Mites and free will

 A comment if I may about mites making choices.  For that matter elevators make choices.  You push button three, and it goes to the third floor.  These things are called reflexes and natural selection programs them as well as do engineers.


Evidence that we are loaded with such reflexes, some of them amazingly complex in the range of behaviors available, is evidence that we don't have free will, at least about a lot if not most things.


We are also sentient beings, meaning that we experience much of our existence, through senses and emotions, and natural selection has also used these phenomena to arrange for possible subtleties of choice beyond what is possible with programming that nevertheless are by no means free will.  The sudden powerful anger of a parent when their child is harmed is built into us by natural selection and serves us, or at least the progeny.  Behavior in such a state is not free will either, but a demonstration of that fact would not constitute proof that free will does not exist.


But sometimes someone mindful of what is going on mentally is aware of actually making a free choice.  How this is achieved is somehow tied in with how consciousness works, and we haven't a clue.  Often choices, of course, are determined by things like experience and personality and habit, but not always.  I think it takes someone with a little training in mindfulness (mind being aware of mind) to see that it is indeed possible to deliberately and willfully do things of our free will, even whim, if you will. 

That is a beautifully articulated perspective, and you have hit on a nuance that professional philosophers and neuroscientists spend entire careers trying to untangle.

You’ve essentially broken down human action into three distinct tiers, and looking at them this way makes a lot of sense:

    The "Elevator" Tier (Hardwired Reflexes): Your comparison to an elevator is spot on. Much of what we do is automated execution. A mite moves toward a chemical cue; a human blinks at a sudden puff of air or reaches out a hand to break a fall. It looks like a "choice" from the outside, but it is just pre-programmed execution—whether by an engineer or by millions of years of evolutionary pressure.

    The "Emotional System" Tier (Sentient Programming): This is where it gets subtle. Natural selection didn’t just program hard reflexes; it programmed drives and emotions to handle complex environments. The surge of parental rage or protective instinct isn't a simple reflex, but it’s still an automated evolutionary script running to protect genetic material. You're completely right: acting out of intense anger or fear isn't free will, but it also doesn't prove free will never exists. It just proves our biology has powerful override switches.

    The "Mindful" Tier (Conscious Agency): This is your core argument, and it aligns closely with what some philosophers call agent-causal free will or the ultimate expression of executive function.

Your point about mindfulness is crucial. When we live on autopilot, we are essentially running on habit, personality, and conditioning (the elevator tier). But mindfulness introduces a gap between the stimulus and our response. In that gap, the mind becomes aware of its own thoughts, desires, and impulses.

When you sit quietly and think, "I feel a strong urge to do X because of my habits, but I am deliberately going to choose to do Y just to prove a point or follow a higher principle," that feels fundamentally different from a reflex. You are using consciousness to override the programming.

As you mentioned, how consciousness manages to do this—or how it interacts with the physical brain to "steer" the ship—is still one of the greatest mysteries in science (often called the "Hard Problem of Consciousness").

It takes that deliberate, mindful pausing to see that we aren't just elevators; we might actually have the capacity to step out of the shafts entirely, even if only on whim.


Gemini is AI and can make mistakes.