This is another Facebook post from 6 years ago. I wouldn’t change much of anything, except maybe a few less “therefores”. I sound like I’m trying to impress people with my word choice, and it’s not a good look. (Maybe someday I’ll look back at this and think I’m trying to impress people with my self-deprecating comments. Dammed if you do, yadda yadda…)
Human life is inherently worthless; human experience is priceless.
That is to say, I don’t believe in free will. I believe in cause and effect. What happened yesterday dictated what I felt and did today as much as what happened when I was five did–as much as what happened when my dad was five, as much as what happened when the universe was born. It’s an unbroken chain of cause and effect and cause and effect, you see.
Therefore, just as the rocks on the beach are where they are because of forces out of their control, so am I here. So are all of us. Therefore we cannot say we are of any more value to the natural order of things than the rocks–or the plants or the planets or the stars or the rabbits or the fish. We are all one and the same. We’re all subject to time, to cause and effect, to entropy.
What is unique to us is our experience while we are here. That’s what matters.
Being happy and not causing unhappiness in others is the noblest pursuit. Indeed its the only change we can ever hope to bring about.
Like or lump it, it’s how I feel. (I can’t change your mind anyway. You’re only reacting how you were always going to.)
You don’t believe Determinism? Great, differing opinions are what makes the world go ‘round. Let me ask you this: When did you decide that you don’t believe in it?
Oh, I see. You didn’t really decide, per se. It’s just how you’ve always felt. I see.
What do you think caused you to feel that way? Any idea? Was it something you read? Something someone said to you? Maybe just the way you were raised?
No, it’s ok that you don’t have an exact answer for it. There are lots of influences that bring us to the beliefs we hold, aren’t there? Ironically, though, my belief in determinism has a very direct cause. It began with a lecture I listened to, on the subject of free will, and it made a lot of sense to me when I heard it. Much the same way that it doesn’t make any sense to you.
Now, I have to ask myself, why did it make sense? Well, I have no idea, do I? I don’t know what about the lecture caused this idea to click in my head, to answer the unasked questions in my mind. Can you tell me why it doesn’t make sense to you?
No, I don’t mean a list of reasons. Those reasons are just subjective, aren’t they? I realize they may seem like objective facts, but an objective fact still has to meet with our ability to understand it, right? If I said water is wet and you didn’t think that was true, well, that’s an objective fact but for some reason it doesn’t sit the same in your reality as it sits in mine.
So when I say, “Why doesn’t Determinism make sense to you?”, I’m not looking for a list of objections, I’m looking for the reason it doesn’t make sense. Or, to put it another way, I’m looking for the reason that those objections do make sense to you. Follow?
I’ll give you time.
Can’t come up with a good answer? That’s totally understandable. I couldn’t either. If you asked me why ‘water is wet’ makes sense to me, I couldn’t come up with a reason. If you asked me why ‘I am alive’ rings true to me, I also couldn’t come up with a reason. If you asked me why determinism makes sense to me, I couldn’t tell you. I could just as easily have felt like you about the matter had circumstances in my life conspired a little differently. Do you agree?
Determinism isn’t the belief that we cannot make choices in life, or that the choices we make don’t matter; it’s the belief that we cannot choose what we are going to choose.
Put another way: We can make a choice, but our choice isn’t random. It’s determined.
We cannot choose how things effect us.
Our actions are based on how things effect us, and we cannot choose how things effect us. Therefore our choices are determined by forces outside ourselves.
If we choose to act opposite to our best interest, that is still a choice based on circumstances. Why did we choose to act that way? We wanted to be contrary.
But why did we want to be contrary? To prove a point.
But why did we want to prove that point? Because we believe we’re right.
But we do we believe we’re right? Etc. Etc. Etc.
Eventually you run out of causes you can attribute to your own conscious will.
God doesn’t play dice, he plays dominoes. The reason you chose to wear that shirt today is the same reason the sun hangs over us at just the perfect distance. It has nothing to do with choice, because choice is an illusion. It’s the byproduct of our advanced brain functions that wants to make sense out of a seemingly senseless, pointless existence.
