<!-- bryant-content-generator:start --> # Free will may be more biologically intelligible as... > {{**Free will may be more biologically intelligible as a useful failure of constraint than as an immaculate faculty somehow standing outside causation.**}} {{What we call independent will may be the moment a person stops yielding to the pressures that normally shape behavior and does something counterintuitive instead.}} {{The nervous system survives by predicting and adapting to its environment, but intelligence becomes something more when a choice-maker can resist the very pressures shaping its behavior and, through a counterintuitive act, change the environment (or hold off the environment) instead of merely yielding to it.}} {{Perfect obedience to an internal model would not create perfect intelligence; it would create an organism unable to escape its own mistakes.}} {{Variation, noise, inhibition failure, competing attractors, exploratory impulses, and occasional breakdowns in ordinary behavioral control can produce departures that appear inefficient or pathological at one scale while opening entirely new adaptive possibilities at another. We call this — creativity.}} {{Individuality, creativity, rebellion, invention, courage, eccentricity, and independent will may partly consist of failure modes that biological intelligence learned to recruit as capabilities.}} {{The mystery of human agency may not be that we escaped the machinery of causation, but that the machinery became sophisticated enough to make creative use of its own irregularities, and we are a part of that feedback-loop.}} **Source:** [[breakouts/Human Machine|Human Machine]] <!-- bryant-content-generator:end -->