Superstitious conditioning forms the experience of free will under causal determinism

The question of whether humans have free will or not is longstanding in the areas of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. While the issue has not been resolved, determinist and compatibilist frameworks have received support from the neuropsychological data. In both cases, decisions are made within a broader framework of causal determinism. If thoughts and behaviours are inevitable consequences of a continuous chain of cause-effect events, why do we feel free? Here, we propose a neuropsychological model for the experience of free will as a conditioned illusion – a misattribution of causality reinforced through operant learning. Drawing on classical findings such as the readiness potential preceding conscious intention and more recent work on active inference, we argue that the temporal contiguity of premotor and motor activations gives rise to superstitious conditioning, shaping an experience of – and belief in – free will that is compatible with determinism. Sustained by dopaminergic circuits and reinforced by sensorimotor feedback loops, our framework situates free will as an experiential phenomenon rooted in the functional neuroanatomy of learning. We discuss implications for medicine, ethics, law, and suggest conditions under which the experience of free will may be disrupted or restructured by disease, pharmacology, and reinforcement history.