When walking my parents’ dog and throwing a tennis ball for him to chase, I used to think of his decision to run after the ball as very different from my own decisions in life. He seems to be running automatically as a natural response to the ball being thrown right in front of him. If my friend asks me to come with him to a party and I approve, it seems like I am not merely naturally responding to external events but rather making a conscious decision to go there. But do dogs really work fundamentally differently from humans?

During the last couple of years, I have been increasingly convinced that the sources of my decisions are not fundamentally different from those of other animals. Both humans and dogs have developed intuitions through evolution by natural selection. The dogs with the greatest intuitive drive to chase small things running around nearby will catch the most food and reproduce to a greater extent. The people with the greatest intuitive drive to socialize and engage with other humans will survive longer and reproduce to a greater extent. A dog can reject his intuition to run after the ball if his discipline is sufficiently trained, and I could reject the party invitation if my discipline would be sufficiently trained. The natural state of both me and the dog is to be driven by our natural instincts and intuition. We are all disciplined away from this progressively since birth; try making a baby resist eating sweets right in front of him.

Both humans and other animals are clusters of particles constantly reacting to other particles in our surroundings. The reason our decisions seem different from those of other beings is that we are contained in the water of our own experiences. We do not see things from a third-person perspective, we interpret ourselves, dogs, and the rest of nature from our own perspective. If playing a first-person shooting game like Counter-Strike, it feels and looks very different when shooting somebody compared to when being shot yourself, although the system for being shot is identical to all players. Similarly, when watching life from our own first-person perspective, it makes sense that we interpret ourselves and our experiences differently than other beings – but it is not because those other beings are fundamentally different, but rather that we have asymmetric perceptions.

I think our decisions, just as dogs’, are derivable functions consisting of a machine built by evolution that interacts with the external world in a manner that can be perceived as us responding to a series of external events well beyond our control. If we cannot control neither the biological machine nor the external events, the main description of free will is not compatible with my view of the world. After deriving this problem many times, I truly feel the absence of free will and nowadays perceive myself and life as externally caused events for me to enjoy, just like being in the cinema watching a movie.