Determinism, Free Will and Paradox
January 17, 2015 at 11:54 am
(This post was last modified: January 17, 2015 at 12:02 pm by bennyboy.)
We've talked much about determinism in the context of free will. If all the universe is a product of mechanical certainty, then there is no free will, at least as we'd normally think about it. But it seems to me we've taken a good philosophical idea and trivialized it as a kind of parlor trick to pull out of a hat for online discussions, ignoring that under the hat sits a universe-sized dragon to think about.
If we accept that everything that exists is connected, at least by Gravity, and perhaps by being entangled in a Big Bang event as well, then what does this mean? It means that all events, past, present and future, inevitably lead to my existence, and yours, and etc., like a multidemensional tapestry woven of a single thread. If you were to pull at that thread at any point in that tapestry, the entire picture would be transformed, perhaps subtly, or perhaps not so subtly. But perhaps we can't do that, can we, because we ourselves would then flicker out of existence. So free will, it seems, must be false. Right?
It also means that time doesn't matter to causality. Not only does every past event in the universe arrive at my existence, so is every single future event an absolute necessity: every death, every birth, every thought we all have-- they are all mutually co-dependent. Every neuron fired, every sperm that was #2 in the race to fertilize an egg, every movement of every particle in the universe, is co-dependent on every event that ever happened or will happen.
It seems to me that determinism implies yin-yang, the paradoxical separation of an individual life into the polar opposities of infinite power and infinitesimal importance: power, because each act I commit affects everything in the universe; and unimportance because those very actions are strictly determined by the position, momentum, spin, etc. of every particle in the universe. Therefore, determinism, if true, makes each of us the Alpha and the Omega-- both the beginning of all causality and its end. Paradoxically, however, it is exactly determinism which best allows for a real free will. I can choose to eat a Mars Bar, or to rape an entire nation, or to type in an internet forum, or to sit next to a river for 20 years, and in the end it all "works out," because the paradox of determinism means that everything I do is exactly what I am meant to do in order to keep the Universe chugging along toward the Big Crunch (or whatever).
The mistake in discarding free-will is this: that it favors only one expression of the paradox of existence. It favors the absolute effect OF the universe ON one's behavior, but ignores the equally absolute effect ON the universe OF one's behavior. If determinism is true, then free will must ALSO be true. That they are mutually exclusive means little-- only that we are not capable of accepting the paradoxical nature of reality.
If we accept that everything that exists is connected, at least by Gravity, and perhaps by being entangled in a Big Bang event as well, then what does this mean? It means that all events, past, present and future, inevitably lead to my existence, and yours, and etc., like a multidemensional tapestry woven of a single thread. If you were to pull at that thread at any point in that tapestry, the entire picture would be transformed, perhaps subtly, or perhaps not so subtly. But perhaps we can't do that, can we, because we ourselves would then flicker out of existence. So free will, it seems, must be false. Right?
It also means that time doesn't matter to causality. Not only does every past event in the universe arrive at my existence, so is every single future event an absolute necessity: every death, every birth, every thought we all have-- they are all mutually co-dependent. Every neuron fired, every sperm that was #2 in the race to fertilize an egg, every movement of every particle in the universe, is co-dependent on every event that ever happened or will happen.
It seems to me that determinism implies yin-yang, the paradoxical separation of an individual life into the polar opposities of infinite power and infinitesimal importance: power, because each act I commit affects everything in the universe; and unimportance because those very actions are strictly determined by the position, momentum, spin, etc. of every particle in the universe. Therefore, determinism, if true, makes each of us the Alpha and the Omega-- both the beginning of all causality and its end. Paradoxically, however, it is exactly determinism which best allows for a real free will. I can choose to eat a Mars Bar, or to rape an entire nation, or to type in an internet forum, or to sit next to a river for 20 years, and in the end it all "works out," because the paradox of determinism means that everything I do is exactly what I am meant to do in order to keep the Universe chugging along toward the Big Crunch (or whatever).
The mistake in discarding free-will is this: that it favors only one expression of the paradox of existence. It favors the absolute effect OF the universe ON one's behavior, but ignores the equally absolute effect ON the universe OF one's behavior. If determinism is true, then free will must ALSO be true. That they are mutually exclusive means little-- only that we are not capable of accepting the paradoxical nature of reality.
