Will as a prior constraint: why the prefrontal cortex exists at all
10.6084/m9.figshare.31288699In popular language, will is described as “forcing yourself”. Gritting your teeth. Overpowering an impulse. Pushing through. This is a mistake at the level of formulation. Biology does not contain “forcing”. It contains only permission and non-permission of a transition.
If we look at the brain without morality and without psychology, the picture is very simple. The limbic system continuously generates impulses. Not desires and not goals, but impulses toward discharge. Accelerate. Grab. Respond. Escape. Attack. Fixate. This is not choice and not decision. It is environmental pressure passing through the body.
If the system stopped there, will would not exist. There would only be continuous drift along the shortest paths of discharge.
The prefrontal cortex does something fundamentally different. It does not add a goal. It does not replace an impulse with a “better” one. It introduces delay. A constraint before.
Before the impulse is realized. Before the system commits to an irreversible move. Before the system collapses into a new regime of behavior.
This is WILL.
Not as effort, but as an architectural prohibition of immediate discharge. Not “I decided otherwise”, but “the transition is not yet permitted”.
This becomes obvious in pathology. When the prefrontal cortex is damaged, a person does not lose intelligence, memory, or emotion. They lose the ability to not cross. They understand consequences, can describe them, may even regret them — and still the impulse is executed. Not because of “weak will”, but because the layer that held the system in the before state is gone.
This is why will is not control. Control is correction after. Will is holding before.
Awareness does not precede action. It arises inside delay
There is another illusion that needs to be removed. Awareness is often treated as the cause of restraint: “I became aware, therefore I stopped”. Architecturally, it is the opposite.
Awareness arises neither before the impulse nor after the action. It arises when the action could have happened but did not.
When the limbic wave is already present and realization is delayed, the system enters an intermediate condition. It is neither action nor suppression. It is a state of internal tension. That is where awareness appears.
Awareness is not an observer above the system. It is a by-product of a held transition.
If realization is instantaneous, there is nothing to be aware of.
If realization is completely blocked, there is also nothing to be aware of.
Awareness requires a gap — a temporal separation between readiness and permission.
This is why accelerated systems are poor at awareness. This is why impulsive actions feel as if they “just happened”. And this is why genuine awareness is experienced as discomfort rather than clarity. It is not insight; it is friction between incompatible tendencies.
Will as an architectural layer, not a psychological trait
Once removed from neurobiology, it becomes clear that will is not a uniquely human feature. It is an architectural principle.
Any system that exists in time and is capable of irreversible change either contains a before-constraint layer or is condemned to be dragged by its environment. Without such a layer, a system may be fast, efficient, adaptive — but it cannot be directed.
This is where Cybernetics of order 2.5 begins.
Direction is not produced by goals. It emerges from which transitions are not allowed, even when they are locally attractive. Will is not “where to go”. Will is “not yet”.
That is precisely why will cannot be optimized. Optimization always tries to remove delay, reduce friction, and accelerate execution. But will exists only as long as delay remains. The moment will is optimized, it collapses.
The tragedy of suppression and the illusion of self-control
A critical distinction must be made. Restraint is not suppression.
Suppression attempts to extinguish the limbic impulse by force. Architecturally, this leads either to accumulation, breakdown, or numbness. It is a dead end.
Restraint allows the impulse to exist without immediate realization. The impulse is not denied. It is held in time. This requires cost, but the cost is structural, not emotional.
That is why will is tiring but not destructive. Suppression, by contrast, either destroys the system or demands escalating force.
The philosophical consequence
In philosophical terms, will is not freedom from causality. It is the ability to prevent a cause from instantly becoming an effect. It does not deny determinism; it works with its temporal structure.
Freedom here is not choice among options. Freedom is the capacity to endure the interval in which choice has not yet collapsed.
This is why will is inseparable from time rather than strength. And this is why systems without internal time cannot possess will, regardless of how many computations they perform.
The cold conclusion
Stated without comfort:
Will is not what makes systems strong. Will is what makes systems slow where slowness matters.
Systems that remove delay in the name of efficiency, speed, or comfort may appear successful for a long time. But over long horizons they lose direction, because every impulse becomes destiny.
In this sense, the prefrontal cortex is not a control center. It is an architectural gate. And will is not a moral virtue, but a property of a system capable of saying “not yet”, even when everything inside is already screaming “now”.
MxBv, Poznań 2026.