Do I Make Decisions?

   Today in class we talked about what makes a person, where there personality comes from and what makes them themselves.

   Freud would describe a personality as the combination of the Id, the basic impulses or drives of the brain and human organism, the ego, which seeks the goals of the id with a long term perspective, and the super-ego, which is a self regulator, a conscience.  He would look at the way that the three interact and then say, there you have a person as a whole.  He would probably also blame a patients mother for something, but that's beyond the point.
   However, In class today, what came to mind was not Civilization and its Discontents, but rather a very different psychological study.  About a year ago, I read an article about a man who, after suffering from seizures had his corpus callosum severed as a cure.  The corpus callosum is the tissue that connects the left and right hemispheres and a seizure is basically a domino effect of too many chemicals receptors being set off in the brain, cutting the hemispheres prevents the chemical overflow from spreading.
   Most people know that the left and right hemisphere can do different things.  The left, for instance, works well with speaking, while the right hemisphere works well with pictures.
   What is more important about this distinction is how it allows researchers to look into the workers of decision making.  For example, a subject with a cut corpus callosum was shown the word music to his speaking left hemisphere and the word bell to his non speaking, but pictorial right hemisphere.  After this, a screen displayed a church with a steeple and bell, a music note, a guitar, and a drum set.  The subject was told to point to the word he had just seen.  He pointed at the church tower and said, "Music."  When asked why he chose the church as apposed to another one of the more music related objects, he said that the last music he could remember was a church bell.
What this proves is that the brain is merely taking in chemical stimuli and responding to them.  Then, your brain convinces you that you actually made the decision.  In an MRI, it becomes apparent that the reasoning section of the brain actually lights up milliseconds after the decision making section of the brain.
   After I read this article, it changed my life, made me depressed and existential.  I read some Camus and sulked.  Then I realized that it doesn't make a difference if I actually choose anything in my life. 
I may know, or at least strongly believe, that free will doesn't exist.  I do, however, believe that people should be held accountable for their actions, if we don't society would collapse.
   However, these findings lead me to believe that Freud was partially correct. He said the the super-ego was created from a fear of a loss of love, i.e. you wont hit your mother because she will become angry.  Humans are pack animals and, if you believe in evolution, it makes sense that those who had a chemical disposition to this fear of losing love would survive.  We are chemically predisposed to be afraid of losing the approval of the group, society, and we explain this as the human desire to analyze our actions and act morally.  Truthfully, it is the human ability to think we are thinking.
   This explains hereditary mental disorders as well; they aren't "disorders" but ill-formed super-egos.  Maybe I should feel bad for a psychopath the same way I do for someone born with a crippling illness.  They were just unlucky enough to get the short end of the gene pool.