Free Will Is A Biological Illusion — The Experiment That Proved It Changed How I See Everything
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Welcome back to Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu. In today’s episode, Tom Bilyeu dives deep into one of the most provocative questions facing science and philosophy: Do we really have free will, or are we all just highly sophisticated NPCs—non-player characters—running a program inside a vast, resource-efficient simulation? Drawing on groundbreaking neuroscience experiments, the story of Phineas Gage, quantum mechanics, and the work of leading thinkers like Robert Sapolsky, Tom Bilyeu challenges everything we think we know about choice, consciousness, and the true nature of reality.
But this isn’t an episode about nihilism. Instead, Tom Bilyeu reveals why embracing the truth of a stochastically deterministic universe can actually make life feel more meaningful, freeing us from the weight of the past and inspiring us to make the most of every moment—programmed or not. Get ready to question your assumptions and see the world from a whole new perspective.
00:00 – Intro
01:38 – Part 1: It’s Biology All The Way Down
14:22 – Part 2: Quantum Mechanics Bury the Notion of Free Will
19:53 – Part 3: The Last Hiding Places of Free Will
27:51 – Part 4: Why Being An NPC Is The Best News You’ll Ever Get
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@nobodyimportant5485
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
29:18 Ok, so how do I use this information to get a certain girl to like me…? LOL
@TedBlack12
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
"I'm not choosing the donuts; they are choosing me." I'm aware of the desire to eat a donut, and I'm aware of the health risks of eating them regularly. I therefore choose not to eat them often. I also value spontaneity and so will occasionally trick my friends' expectations by eating one because I'm aware that eating one is unlikely to cause serious harm. Yes, "unconscious" people eat them often and pay the consequences. They are however free to learn to eat differently. I had to consciously choose a different path. Awareness is power. Now, I want to be clear. What I've expressed here is different from the challenge I'm giving Tom. It is easiest to demonstrate free will in specific, isolated circumstances, but once proven, we can extrapolate the understanding to our ability to exclude donuts from our regular diet.
@michaelferentino8412
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
It’s all absolutely meaningless either way. We still have the illusion of free will and knowing this changes nothing.
@Knapweed
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
You're out of touch with the latest developments in the Free Will argument. Microtubules have been found in the brain that perform a quantum connection with the entire Universe. The fact there is a delay in the brain function between the connection does not deny free will.
@Telencephelon
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
90% is right. But the game-engine Bullshit from a literal game-creator is getting tedious. Even Elon Musk says he only assumes a 20% chance we live in a shared simulation with a shared game-state.
I am not arguing that consciosuness is a simulation of what it would feel and be like in the universe as an agent.
Ultimately, everyone wants to cohere and have that feeling of certainty. But when it comes to the question of what the universe is, there simply is no good answer yet
@soulsthatremember
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
I can tell you from personal NDE and OBE experiences that I am NOT this physical body. To suggest otherwise is meaningless to me.
@Realsearchppc
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
That is false. See GWA and PCGCT
@mitterben
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
I've watched John since I was a kid some 40 years ago. @StosselTV , I'd love to see you cover the Lego story involving Utah and Ridiculous Ben!
@TedBlack12
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
Through awareness and language and the ability of awareness to know that it knows, through meta-awareness and the ability to rapidly analyze multiple criteria, I can in fact make a free choice in specific, isolated situations. If you invite me to your studio, I will demonstrate this. I believe you are making a grave error in reducing human beings to automatons run by their biology.
@phobic_musics
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
This is fascinating but materialist. I still believe the consciousness lives outside the brain to some degree at least. Which I guess is still possible in a simulation but instead of being outside of our biology it's just programmed into the simulation. Plus the afterlife is real. You can see it and feel it and touch it if you smoke 5-MeO-DMT
@SadevIrate
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
It's not about free will , it's whether you intend to acquire it .
Then surely one has to deliberate everything turns to self responsibility 😊😊
@patrick-k2h1y
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
❤
@christianjacobs4723
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
Tom is the best
@furkansimsek33
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
Amazing video ❤
@AncientMarinerNY
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
There is free will
@amanotas.com2
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
Your brain is constantly bombarded by millions of bits of environmental data every second. To prevent sensory overload, a network of neurons called the Reticular Activating System (RAS) acts as a filter.
The RAS prioritizes data that matches your deeply held internal beliefs and emotional focus. By holding that internal focus, your mind quite literally uses attention to sculpt its own physical brain tissue.
This continuous attention triggers myelination and neuroplasticity, forcing specific neural pathways to fire and wire together. What you prioritize within, your brain physically builds infrastructure for, fundamentally altering your external interactions, decisions, and environment.
Quantum physics hints a deeper reality: your consciousness is fundamentally a quantum processor.
@duomaxwell5807
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
Bro used his free will to not have kids then turns around and says free will doesn't exist….
Bruh make up your mind.
@TedBlack12
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
Your opening gambit regarding the Berlin scientists studying subjects in an FRMI machine contains a glaring oversight. It doesn't take 10 seconds to decide which button to push. It doesn't take 3 seconds. In fact, it doesn't take one second. You have become a bit too cocksure of your mechanistic view. Also all the studies of brain-damaged or drug-addled people do nothing to answer the question: Does a healthy human being have free will in specific situations?
@GetRocStar
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
As long as I can go fishing 🎣 when I want too. I’m good.
@karlholley4245
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
Very Copenhagen-centric Tom
@mikeknowles8017
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
Too bad MRI brain activity software glitches pretty much voided any MRI Brain activity research prior to 2016. Any brain activity recorded by MRI prior to that had false positives as high as 70%. Go look it up if you don't believe me.
