Who Thinks the Thinker? An Inquiry Into Free Will, Consciousness, and Personality

9 min readSep 15, 2022

“To each man shall his own free actions bring both his suffering and his good fortune. Jupiter is impartially king over all alike. The Fates will find the way.” ― Virgil, The Aeneid

Introduction

Historically, tensions have existed between opposing ideological camps, claiming that human behavior is either the outcome of their free will, or that it is predetermined by outside, uncontrollable forces, such as nature, God, or genes. For centuries, people have been pondering whether we are the designers of our lives, or if the design is prearranged even before our conscious knowledge of it. Without leaning nor to the left, nor to the right, can we find a middle ground linking these two antagonistic claims together? As the North and South poles of a magnet are still parts of the same thing, is there a connection between the voluntary and involuntary aspects of our being?

Actions and choices. Who decides to decide?

Some people might argue that our life is the sum total of the decisions we make. Indeed, every day we make countless decisions on both trivial and non-trivial matters. Some of our choices are conscious, others are not. Some are dictated by the faculties of rational thinking, others are spurred by unconscious biases, emotions, and predispositions. Rarely do our minds, hearts, and guts align, saying “This is it! Do this!” Most of the time in order to find the right way to act we have to go through a rigorous scanning process and reflect on our experiences.

“What should I eat for breakfast? Should I call that person I met yesterday? Would it be that bad if I skipped exercise today?” At first glance, the daily choices we make look temporal and insignificant, but once they stack up, it becomes visible that small incremental changes in our decision-making process can greatly determine the course of our lives. Some decisions open unexpected doors and pathways, others close them without us even knowing that they were there. As said by C.S. Lewis:

We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork, you must make a decision.

But how do we actually make decisions? Who governs the decision-making process and how do we know that the decisions we make are right? As said by Sam Harris:

“You can do what you decide to do — but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.”

It is safe to say that not all of our choices are in our conscious authority. Some might argue that our decisions are not in our authority at all! As a proponent of the Buddhistic doctrine of the Middle Way, I can’t fully agree with either of the claims. It is true that our perceptions are guided by a myriad of things, some of which we are in the know, while others we have no clue of. Different circumstances, popular beliefs, and ideological norms all influence our decisions greatly, but in my mind, what affects them most is our personality.

An inquiry into the phenomena of personality

If you have ever been interested in the field of psychology, you might have come across this formula:

Personality = temperament + character

At first glance, it looks rather clear and simple, but let me ask you something… What do the terms “temperament” and “character” actually mean? What’s the difference between the two? As both concepts often get conflated and mixed up, let’s give each of them a clear definition. This will clarify some possible misconceptions and help us to answer today’s main question: “Is there a place where voluntary and involuntary actions meet?” My idea is that yes, there is such a place. That place is our psyches. Let’s continue by clarifying the previously mentioned concepts. As defined by R. M. Ryckman:

Personality is a dynamic and organized set of characteristics possessed by a person that uniquely influences his or her cognitions, motivations, and behaviors in various situations.
Temperament refers to aspects of an individual’s personality that are often regarded as innate rather than learnt (such as introversion or extroversion.)
Character is a part of personality developed through learning and experience. It can be defined as the collection of core values possessed by an individual that leads to moral commitment and action.

By using the definitions provided above, we can make a claim that each personality is a constellation of both conscious and unconscious aspects of a person’s mind, that influences and directs his or her behavior, cognition, and motivations in various circumstances. Knowing that both temperament and character play a role in one’s thought process and decision-making, it is hard to state that people act in a fully self-determined, conscious, and independent manner, nor can we say that human beings are mere puppets of foreign, external forces. A more balanced view would be to say, that the personality is the center where the voluntary and involuntary aspects of being meet, both of them being products of human reflection and thought. This reminds me of a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson. In one of his essays he wrote:

“Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep, a lower deep opens.”

