere he looked, memories with his friends came back to him. After several years of studying at this university, he considered it like his home. But he was wrong.

“Home is where we choose it to be. When we have no right to choose, then we have no home either.”

He was very hungry. He needed to eat something before the session. Eating and drinking were indeed among human needs, but the right to choose still played a role. For example, right now, he desperately craved Iranian food; but he didn’t have time to go to his favorite restaurant and eat kebab. So he had to settle for a hamburger sandwich with a soda.

He was sitting on a chair under the university’s large tree. His hands were trembling, his throat was tight—as if he had a lump in his throat that he never wanted to turn into tears. He had to eat. He couldn’t allow even the smallest thing to cast a shadow over his speech.

He would hold this seminar in the best possible way and prove to everyone that we not only have free will, but we also share it. This was the collective decision of most professors: that the best student would hold the first seminar on this topic.

Even though he had volunteered himself, in reality, they had decided that he must hold this seminar, because they thought he was going to present their viewpoint in the best possible way. He returned to the hall.

He looked at his appearance. He was wearing his best formal clothes. If he had no free will, why was he wearing these clothes?

Why did celebrities wear clothes that advertised a particular brand, and people chose the same clothes they wore as fashion, as their own standard of choice? Why did the wealthy have special rooms for thousands of their clothes and shoes, and proudly share them on social media?

If this were like the seminars he had held over the past few years, he would have prepared a PowerPoint for it, conveying all the valuable points in the most beautiful way. But this time, he didn’t need a PowerPoint.

His own existence, and the existence of everyone present there, was the symbol of the key points of this topic. Only half an hour was left until the session began, and he was pacing nervously on the stage.

When the first person entered the hall, he took a deep breath; once again, adrenaline in his body reached its peak. Was it worth it?

To sacrifice his years of effort for studying in this field and a degree he would receive in just a few months?

He was still standing on the stage with immense stress. The more people entered the hall, the more his anxiety multiplied. He felt a halo had covered his eyes, like someone who had to drive for a long time in fog to reach somewhere. He saw no bright point at all. He didn’t know when this fog-covered road would end and he would reach his destination.

When a hand was placed on his shoulder, he came back to himself. He took a deep breath and stared into his professor’s eyes—the same one who, for reasons unknown, had rendered even his own efforts to reach this position meaningless. He smiled. His professor asked:

“Are you ready?”

“Yes, professor.”

“Alright, then I’ll go down…”

He took his professor’s arm and said:

“No, professor, stay. I need your presence.”

His professor looked at him in surprise. In all these years, he had never heard such a thing from him—not even once. He smiled and nodded. He stood behind the glass lie detector, and his professor was a few steps behind him.

His breath was caught. His eyes darted around; but he was determined to do this. So he took a deep breath, drank a little from the glass of water on the lie detector, and smiled. He looked at the entire audience in the hall.

He was looking for his friends; he wished they were there too, to see that the best student this time wanted to be nothing but human. Finally, he found them in the farthest corner of the hall. The hall, with a capacity of several thousand, was completely full, and there wasn’t even one empty seat. His professor saw his hesitation and said calmly:

“Begin.”

“With greetings and a warm welcome to the respected audience. With apologies for the lack of a PowerPoint, I begin the seminar.

If we had no free will, we would not wake up every morning. Because it is our free will that tells us to get out of bed or to sleep. That is why waking up early and being on time is a very positive personality trait.

If we had no free will, we would constantly soil our clothes, like when we were infants, and then our parents went through so much trouble to teach us how to control our urination and defecation; even now, there are elderly people who suffer from incontinence.

This type of illness is precisely called incontinence, because they have lost control over this part of their body.

If we had no free will, we would eat so much that our intestines and stomach would explode. That is why they say that to have a healthy diet and to exercise, we need willpower.

If we had no free will, we would talk so much that we would suffocate without oxygen. Because talking too much causes blood oxygen to drop. That is why, in the middle of speaking, we sometimes take a deep breath.

His professor asked quietly from behind him:

“What are you saying? You were supposed to research in confirmation of the experiment.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll get to that topic too.”

If we had no free will, jobs and education would be meaningless, because the right to choose is very important in these matters, especially in artistic professions like fashion design.

If we had no free will, all criminal, civil, traffic, and privacy laws would become ineffective. Because all these laws only have meaning when human beings have free will, and punishment exists precisely because someone has chosen to act against the law.

For example, when someone runs a red light and causes someone’s death, if this theory were practical, he could say:

‘It wasn’t me. It was my hormones that decided to do such a thing.’

When someone molests a child or harms several people, would anyone accept this when he says in his defense:

‘It wasn’t me. It was my hormones that decided to do this.’

What if someone breaks a store window and steals its goods?

What if someone attacks people with a weapon?

And…

“His professor grabbed his arm and pulled him back from behind the table and said very calmly: “So when are you going to get to the main topic?”

He gave his professor a very bad look, which made him take a step back, and the university president, who was sitting in the first row, stood up. His professor said loudly:

“This student has misunderstood the topic.”

He became very, very angry at this. He raised his hand and slapped his professor with all his strength. The security officer from the corner of the hall wanted to come up, but he raised his hand in a gesture meaning “wait” toward the man and continued:

“We have no free will. It was my hormones that decided to slap my professor’s ear. You shouldn’t blame me for such a thing.”

His professor had fallen on the stage floor like a bewitched human being. When he moved toward him, he stepped back a few steps with his hands. But the smile he gave was like the Joker character in the Batman film, and he said:

“Now my hormones have decided to get in a car and run a few red lights and run over a few people; then, with the same car, enter a grocery store; and I, along with all those who have hormones like mine, steal all the goods in that store.

If the police want to arrest me, the only thing I will say is that I am a student of this university, and at this university, they taught me that free will does not exist. So I can do whatever I want; no one has the right to object.

And all professions like police, judge, lawyer, prosecutor, and jury, and anyone who has a responsibility regarding free will, have no right to punish me, because I am without free will…”

Then, with that same famous smile, he gave his professor a terrifying look—like those who have truly lost their minds and are determined to do all those dangerous things.

Then he headed toward the stage steps, and before going down, he threw one of the large glass vases beside the stage into the middle of the hall. The vase shattered with a loud crash, and he went down a few steps, and as he walked over the broken pieces of the vase, the sound of glass crushing under his feet was, in fact, the symbol of the crushing of this sentence:

“Human beings have no free will.”

Under the feet of all human beings who had spent their entire lives striving and choosing for the sake of being human and for goals they considered infinitely valuable.

— Stephen Pinker says: “Free will is not a mysterious soul in a machine. It is a complex, conscious, and slower process in our brain that chooses behavior based on information, goals, and consequences.”

Every poet, every philosopher, every scientist, every artist who ever struggled to become something — they all believed in this. If they didn’t, they would have sat still and waited for fate to move them. And if free will does not exist, then their struggles were meaningless. And so are ours. But I refuse to believe that.

The Will Is Gone?

That’s what they say.

But I m still here.

And I’m still choosing.