@TheGreen_
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
eat shrooms. shrooms reset your brain to the stock OS… love
@Axiomatic75
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
He's making a good case against free will, but I just don't buy it. If I genuinely believed it, life would become utterly meaningless, to the point I'd probably just off myself. Also, if there was no free will, you couldn't judge anyone ever, no matter what horrible things they do. The child grapist could not only claim that it wasn't his choice, he could also point out that all he did was do something with a biological automaton, so why bother.
I like Tom, but I just can't agree with him on this one.
@Jay-kx4jf
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
Im not sure whst you even mean by "free will".
Why would we assume we csn suddenly turn off gravity and fly? Because we can imagine it and can superimpose our imaginal layer on to the wrong layer?
The bio-psycho-social system that YOU are, IS making decision freely, moment-to-moment, based on incomplete information it has learned in those layers.
White blood cells scan invaders and decide on action.
And we know the emergent layers can influence the lower layers(like the banks of a river). Photons arnt just bouncing balls. Their arrangement evokes certain meaning structures in various layers that comprise us.
the real argument is to clarify what we even mean by free, will, freewill, and how much decision space is available in each layer. Instead of arguing from within the saplowski framing of a seperate "concious you".
But its like the science bro ick to specific language that gets in the way
"Oh, aRe electrons DECIDING to moVe away frOm protons"
Which is just fighting the ick of the ones who like the word "free". The once science ppl call magicy supersition.
Whats more interesting is the tension that is revealed here. And what that twlls us about perspectival knowledge.
Go in one direction, nothing is free including you.
Go in the other direction everything is freely deciding including electrons.
Ppl be arguing the moon is looking different standing on the north or south poles. And fighting about pointing with their index or pinky.
@GRAFsTube
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
Biology all the way down, right… and people don't have the the concept of the subject… there is no person in the human vessel with a sense of self and agency… people don't understand that the conditions of existence have a heavy impact on them… people don't use agency make mold their environment to avoid states of being that reduce their agency… right… they definitely don't do that… totally correct… it's definitely not that everyone agrees free will is not a thing due to conditions appling pressures and not being free… "free" in free will is definitely not colloquial… nope definitely not… people definitely don't think that it's will and not "free" will that matters… nope, definitely not that… it's definitely not that people conflate a causal chain means there will be only one flow through time that people experience with there being no will, no driver, no subject… nope definitely not that… it's definitely not that people have ever thought about these arguments before… nope… it's definitely not that there are numerous philosophical, mathematic, and scientific arguments for the will of the subject nor gaps that exist in these arguments nope… nope it's not that fundamentally if you apply a reducer to all of existence and just call it logic therefore no will that then pointing out its opposite of chaos or randomness would therefore definitely not mean removing the no from "no will" yielding will… nope such reduction can't possibly mean that… it's definitely that superposition is imposible to influence and it's definitely not that superposition scaled up might look like the possibility storm of the future that people try to navigate through… nope… it's definitely not that the universe would find things it doesn't need to render and not render them due to a lack of will interacting with it… nope… it's definitely that the world is a video game and definitely not why is the world a video game… yep totally that… definitely not "why is the universe rendering a 'video game' for us the subjects"… nope totally not the right thing to consider at all… it's definitely not that "whoever" is running this "simulation" set up something that doesn't respond to agency, to will for the purpose of expanding agency to achieve the freedom of free will free will for its subjects/agents through various means… nope definitely not a possibility…
@Dominic.successally
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
while well grounded – where does this leave us in regards to nde's, past life regressions, and those other aspects of consciousness which would suggests there's something more persistent than this moment experienced within our biology?
@fabp.2114
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
Wow you are onto something, great philosopher of mount naivety.
@zaelu
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
We have the illusion of free will in our lives because that is the prime directive: Have free will! And we vastly fail at it.
Being and entity in the whole universe is measured by this… will. Universe is magic Will power is magic.
The universe is not Mathematics – the fact is provable so only shows our limitation. You make a lot of "prosaic" assumptions there.
Nothing in the cosmos is math. Nothing! It's hilarious to see the conviction is the opposite because you can add some numbers and proportions. There is no math in your DNA… the only way for you to "see it" is through some math and geometry maybe. But… that's because as an NPC you have some limitations 🙂 .
Also you mix emotions and reason in a funny way… due to same limitations normally we human NPCs have.
There are no particles, There is no wave function collapse. Again. Just limitations in perceiving "reality" some self imposed.
Efficiency is a mirage.
But yeah… we are Conscious NPCs that got fooled by our greatness of being self aware… a thing that is not unique to us nor gives us any big title. In fact we are just sheep.
@drzaanko4255
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
Yeah, its rather obvious when you put your mind to it. Every choice you make – when u go to the bottom you see you made it because of something outside of your control. You can easily prove it to yourself… but I guess we are not meant to get it otherwise we would. Most people I talk to fail to get it and I guess thats okay…
@thatoneguyv9098
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
This is a non sequitur. And if my emotions and desires dictate my actions, then I should not be able to resist the cheesecake even though I really want it.
@Telencephelon
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
Correction, Tom. The universe is a pattern generator. Only patterns (repetitions) can be observed by definition.
And maths is the language of patterns
@nobodyimportant5485
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
23:26 This happened to me! I met a girl who completely altered my reality, now I’m not the same. It has been really hard to recover from it.
@JonnyFootman-k5t
June 2, 2026 at 4:25 pm
What is even the point of running a deterministic simulation
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