No, your decision to wear that shirt and the sun’s position in the galaxy are both the result of an ancient, unknowably complex series of cosmic events on the subatomic scale that were set in motion at the beginning of everything. The computer you’re using is made of the same particles as the shirt you’re wearing and as the sun in the sky and as a billion stars and planets so far away that we’ll never even know they existed at all. It’s all part of the same fabric, all subject to the same fundamental force of Cause and Effect. The force that–if I may paraphrase–surrounds us and penetrates us and binds all things together–living and nonliving, because fundamentally there is no difference between the two.
The sand on the beach is subject to it the same as the man in the foxhole. The only meaningful distinction is that the sand has only one possible function, only one effect for the force to lead to. It’s like a single row of dominos from start to finish. The man, on the other hand, is like a million rows all branching off from a single starting point, in different directions and at different moments in time. He still has just as little choice in matters as the sand does, but the number of ways that the force of Cause and Effect plays out in his life is so unbelievably vast and varied that it only naturally creates the illusion in his mind that there was any other way things could’ve happened; and more insidiously, the illusion that he had any say in the matter whatsoever.
One thing that I’ve always done in life, even when it’s been to my detriment, is to acknowledge the reality of situations I’m in with other people. This means calling out uncomfortable emotions (my own), or openly speculating about others’ emotions, as well as marking, out loud, the absurdity or awkwardness of whatever situation we’re in.
I didn’t read about this, or learn it from anyone (as far as I know). It’s been a byproduct of, I guess, my shamelessness and belief in the importance of honesty. No, that’s probably giving myself too much credit.
The fact is, I’m not a good liar. I never have been. And when you can’t hide very well, the best thing to do is burn down all the cover so nobody else can hide, either.
That’s the more pessimistic way to explain why I am so eager to lay bare everything. Another good analogy is the dog that lays down to expose its belly. At the very least, I hope to demonstrate a humility that will hopefully be disarming; at best, I’ll get some tummy scratches.
See, we all live like actors in a play who can’t acknowledge the script or the scenery or the audience even though we all know that we all know they are there. When someone has been rude to us and we don’t know if it was on purpose or not, we spend our waking hours (and even our sleeping ones) trying to read their minds, discern their motivations.
Instead, it’s much easier for everyone–even if not at first–to simply ask the other person about their own intentions, and do it in such a way that they don’t feel the need to hide them. It cuts to the chase. It gets to the issue at hand.
So much time can be saved this way, and so much stress and anxiety and heartache. Just tell people how you feel, or tell them you don’t know how to feel, or tell them you felt one way but now you feel another way. And then ask them how they feel.
Open up to them. Talk about the reality, don’t just go through the motions. If there is a fire on stage, don’t just keep performing the play for the sake of maintaining the illusion. Deal with the fire. Talk about the damage. Investigate the cause.
Explore the stage, question the script, change the lines if you see fit.
Imagine a rock sitting at the top of a long, gentle slope. Because of a strong wind, or an earthquake, or maybe a stray bird hitting it, the rock tips and begins slowly rolling down the hill.
It doesn’t roll particularly fast, but it rolls nonetheless.
Now imagine the slope is long enough that you have time to observe the rock rolling for quite a while.
You could ask yourself, “Why is this rock rolling downhill?” If you mean what caused it, then the answer is simple: the wind, or the earthquake, or the stray bird.
If by the question you meant, “What is the point of this rock rolling downhill?” then the answer is equally simple: there is no point. It’s not an action that’s meant to have a purpose, it’s just a thing that is happening for as long as it happens. As the rock continues to roll, it gets ever nearer to the bottom of the hill. But would you say, “Ah, the point of the rock rolling downhill is to the get to the bottom?” Not likely, I would think.
The end of an event is not necessarily the point of the event.
The rock will roll for as long as it rolls, and eventually it will stop when it gets to the end. There was no point to the journey, and in the end the only result will be the rock being in a different place than it started.
Perhaps there’s a small stream at the bottom of the hill that the rock ends up in, and because it ends up in the stream the water changes flow slightly, or stops completely. Would you say that the point of the rock rolling downhill was to stop the stream?
That seems like applying purpose to a random series of events, doesn’t it? The rock had no intention of stopping the stream. It had no intention of rolling down that hill at all, in fact. The rock has no intentions at all.
