Consider whether you have free will. When a newborn arrives in the world his brain is equipped with the ability to make an increasing number of associations via his perceptions. These associations will endow him with wide-ranging capabilities. However, before he becomes aware of his surroundings and before his brain is fully operating, he is pressured to think and respond by his caretakers, usually parents, by stereotype. Thus the young infant’s reality is distorted or erased. The infant seeks the parents’ emotional rewards. In the process the infant (and later child) learns to perform some unnatural behaviors to get the support he needs from his parents. Due to parental reinforcement through repetition, the child’s actions become more fixed and rigid.
People are encouraged to believe they are unique. But they are all stamped out of molds that function similarly. Only slight variations in childrearing exist within families. These create only minute individual differences. While people think they have free will, they do not as their minds are “emotionally shaped” early in their lives to live in unconsciously proscribed roles of which they have little self-understanding.
What is your opinion? Do you have free will over your life?
