If I Ask You to Wiggle
If I ask you to wiggle
one of your fingers right now
go ahead —
which one did you move?
and why that finger and not
one of the other nine?
What happens
deep beneath the surface of
our conscious minds,
the inscrutable mystery
of what ultimately churns up
the bright signal:
move left pinky
is as clear to us as mud.
We don't need to look hard to find
there's no one riding inside our heads
creating our thoughts
thinking what we think
before we think them —
for we simply don’t think
anything
before it's thought.
So, the ultimate decision to
lift our left pinky —
when you consider it,
the freest choice
we could possibly make,
completely uncoerced by
any outside influence —
that decision
emerges fully formed
from a vast, inky-dark
unknowable void
and we, the wide-eyed
witness to the product of this internal magic,
we have no ability to
inspect it
defend it
or admonish it
for we simply didn’t
create it.
The greatest trick the devil
ever pulled
wan’t convincing us all that
he doesn’t exist
but that we instead, do.
Because the very self
we think we experience every day,
that feeling of being
someone
behind our face
authoring our thoughts,
making our moves —
that feeling of agency,
of having free will?
that is the most
powerful illusion
of all.