The discovery of epigenetics

The idea that existence might be a no-way-out, indeed choiceless enterprise seems daunting. Similarly worrying is the idea, that everything lies in our own hands. Even though many evolutionary scientists say that a living being is simply an expression of the genetic information stored in his DNA, in the late 1990s a new way of looking at genetic expression has begun. Side by side with traditional genetics, the field of epigenetics is developing and picking up pace at an exponential rate. The growing interest in how a genome can be modified without adding any new pieces to the genetic puzzle helps scientists to explain questions, such as why a complex organism like a human being has fewer genes than a flea.

As opposed to the traditional field of genetics, which is a branch of biology that studies heredity in organisms, epigenetics is the study of how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work. Unlike genetic changes, epigenetic changes are reversible and do not change your DNA sequence. Instead, they change how your body reads DNA, and which genes it activates.

Just like our innate temperament can be shaped and molded by our character, genes can be read and interpreted differently, according to our lifestyle and the environment in which we reside. Everything affects the variability of our genetic plug-ins. What we eat, how we sleep, where we live, what we do all have a major influence on our body not just on a superficial level, but also cellularly. Deep down on a molecular level, the building blocks of our physicality emerge. There, deep inside each nucleus, is the potential for extended longevity, or a shortened lifespan. There we can find the precursors for diseases, and mechanisms that help us thrive. Which of them will become activated? Well, that depends on how you live your life (or should we say, how life unfolds?)

Microbiome and its role in consciousness

Still, the age-old question of who wills the willer remains. Who decides what is good for you and what is not? Who chooses what to eat, when to sleep, where to live, what to do? Interestingly enough, some recent findings suggest that much of our impulses come from a source where we would not have expected them to come some decades ago. Zach Bush, a triple board-certified physician specializing in internal medicine, endocrinology, and hospice care argues that many of our choices are not ours at all. Rather, they are the choices of the body’s microbiome, which can be described as a community of microorganisms that live in and on the human body. As taken from the transcript of Zach’s webinar on the virome:

In the past, we’ve explained human life through the lens of the DNA or human genome. However, we now understand that we are an amalgamation of life within us and around us. Humans are not a superior manifestation of life, but are in fact the result of the microbiome and dependent upon the microbiome. We actually don’t understand a lot of the data within human DNA because only 1% of it is programming for a gene.
The microbiome of the body contains infinitely more genetic material than the human cell. 40,000 species of bacteria are a healthy amount within the human microbiome, and the vast majority of the proteins made in the human body are made by bacteria. This discovery is comparable to Galileo’s discovery of heliocentricity, which challenged the scientific, philosophical, and religious belief systems of the time. The human genome pales in comparison to the complexity and sheer amount of genetic information coming from bacteria, parasites and fungi.

\This is mindboggling. Until the late 1990s, it was firmly believed that the genes that we inherited from mom and dad are our bodies’ last decision-makers. Now we know, that in each of our cells there are around 20–25,000 genes, whereas the human microbiome potentially holds 500 times more genetic information than do our cells. In a way, the microorganisms living in and on our bodies are outnumbering the human cells tenfold, pushing 15 to 20-fold.

This begs the question, how should we conceptualize ourselves if our health and the body itself is in the hands of other organisms? Some might push the envelope even further, claiming that our microbiome is directly responsible for the development of consciousness.

Even though the identity crisis might appear daunting, thanks to the findings in epigenetics, it is refreshing to know that only ~20% of our present and future is the direct result of inherited genes. The rest 80% rest in the hands of the choices we make. How and where are we going to live our lives? Exercising regularly, eating the right foods, sleeping well, and giving our bodies enough adversity might not just expand the length of our life, it may also determine its quality.

In conclusion…

There’s still much that we don’t know about the body and how it functions. Similarly mysterious is our ability to perceive ourselves and our choices. Even though the agency of these decisions remains to be questioned, fortunately, now we know that the lifestyle choices we make matter not just on the superficial, sensory level, but also deeply, on the level of cells and even genes. Thus, even though a person has a proclivity for a certain disease, the right lifestyle changes might prevent it from occurring altogether. In this way, we are all magicians helping the body play the flute of its DNA. The material from which it is made is not for us to decide, but the melodies it makes are at least partly for us to say.

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