L ast month I presented (https://howtosavetheworld.ca/2026/06/17/how-our-bodies-usually-compel-us-to-do-whats-best-for-us/) a bit of research on how our bodies’ chemicals appear to drive, direct, and dictate (ie ‘condition’) our behaviour by trying to maximize the body’s feelings of pleasure and minimize its feelings of pain. They do this because that’s been a successful evolutionary strategy for millions of years (ie it’s in ‘our’ and our bodies’ best interests), and they do it with a remarkably small arsenal of chemicals. When we feel good, we want to do the thing again, and when we do it again, our bodies reinforce the behaviour by generating more of the pleasure chemicals. And conversely they convey painful signals (like feelings of fear and rage, and hunger pangs) when they want to direct us to avoid some other behaviours. The thought process in that article has caused me yet again to make some minor modifications to my model of how the body seemingly actually directs and determines our behaviour, which I’ve shown in the figures above. Here’s a brief step-through of the example it presents: 1. Say it’s the end of a long day and we’re tired, and hungry, and feeling out of shape. We have chocolate at hand to easily address the food cravings, and a gym at hand to address the out-of-shape feelings. These are some of the conditions and circumstances of the moment that our senses continually sense and bring to our (body’s) attention. 2. As our body acknowledges these sensations, it also recalls pertinent memories. It is rather amazing that our bodies often react to a remembered event or fact (like the eating of delicious chocolate) almost exactly as they react to the same event actually currently happening (or even the mere imagining of that event occurring). 3. What happens next is the spontaneous occurrence of what I call instinctive, unconscious, and ‘incoherent’ feelings and thoughts. Anger at the memory of someone recently calling us out-of-shape, for example. Or incoherent thoughts of gyms being very unhappy and sometimes dangerous places to get back into shape. Or just a sense of preference for chocolate over raspberries in the moment, say, or a preference for running on an outdoor track rather than a treadmill. These are ‘incoherent’ because they need not entail any mental judgements or self-judgements about these thoughts and feelings when they arise. 4. But what happens now is the start of a three-way behavioural feedback loop, the kind we observe in much addictive behaviour. At the same time we’re having these thoughts and feelings (about chocolate, exercise, and everything else going through our minds and sparking emotional responses), our bodies are generating pleasurable and/or painful chemicals (all the ones listed in my earlier article, and many more) to try to compel behaviours that our body ‘thinks’ (ie has been conditioned to consider) are ‘best’ for us. In this example they would include hunger pangs (‘painful’), dopamine rushes in anticipation of the taste of chocolate or the potential appearance of a six-pack instead of a paunch when we’re back in shape (‘pleasurable’), And these instinctive thoughts and feelings and these directive chemical flows create positive feedback loops that reinforce those feelings, thoughts and chemical flows. Eating chocolate and “runner’s high” can be addictive, and conversely so can eating disorders. 5. But at the same time, there will often be conflicting thoughts and feelings and chemical flows, notably if our biological conditioning (eg to love chocolate and hate painful workouts) and our cultural conditioning (eg to stay in shape to be attractive to others and useful to society) are at cross-purposes. The tension can be palpable as we’re torn over what to ‘decide’ to do. 6. Finally, we (our bodies that is) have no choice, agency or free will (yeah I know, you’re tired of me saying that) but to obey those chemical directives and do what they tell us to do. Where there is a conflict, generally we (our bodies) will do what our conditioning suggests is most urgent first (that’s a useful evolutionary prioritization), and then we’ll do what’s easy and/or fun (ie most pleasurable). Very often, nothing else will make the ‘cut’ and hence get done at all, including all the things that ‘we’ believe are ‘merely’ important. (Hey, gotta love a kindly explanation for procrastination!) I continue to believe, based on all the evidence I have read, that ‘we’ (ie our ‘conscious’ minds) have absolutely no say over any of this. The amount of information we process ‘consciously’ is an infinitesimally small part of our body’s total ‘information’ processing activity, and our bodies have hence naturally evolved not to depend at all on this slow, unreliable, negligible processing capacity we call ‘consciousness’. Or on the absurdly flawed and oversimplified model of reality that constitutes its scaffolding. They (these bodies) make ‘our’ decisions for us. We would almost certainly be extinct as a species otherwise. We would love to believe that we exercise ‘conscious’ free will and agency over every significant decision that affects ‘us’ and ‘our’ bodies, as shown in the top chart above. After all, a huge amount of humans’ energy (physical, emotional, and intellectual) is devoted to, and consumed with, the exhausting mental processes of creating, constantly adding to, and sometimes changing our belief systems and worldview, with the total conviction that this massively complex model of reality we construct with our brains is essential to our ‘success’ and our very survival. Our societal reward systems depend completely on the veracity of this made-up