Free Will

Scientists said that human's main characteristic is his freedom of choice or free will, the ability to manually control our life. I don't think so.
Let's start with an argument for free will. I can choose to turn left or right, I can choose to eat McDonald or Chinese food, I can select my major, I can choose what time to sleep, I can choose my mate, and so on and so on.

If we have free will, why do we make mistakes? why do we suffer? why do we hurt self or others? why do we get sick? Why do people have physical or mental health problems?

When we make choices, like between type of food or mates or type of anything, don't they have to be in our preference? We can't choose about something that we don't know. What we choose is choice of idea. There is a saying that "we can choose what to eat but not the appetite, we can choose when to sleep but not our drowsiness, we can choose what to drink but not our thirst"

Our ability to choose right now is predetermined by our previous experiences. Some people like Chinese food and some people don't. Some people like classical music and some people don't. There is a basketball coach who said after winning the final "we didn't win this game because of what we did in the past 40 minutes of the game. We won this game a long time ago when we recruited this players, when the players worked hard on their conditioning last summer, when we worked all year long to get better. We actually won this game because we scored 1 or more points than the opponent" A very wise coach.

Suffering, sickness, death is the strongest argument that we don't have much manual control of our life as we think we do. Freud had the right idea about predetermination and was condemned by western psychologists. Yes, it is not convenient to think that we don't have control over our life, especially in western industrial culture. However, having illusion about control about something we have no control about can bring all sorts of problems.

When we do something that we are competent, like driving, we usually go on autopilot and rely on our habit/skills to perform the skills for us. We can drive by not driving. Instead, we listen to music, think about something, or talk on the phone. When we do something that we are not competent or we are in a traumatic experience, we are also hijacked by our emotions and is not within our control. Other than those two, what other situation can we be? In both cases, we rely on our long term memory or emotions to perform our tasks.

However, it doesn't mean that we are 100% predetermined like what some people accused Freud. Otherwise, there is no accountability that we can hurt anybody and no one is accountable. We have the ability to be accountable and we are expected by society to be accountable for our behaviors. But we are not that enlightened to be able to choose what we want.