“Although making tea was fully consistent with my beliefs, values, and desires, I did not choose to have these beliefs, values, and desires. I wanted a cup of tea, but I did not choose to want a cup of tea. Voluntary actions are voluntary not because they descend from an immaterial soul, nor because they ascend from a quantum soup. They are voluntary because they express what I, as a person, want to do, even though I cannot choose these wants. As nineteenth-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer put it, ‘Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.’
I made tea. Could I have done otherwise? In one sense, yes. There’s coffee in the kitchen too, so I could have made coffee. And when making the tea it certainly seemed to me that I could have made coffee instead. But I didn’t want coffee, I wanted tea, and since I can’t choose my wants, I made tea. Given the precise state of the universe at the time, which includes the state of my body and brain, all of which have prior causes, whether deterministic or not, stretching all the way back to my origin as a tea-drinking semi-Englishman and beyond, I could not have done otherwise. You can’t replay the same tape and expect a different outcome, apart from uninteresting differences due to randomness. The relevant phenomenology – the feeling that I could have done otherwise – is not a transparent window onto how causality operates in the physical world.”