The Problem of Choice: A Speculative Exploration into the Roots of Evil

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what drives what we perceive as evil behavior. I believe the core issue might not be malice or intent—but something as fundamental as storage.

Not storage in the physical sense, but in how our minds handle, process, and store information—efficiently or inefficiently. Let me break down this line of thought with a recent real-world example from my team.

One of my team members took the time to explain a process to a colleague, face-to-face, outlining exactly what should be done and, importantly, what should be avoided. Despite this clear communication, that same colleague later did exactly what they were explicitly told not to do. When I later sent a gentle correction, I was made aware about this earlier interaction. My team member seemed frustrated at the outcome.

At first glance, this situation might just seem like poor communication or carelessness. But I think it’s more than that—it’s about the data we store and how our brains prioritize it.

Imagine someone trying to store too many data points. They aren’t consciously deciding what to hold onto and what to let go of—or perhaps they are, but the priorities get mixed up. As a result, their mind drops the crucial bit of information. But here’s the tricky part: when your mind drops a piece of data, you don’t notice it’s gone—if you did, it wouldn’t be dropped in the first place. Identifying what you have forgotten is one of the single most difficult tasks any human ever faces, cognitively speaking. I rate it above escaping sleep paralysis. That, at least, there's a trick to.

Over time, these drops and selective holds form patterns. And these patterns can manifest as what we perceive as different personalities, personality flaws, behavioral inconsistencies, or even things like motives and desires. I’m suggesting that it’s this pattern, whatever label you apply to it, that can lead to outcomes we describe as evil—violence, corruption, greed. I am suggesting that once a particular behavior occurs, perhaps it changes things in such a way as to guarantee its recurrence. If someone forgets something once, it is possible that they set themselves up to forget similar things in the future, reinforcing the pattern.

Here’s the thing: everything any human has ever done probably seemed like a “good idea” at the time. Not necessarily good in the moral sense, but in the sense that, in that moment, it was the most compelling option for them to pursue. We all act based on what we want—or what we believe we want. If we shift our attention, whether consciously or unconsciously, you can say that we wanted to do so. Our idea of desire carries with it the implied assumption that if we did not want to do things, we would not do them.

But where do these wants come from? And more provocatively, is “want” even a real thing? Maybe what we call “want” is just the expression of will. "Will" in the sense of activity, not "will" in the sense of intent. Like, I will fall if I jump out of a plane. What I intend really doesn't matter once I'm in the air and nothing is under me. It is something beyond our conscious control. Perhaps nothing is truly voluntary and the idea of choice itself is an illusion—a deeply ingrained bit that our minds are programmed to drop as soon as we try to examine it.

Personally, I’ve had experiences and memories that I choose to forget every time they resurface. Usually they involve some sort of acute or chronic trauma. But the question is, is it really a choice? Or is the idea of choice, like the concept of control, just a stubborn illusions?

I think about bitflips. A bitflip happens when any piece of data updates from one setting to another. A gene mutates, a 0 becomes a 1 in your computer. Both of these things can happen as the result of manufacturing errors, but they can also both happen as a result of cosmic rays. Are some of our behaviors caused by bitflips, which themselves are caused by phenomena we have no control over or even regular awareness of? And, if so, what does that say about our concept of why we do, say, and think the things we do?

If we’re misattributing the causes of behavior, could it be that what we see as evil is just a byproduct of inefficient information storage? A glitch in the human experience? We might be looking in the wrong places for the root of what troubles us—perhaps the real culprit is hidden in the structure of how we store and retrieve information, leading us to act in ways that, from the outside, appear malicious.

This is purely speculative, of course, but it’s a line of thought worth exploring. The answer might be far more mundane—and simultaneously more profound—than we think.

-One spark, sun becoming.