model. But there is increasing evidence that it is pretty much completely useless. Like accounting (my profession, I’m not meaning to diss my fellow CPAs), it’s just an after-the-fact rationalization of what has already happened and been ‘decided’. As I’ve argued extensively and am still inclined to believe, despite it being so counterintuitive, it (our ‘conscious self’ and its belief systems) plays absolutely no role in any facet of our (body’s) ‘decision-making’. We absolutely hate this assertion. Most of our human-made systems are absolutely founded on us having free will, including our legal, justice, and psychological counselling systems. If we acknowledged we have no free will, those systems would have to be almost entirely discarded and rebuilt from scratch based on very different principles. The obvious question, then, is why do we (humans, uniquely) have this illusory sense of agency? My sense, which I’ve explained elsewhere, is that it’s an evolutionary spandrel, or more precisely an exaptation, that arose because nature decided to experiment with humans’ unusually large brain capacity by seeing whether conjuring up an entire model of reality inside the brain would be evolutionarily advantageous. Once the model had been constructed, and all humans had agreed to adopt it, it quickly became impossible to function without it (we ‘forgot’ how to do things without relying on this model). So, as I’ve explained (https://howtosavetheworld.ca/2021/03/07/the-four-impossibilities/), once the human brain was able to imagine non-existent things, it was absolutely necessary, for example, to ‘invent’ the concept of time, which doesn’t actually exist: Studies have shown that the body and brain react identically whether they are perceiving an actual stimulus, imagining that stimulus, remembering that stimulus, or considering the future possibility of that stimulus. To the body and brain, these are all the same. But confusing those four things can be very dysfunctional (just ask people who hallucinate), so the brain had to invent a new ‘quality’ to distinguish between them. That quality was time. By conceiving of a stimulus as being at an ‘early’ point, ‘mid’ point, or ‘end’ point in a ‘time line’ the human could then differentially ‘perceive’ this as a memory, an immediate (‘real’) perception, or a future possibility, respectively, and respond appropriately. The absolute difference between “tiger”, here now, and a memory or imagined future possibility of “tiger” became forever blurred. But the ‘past’ and ‘future’ perceptions are not real perceptions at all. They are con ceptions that the brain imagines it has per ceived. In its newly integrated brain, the now-‘conscious’ human mistakes its conceptions for perceptions. Its model of reality has become infected by a psychosomatic misunderstanding, one that can no longer distinguish between what is real (perceived) and what is imagined (conceived). As an extreme example, sufferers from PTSD are constantly reliving a trauma that is not present, and reacting as if it were. And nostalgics are forever recalling an imagined past that never was. But like some other spandrels and exaptations, the invention of the human model of reality with the ‘conscious self’ as its controlling centrepiece, might actually be what non-dualist speaker Tony Parsons called “a useless piece of software”, in that it actually changes nothing. Everything that happens happens without and despite anything the ‘self’ ‘decides’. So why does it continue to exist and be relied upon? Why don’t we just turf out the ‘self-ish’ blue sections of our model of reality depicted above, and ‘get real’ about how ‘decisions’ actually occur? Because ‘we’ can’t. The scaffolding of self and separation and time and agency is absolutely essential,not to our successful functioning as living creatures, but to our capacity to explain ourselves to other humans. We are essentially social animals, completely incapable of surviving as solitary creatures. We are utterly dependent on each other. We need to be able to communicate with other humans in ways they can understand and agree upon, and this “useless piece of software”, this completely illusory but globally accepted model of the real world with our ‘separate’ ‘independent’ ‘conscious’ selves at its centre, acting with agency, is the only accepted model our species now has to communicate and associate with each other with. Just as our legal and incarceration systems utterly depend on the illusion of free will, all our human systems and societies and even our languages now depend completely on our acceptance not only of free will, but of the entire separate-self-centred moving-through-time model of reality we have concocted out of whole cloth. And indeed the work of Benjamin Libet, Michael Gazzaniga, and Daniel Wegner suggests that this social justification is the real reason we persist in insisting to each other that the separate-self-centred moving-through-time model of reality is real and true — even though it is just an accepted fiction, shared and propagated from generation to generation in all known remaining human cultures: Its main job may not have been prediction, but rather social justification — explaining and coordinating behaviour after it occurred. This “narrative exaptation” view sees prediction as a comforting fiction, useful for storytelling, coordination, and social cohesion rather than moment-to-moment survival. Our whole universally-shared model of reality, used and believed in only by humans, is just a comforting fiction. No wonder the wild creatures of this world often behave towards us as if we were dangerous and crazy.