Startling Conclusions! (Well, maybe not) Part II

Let me consider something I generally look back as a huge cusp in my life. Angel. For a lot of my current querks, I usually just blindly point back and say “Oh, it’s Angel’s fault.” But, I know that’s just a simple solution. I was already changing before I had met her. I consider her a catalyst. Would I really be that different had I never met Angel? I seem to have differentiated possible lives from possible Timmys. Having lived a slightly different life does not mean a different Timmy, as the fork example shows. But, Angel seems more than a slight deviation. Angel seems like just one of the many things which have “made me” who I am.

I suppose it might help if I look at all the things that have remained more or less constant despite me meeting Angel. I’m lazy. I have long hair. The classes I took. The other people I’ve met. My good-naturedness. What exactly DID Angel change, anyway? Aside from not going through a post-dump depression, it’s getting hard to see how not meeting Angel would have changed me. If I hadn’t met her, I wouldn’t be trying to feel like I did when I was with her. But, wait a minute. Is the Timmy that I am now any different from the Timmy that isn’t sad that he hasn’t felt like he did when he was with Angel? Both are clearly valid Timmys.

The devil is in the details, as they say.

Okay, let’s suppose I took harder classes. Okay, that wouldn’t change the fact that I’m lazy as hell. Facts. Knowing more facts won’t change much, unless I think and conclude something on my own. Few things I’ve learned in High School have really stuck with me. College seems to be more of the same. I suppose I’ve “learned” things from my philosophy classes. But, I take the concepts and make them my own. Is the Timmy that knows about determinism really all that different from the Timmy that doesn’t? Aside from arguing about determinism, there isn’t that much of a difference.

For whatever reason, I decided that should be an appropriate openner. Not sure why. I trust myself. The reason point of this entry is to address Free Will VS Determinism.

I tend to favor Determinism. Why? To agree with Free Will is to assume there is randomness in the universe. As far as I can tell, there is no such thing as randomness. “Chaos” or “randomness” is simply things for which we can not easily find a pattern. It is human nature to find patterns and catagorize things, after all. The stock market is quite chaotic, but the individual elements which make it up are quite orderly. Chaos from order. Fascinating, eh?

So I favor Determinism. The belief that, given the state of the universe at one point in time, there is only one predetermined future, and one coherent past. The dissident to determinism generally react, “If my life is predetermined, why should I do anything?” The mistake here is that you still have to live your life. If you think, “If it’s predetermined that I’ll be a lawyer, I can just sit on my ass and wait for it to happen,” well… Yeah. You’re not going to be a lawyer sitting on your ass waiting for it to happen. Moreover, it is IMPOSSIBLE for humans to even guess how our lives will pan out.

One of the issues that arises, aside from morality, is the concept of “choice”. Lots of people aren’t comfortable with the idea that we don’t have choice (in Determinism). Or so it seems. The Free Will person will say, “Of course, I have choice. If I wanted to, I could have done something else.” The Determinism will then reply, “Yes, but those wants and desires would be predetermined, and so would your choice.”

And so, somehow last night, I came to an odd conclusion. Determinism is Free Will. Let me flip that around so everybody gets me. Free Will is Determinism. Okay, maybe I’m just saying that to trivialize the issue. I sure as hell said to myself, “Dude, you’re nuts” last night.

But, wait. What is “choice” in Free Will? The average person might say something similar to, “Having more than one option.” That, if you want to, you can do anything you want. Let’s suppose I want to be President. If I had the desire, and I did the right things, I COULD be President. I probably won’t, simply because I choose not to.

Consider the same thing in the Determinism scheme. Is it predetermined that I won’t be President? It is predetermined that I will be President if and only if I become President. And, as I said before, it is impossible to know what is predetermined. The future is still ours for the making, one way for another. Determinism relies on the concept of cause and effect. Entire casual chains. So. I could be President if I went down the right causal chain. There is absolutely nothing to stop me from being President. There is no logical law which will prevent me from being President. As I said, there is no way for us to know the predetermined future.