Dear Shelly,
Very interesting article. It just so happens that I had the same type of reflections on “what does reality really look like” a year ago. My conclusions are here: https://medium.com/@marma.developer/my-spiritual-journey-3-the-nature-of-reality-abc06dc42c67
What you have done, via your experiment, is change your perception of reality and your core beliefs, which in turn affected the reality you experienced. I hope you will find the article I wrote informative. I have also written one about free will. I’ll summarize my conclusions for you here:
Our free will is akin to that of our cells. As within so without. When you cut yourself, and the wound needs to be disinfected by the body, it is not as if each and every single white blood cell has a pre-determined, pre-destined “role” to play. Rather, the body has a form of collective intelligence whereby it knows how many white blood cells it needs to produce to ensure that the job of disinfection gets done within a margin of 99%. So it produces a certain number of white blood cells in excess to reach that level of certainty, maintaining a perfect balance between 100% randomness (white blood cells doing whatever they want in a totally uncoordinated manner) and 100% determinism. A balance between order and chaos. And should those white blood cells fail to do their job, then there is a fall back plan to fend off the infection by other means again, with the same 99% certainty (or the likes). This is why you are still alive, and why you didn’t die at the very first scratch that you had being a toddler or baby.
A further proof that we have free will is the fact that we experience hesitation. If there is no free will, then there could not be hesitation. The mere fact of experiencing hesitation is proof that things are not working like clockwork. If your brain would take decisions like a computer or a neural network, then even if a decision is 50.000000001% more “likely” to be the “right” thing to do, based on the interactions between all your neurons and connections in your brain, then there still wouldn’t be hesitation. You would just DO it or be conscious of taking that decision. For a computer, there is no difference in taking an action with 100% certainty, or 50.000001% certainty. In the end, it translates this information to a 1 or 0, a “yes” or “no”, a “do” or “not do”, a binary option.
If you read my “spiritual journey” series, you are in for a trip down the rabbit hole, as I explore the nature of God… Happy to discuss further!
