Could you have done otherwise?

This morning you chose what to eat, what to wear, maybe whether to get up at all. It felt like choosing. Now rewind the morning with everything exactly as it was, every atom and every mood, and ask whether you could have done otherwise. Most people's honest answer wobbles. The Stoic Chrysippus, in the third century BC, offered a reply that still has many takers. Push a cylinder and it rolls; push a spinning top and it whirls in place. The push comes from outside, but the way each one moves comes from its own shape. Events act on you, and how you respond comes from your character, which on this view is all the freedom anyone needs. Spinoza set the bar higher. A thing is free, he argued, only when it acts from its own nature alone, and the feeling of choosing proves nothing. He imagined a stone flying through the air suddenly becoming conscious: it would believe it was flying because it wanted to. Our sense of deciding, on his account, is just what a chain of causes we cannot see looks like from the inside. Dostoevsky's narrator in Notes from Underground (1864) answered with spite. If science ever showed our choices to be as predictable as the keys of a piano, he says, a man would do something mad and self-destructive just to prove he isn't one. More than a century later, in 1983, Benjamin Libet seemed to give science its proof: brain activity tied to a simple movement began a few hundred milliseconds before people reported deciding to move. Libet drew a gentler conclusion than many of his readers did. He thought the conscious mind could still veto what the brain had started. If your choices turned out to be fully caused by your genes, your history and the shape of your character, would that make them any less yours?