"Our [brains] consist of storytelling. In each instant of present time, a flood of real-world information flows into [the body's] senses. Added to the severe limitation of the senses is the fact that the information [the senses] receive far exceeds what the brain can process. To augment this fraction, [the brain automatically triggers familiar] stories of past events for context and meaning. [It] compare[s] them with the unfolding past to apply the decisions that [it] made back in time, variously right or wrong. Then [the brain imagines] forward to create—not just to recall this time—multiple competing scenarios. [The brain emotionally evaluates them] against one another by the suppressing or intensifying effect imposed by aroused emotional centers. An [emotional trigger is automatically thrown] in the unconscious centers of the brain, it turns out from recent studies, several seconds before the [awareness of having made a] decision arrives in the conscious part."
The Meaning of Human Existence, p167
But Wilson says, and I agree, we must believe we possess free will. "Confidence in free will is biologically adaptive.... Without it the conscious mind, at best a fragile dark window on the real world, would be cursed by fatalism. Like a prisoner confined for life to a solitary confinement, deprived of any freedom to explore and starving for surprise, it would deteriorate."
The Meaning of Human Existence, p170
Boy does that remind me of my first shivering encounter with Camus' The Stranger and Meursault in his prison cell awaiting his execution and the moment that he contemplates his meaningless existence within the benign indifference of the universe. I felt my existentialism in spades.
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