A Hive Mind and the Myth of Free Will

Where does "me" reside among the billions of neurons? There's no single neuron that "me" lives inside of. The sense of "me" comes from an almost borg-like hive mind; the neuron collective, if you will. Choices aren't made by any single neuron firing. Many choices are made, but it seems to work by a democratic method: The most-common choice is the one taken.

When we journey below the neuron level to the atomic level, brains are physical mechanisms for making hive-mind decisions with. We also have our memories/experiences that are saved off to inform our future decisions. If our memories are what inform our future and at its root our brain is a decision-making device, it makes sense to think that our future decisions are not the result of free will. There may be an illusion of free will because we don't have instant access to all our past memories/experiences and able to spend time mulling over decisions, and our decisions have to be made instantaneously. In a sense, then, we can only make the decisions that our past experiences and memories tell us we should. If this is the case, then we have no free will. It doesn't mean that there's any conscious entity controlling us by marionette strings (unless by "God" you mean that we are our own God), it just means our past controls our present and from a mechanistic way of looking at it, we have no free will in those decisions. It's thanks to the hive-mind and the subconscious nature of those democratic decisions by our collective neuron firings that we get the impression we have free will.

However, knowing all that, we get along just fine in daily life as if we do have free will. It's like objective morality. There could be some objective standard for morality, but since that has to be filtered through the prism of our subjective experiences (including learning and biases), we can't be sure what those objective moral standards would be. The closest one can reasonably get is to generalize by using a 'least harm, most good' analysis and submit that to case-by-case questions.