The Game of Life is about moving up different ego developmental levels to achieve unity with Ultimate Reality (some call this Spirit or Godhead). Along the way we learn many valuable lessons as our cognitive and emotional intelligences develop. You could say that the human being has many different centers of cognition, both in a real physical sense as in different biological circuitry, but also in a more subtle or virtual way where our mind organizes the “software” or memes that are running on the Operating Systems. The way it works is kind of like this:
Instinct -> Emotion -> Thought -> Vision Logic/Integral Mind
Basically this means you have 4 “brains”, not one, and what you perceive of as “free will” is simply an argument happening between these three modules. I say three because the fourth module (Vision Logic) does not participate in the argument from an equal level. Simply put the higher models (VL+) of the Operating Systems tend to wait until the lower ones are somewhat healthy before becoming available. Just like a civilization does not go straight from the iron age to industrialization, or you don’t go straight from kindergarten to university.
From one perspective you could argue that these different operating systems then have “free will”, but not from any perspective can that be reasoned successfully. Only if you assume an atomized “individual”, as we do in the social game, does the concept even make sense. This creates a map of reality were “we” are separate entities acting under conscious control of a “me” entity. The problem is that this “me” character is quite illusory. When we look closer we see it dissolving into smaller and smaller processes in different languages (impulses, energy shifts or symbols) that are interacting with each other. Another way to put it is that impulses, emotions and thoughts are happening in your field of awareness, but you are not the impulses, thoughts or emotions, you are the awareness that is experiencing them. As immobile awareness you are simply witnessing the events unfolding in your characters life story, usually listening to the mind trying to use language to explain things, complain about things or initiate in strange dialogues with itself in anticipation of interactions with other sentient beings using the same form of communication.
This is how the illusion of “free will” appears, but since the witnessing entity that is the real “you” is not interacting with events, the experience of free will can be explained in a more satisfactory manner as the awareness of and attachment to cognitive dissonance. Basically when your internal “decision making system” has a conflict you register that as a choice and attempt to engage higher thought processes or somehow resolve the conflict peacefully. “Do I have another beer? I feel like it but maybe I shouldn’t” is now viewed as simply a process happening over which there is no control, because the process is self controlling and ultimately self-liberating/resolving. There is no need for a “you” to think because the process is perfectly capable of thinking by itself, it’s a meme, it’s what it does. When you say “I am thinking” what you are really saying (from another perspective that is more correct) is “I am observing a stream of words appearing in my consciousness and simultaneously processing them on both higher and lower levels, depending on my current level of awareness (which perspective you have”.
Hence you can look at the “Free Will” meme as a bug or misunderstanding in the system. The benefit of the meme is that it allows your organism to evolve quicker by pushing the rational mind to its max (it is basically trying to control everything to ensure its survival), but it also causes a lot of health problems down the whole spiral of development. Essentially the “Free Will” meme is responsible for a lot of anxiety and existential angst, as well as feelings of being helpless or victimized.
Most arguments for the argument of the existence of a “Free Will” comes either from a mythical perspective (A God gave it to us) or a moralistic one (if people don’t have free will we can’t morally condemn and punish them). But at a rational level you finally see these arguments as red herrings. We are not talking about whether “Free Will” is GOOD or BAD we are talking about whether it exists, or whether there is a healthier way to perceive it.