Now suppose for a moment that the rock does have intentions! We don’t know what it’s like to be a rock, but suppose that it is like something to be that particular rock. Every event that happened still happened as it did, but the rock has the experience of it happening.
Actually, suppose that the rock wasn’t awake when the wind, or the earthquake, or the stray bird caused it to begin to roll. The rock woke up as it was rolling down the hill.
The rock woke up for the first time, in fact. It became aware of its experience as a rock, as it was rolling down the hill.
Do you think the rock would wonder why it was rolling down the hill? Why would it? The rock has no experience other than rolling down the hill. It has no past to compare rolling down the hill to.
As far as the rock is concerned, rolling down the hill is the experience of all rocks.
Of all sentient things, for that matter. Just as a fish can’t perceive water, the rock cannot perceive rolling because it doesn’t know anything else.
The rock is aware, though, that it is going somewhere. It doesn’t know what happened before it was going somewhere, but it can tell that the bottom of the hill is approaching. (Although it has no concept of a “top” or “bottom” of the hill, or even of a “hill” itself.) It knows the end of its journey is coming.
And it begins to ask itself what the point of this whole thing was.
If the hill is long enough, the rock begins to get scared of what will happen at the end. It begins to build a mythology for what happens after the end of the hill. It tells itself stories about why it’s important and meaningful that it’s heading to the bottom of the hill.
Eventually the rock finds other rocks (it’s a really, really big hill) that feel the same fear and wonder that it does, and they all begin to tell each other the same stories about the hill, about rolling, and about the bottom.
This is all meaningful, they tell each other. This has a purpose. This has a reason.
It must, otherwise…Why?
But you can see, from your distant vantage point, the answer to that question. You know the Why.
Because of the wind, or an earthquake, or a stray bird.
That’s all.
This is what you should think about when you start wondering what the purpose of our life is. Don’t look for a why at the end of the hill. Look to the past, and recognize that the true answer to Why is arbitrary.
You are on a course that was set long before you came into being, and it will end where it will end. You can do no more about any of it than the rock can do about its own situation.
You and the rock are one.
Think about it: you are both made of the same fundamental matter. Fermions and bosons, as philosopher Alex Rosenberg likes to say. The rock has a simpler structure, but the ingredients are the same. If one could shrink down to the subatomic level in a tiny ship, and travel through the vast empty distances between your atoms, they would not be able to tell exactly where the subatomic space that makes up “you” ends and that which makes up “rock” begins.
And those fermions and bosons, yours and the rock’s, are equally subject to the laws of nature and the incomprehensibly long and intricate string of dominoes that has been falling since the Big Bang.
What of free will, you ask? What about the fact that you have a mind and the rock doesn’t? How do I explain the fact that you can have thoughts which the rock cannot have, and you can act on those thoughts, and decide to move to Florida or go to college or buy new shoes–while the rock can’t?
Great! I’m glad you asked. Let’s hop behind the wheel of our subatomic ship and set a course for your brain. Well…the area of mostly-empty space that sort of makes up what the macro-world calls “the brain.”
Here we are, now, and it looks just like the area we just left. Where are the thoughts, you ask? Where are the feelings and intentions and memories?
Nowhere, is the only logical answer to give. Or, everywhere. You might as well travel to the edge of the Solar system, a few million miles past Pluto, and ask: where is the galaxy?
It’s all around. We’re in it. We’re a part of it.
It’s everywhere and nowhere in particular.
You’d find the same thing on the subatomic level of the brain, and at the subatomic level at the center of that rock rolling downhill. There is fundamentally no difference to the building blocks that make up either of you.
The difference emerges through complexity. What we call “life” emerges through complexity. What we call “consciousness” emerges through complexity.
My point is simply this: there is no hard dividing line between you and that rock, or you and the chair you are sitting on, or you and the person next to you. We are just differently-ordered, differently-complex arrangements of the same stuff, and I think that’s important to keep in mind.
You may think it means you’re not special. In a way, that’s true. But in another, more accurate way, you’re very special. Because you’re not separate from the universe, nor from time and space.
You are a part of it, and you are a part of its infinite nature. The billions of stars and planets that have formed and been devoured, and all those billions upon billions that have yet to be born and to be devoured.
The Vulcan Buddha 