A five-part descent into the illusion of autonomy, where biology writes the script, reason provides the excuse, and the self is merely the echo of its own conditioning. This is a follow-up to a recent post on the implausibility of free will.

Constraint Is Not Freedom

The ergonomic cage of compatibilist comfort

“You are not playing the piano. You are the piano, playing itself — then applauding.”

Compatibilists — those philosophical locksmiths determined to keep the myth of free will intact — love to say that constraint doesn’t contradict freedom. That a system can still be “free” so long as it is coherent, self-reflective, and capable of recursive evaluation.

In this view, freedom doesn’t require being uncaused — it only requires being causally integrated. You don’t need to be sovereign. You just need to be responsive.

“The pianist may not have built the piano — but she still plays it.”

It sounds lovely.

It’s also false.

You Are the Piano

This analogy fails for a simple reason: there is no pianist. No ghost in the gears. No homunculus seated behind the cortex, pulling levers and composing virtue. There is only the piano — complex, self-modulating, exquisitely tuned — but self-playing nonetheless.

The illusion of choice is merely the instrument responding to its state: to its internal wiring, environmental inputs, and the accumulated sediment of prior events. What feels like deliberation is often delay. What feels like freedom is often latency.

Recursive ≠ Free

Ah, but what about reflection? Don’t we revise ourselves over time?

We do. But that revision is itself conditioned. You didn’t choose the capacity to reflect. You didn’t choose your threshold for introspection. If you resist a bias, it’s because you were predisposed — by some cocktail of education, temperament, or trauma — to resist it.

A thermostat that updates its own algorithm is still a thermostat.

It doesn’t become “free” by being self-correcting. It becomes better adapted. Likewise, human introspection is just adaptive determinism wearing a philosophical hat.

Constraint Isn’t Contradiction — It’s Redefinition

Compatibilists smuggle in a quieter, defanged version of freedom: not the ability to do otherwise, but the ability to behave “like yourself.”

But this is freedom in retrospect, not in action.
If all freedom means is “acting in accordance with one’s programming,” then Roombas have free will.

If we stretch the term that far, it breaks — not loudly, but with the sad elasticity of a word losing its shape.

TL;DR: The Pianist Was Always a Myth

• You didn’t design your mental architecture.
• You didn’t select your desires or dispositions.
• You didn’t choose the you that chooses.

So no — you’re not playing the piano.
You are the piano — reverberating, perhaps beautifully, to stimuli you didn’t summon and cannot evade.

📅 Coming Tomorrow

Continuity Is Not Identity

What if you are not who you were — but simply what you’ve become?