You’re supposed to believe in free will. The average person who wants oatmeal will eat it quickly; Want to ride a bike, soon ride on; If your nose feels itchy, you’ll scratch it without even thinking about it.

But according to some scientists and philosophers, this feeling is actually an illusion: you “want” oatmeal because you’re hungry; You “decide” to exercise because you’re bored and don’t want to stay indoors. As for that itchy nose, there must be a biological reason, too. According to this deterministic logic, all these actions, the causes behind them, and the causes of causes, can be traced all the way back to when you were born, to the lives of your parents, and all the way back to the very beginning of the universe.

Determinism, the antithesis of free will, holds that humans are embedded in a stable network of causality stretching back to the Big Bang. This idea is hard for many to swallow. This is normal, because free will is what makes many social systems work. The criminal justice system is built on the belief that people have free will, that they can choose whether to obey the law, and that those who don’t should be punished.