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I have been suffering from depression-induced cognitive impairment for a few months, so I apologize if I fail to get my point across, but this matter has been paramount for me for years. Two years ago, I came up with a concept. I failed to find a name for it wherewith I was comfortable, but it was the grouping of the individual desires that are present in all living things. It had something to do with instinct, but went further than just that, for it included humans’ desires that do not directly come from mere instinct. That… thing, materialized itself in the existence of all living things and in everything humans have created. Sculptures, paintings, malls, fashion, capitalism as a whole, laws, morality, forests, mushrooms… they were no more than the manifestations of that collection of desires. It was the noumenon of Life, if you will. [i use the term “noumenon” loosely, for I believe that it is a group of physical elements found in the body and DNA of all life forms.] Coming up with such concept made me question the possibility of such thing as a free will. “Is there any action at all without that [the noumenon of life]?” I asked myself, “if I created a robot with artificial intelligence, what would it do, apart from that which I, accidentally or not, programmed it to do?” What does it mean to be free, if you can do what you want, but you cannot choose what you want? Just as AI is programmed by humans, humans and other life forms are programmed by the billions of years of evolution that made their present existence possible. Even though Stefan and all of you are keen on free-will, I have never seen a rebuttal to that, to the fact that what you want is pretty much the same thing that all life forms do, although each individual pursues it differently—it’s not up to you, and it was decided billions of years before you were born, that the mere fact of your existence would intrinsically mean that you want to live and to reproduce, and that each of your desires is directly or indirectly related to that. The recognition that those desires are the noumenon of your existence would be the ultimate self-knowledge. All of that will be familiar to you if you’ve read Schopenhauer. I did, last year, as a 15 year old, and noticed how Schopenhauer had given the name of “Wille”—“Will” in English—to a concept very similar to mine; different, however, in that Schopenhauer attributed to it the phenomenal existence of all things, including those that had nothing to do with life. He also explored the concept and its implications much more deeply than I ever had, and I thought to myself—“isn’t that the ultimate truth—the ultimate ‘red pill’? The Will—our own desires—is the matrix we all live in, and it’s the source of all suffering.” “Meanwhile it surprises one to find, both in the world of human beings and in that of animals, that this great, manifold, and restless motion is sustained and kept going by the medium of two simple impulses—hunger and the instinct of sex, helped perhaps a little by boredom—and that these have the power to form the primum mobile of so complex a machinery, setting in motion the variegated show!” Schopenhauer also thought of something similar to my AI analogy, in regards to free will. In his prize essay on the freedom of the will, he points out how freedom is a negative. “The natural image of a free will is an empty set of scales. It hangs there at rest and will never lose its equilibrium unless something is laid on one of the pans. Free will can no more produce an action out of itself than a scale can produce a movement of itself, since nothing comes from nothing.” Just as an intelligent computer not programmed to do anything (if such thing could possibly exist) would be technically free, and wouldn’t do anything, humans and the rest of the life forms, if we weren’t programmed by years of evolution to have certain wishes, wouldn’t do anything, if such beings were physically possible in the first place. Our very existence and actions deny free will. “Der Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will.” [Man can do what he wills; he cannot, however, will what he wills.] I disagree with Schopenhauer on many things, but in this particular matter presented here and in what it implies I see nothing but the ultimate truth. Would anyone here rebut that? On a semi-related note, I made this meme which only people interested in philosophy would comprehend, here it is: >inb4 ad hominem >inb4 ad naturam strawman