Determinism Is Stupid

We don't have many things, but free will is one of the things inherent to our being.

You are not free.

That’s what some people believe.

This is called Determinism. It stems from the fact that everything has a physical cause. The ball bounces up because you threw it down. The car crashed because it has a certain velocity. Your thoughts occurred because of a mix of chemical and electrical signals.

This train of thought sucks.

If we continue this far enough, we arrive at the fact that since the moment of the big bang everything was determined. All the planets that formed, all the feelings you have, all the thoughts you will ever think.

Are you mad? That was inevitable.

When I realized that Determinism was real and you couldn’t escape it I became depressed. I cried in the shower. I had this deep pain inside of me all the time. Life felt pointless.

Fun stuff.

Do you ever feel hopeless? Maybe nothing so dramatic. But do you feel like you can’t change your life? As if you don’t have any agency in your life? Do you feel like a leaf blowing in the wind?

No more.

There are so many systems that work against our best interest, on top of that we are gonna give up our agency? No. I write this post to inform you that in the deepest levels of reality you are the cause of things, not only the effect. I don’t mean you can create anything into existence but that humans have agency.

We have a surprising amount of free will.

You chose the same each time because it’s the best for you

Free will is funny.

Given the same conditions, you will choose the same thing every time.

Not because you aren’t free or everything is determined.
It’s because you always choose what's best for you.

If you had to choose 100 times between ice cream and someone punching you in the face… you will choose ice cream every single time.

You choose ice cream because it’s the best decision (according to your worldview), not because everything is determined.

You do choose.

It might look like you don't have free will. But the key is that you are making the choice each time. It's the same choice but it is a choice. It's not an involuntary reflex.

You chose each time, and ice cream was the best choice.

I did choose but the choice was not my own

You might say you are not free in the sense that you couldn’t help but think that ice cream was the best choice. You would be correct.

You didn't choose your DNA.

You didn’t choose when and where you were born. You didn’t choose the beliefs you learned as a child. I'll give you that, but it depends on how you count you as ‘you’. You invariably choose things that are compatible with your worldview. If you had a different worldview you would act differently. Duh.

That doesn't make it any less free will-y.

If the sun stopped being a sun and became a planet it would behave differently. Obviously.

If you change the nature of the thing it will change its actions. Free will doesn’t mean acting completely uninfluenced from everything. Free will is acting in accordance with the nature of your being. Thought in this way, we can never not exercise our free will.

We will choose the same thing every time if the conditions are identical. That’s just us being us. If we were another person, with different DNA and another name, we would think differently and choose accordingly.

Because I am who I am, I cannot choose something that is not in my nature. However, if my current nature allows, I can choose a different nature. But I can only ever choose and act in accordance with the nature I have at that moment.

From the outside, it might look like you are a machine.

Given the same input, you give the same output. The key distinction is that you don’t arrive at the output by mere interaction of inert processes. You arrive at the decision using your awareness and metacognition, capabilities only beings with free will possess.

A little side note:

As a caveat, for this thought experiment to work, the conditions have to be exactly the same each time.

If we know we’ve made the same choice 99 times we might choose differently just to see what happens. We are funny that way.

Knowing that we've made the same choice countless times, will change the decision we make because the conditions are not the same. For it to be the exact same conditions we would need to not know we had made the choice before.

Free will doesn’t end in your body

And in a way, we might be thinking too small.

What if you are your environment? And not only your corporeal being?

If your environment influences you then you are as much your environment as you are your body. This arbitrary decision to end the self in the body can have unintended consequences.

If you are your environment, every choice is always yours.

It's myopic to think of yourself as an individual that ends with your body. If you are also your environment, the whole free will debate becomes obsolete. It is simply a matter of perception and categorization. If the origin of your choice is not only internal but involves your environment, then you’re always acting on free will.

In a way, the Universe + yourself is the mixture needed for free will. Beautiful.

That you’re influenced by external things is a moot point. That is a feature, not a bug of free will.

Manipulation is not free will

Free will has 2 parts: the external (environment) and internal (awareness and metacognition).

Free will is the intersection of the things that condition me (my environment) and my awareness and metacognition (my ability to reason, analyze, feel, think, etc).

We can use our internal part to change our external part (to an extent). But it’s not free will if my internal part is compromised.

•If I hit my head and lose my ability to reason, I can no longer say I have free will.
•If I abused a substance and can no longer exercise metacognition, I have lost my free will.
•If someone manipulates me and compromises my internal part, I don’t have free will as long as the manipulation persists.

But all this talk of free will is irrelevant if it doesn’t help us achieve a good life.

You don’t want to be free, you want a good life

What truly concerns us when we talk about free will and determinism is the matter of the good life.

We don’t want to be told we are destined for a life of great suffering. We don’t want to believe that if things go bad in our life we cannot change them, that it had to happen this way.

People don’t like determinism because the thought that we cannot do anything to change our fate is almost unbearable.

But what if I said:

You are destined for a great life.
There will be some ups, some downs, but it is impossible to screw up. You can't, no matter how hard you try. You are destined for a great life, nothing you can do about it.

Then screw free will right? Determinism sounds amazing!

Let’s get practical with this knowledge

Why am I telling you all this? Why is this relevant?

It might feel like intellectual masturbation. I agree. But only if we don’t use this knowledge to affect our life. The effects should be real and tangible.

I was in junior high school when I realized everything was determined. I didn’t know it was called determinism at the time. I tried to refute it from every angle. I couldn’t.

I got depressed.

I felt like a zombie. You feel sad? Yep, it was inevitable that you felt this way. Got in a fight with your friends? Inevitable. Can you change how you are feeling? Ha! you have no agency over that. It felt horrible.

Determinism brings with it so much hopelessness. It’s self-reinforcing. It royally sucks.

I eventually found a way out of determinism through quantum mechanics and I slowly returned to the normal emotional spectrum. We don’t have absolute freedom. We can’t choose something we don’t know exists. But we are not determined, we are not machines.

We have degrees of freedom.

The more awareness and metacognition we have, the freer we can be. Some people are closer to automatons, they barely exhibit having free will. They are slaves to their beliefs. But some people exhibit a lot of free will.

The more metacognition, the freer you are.

I’ve talked about all these concepts in this article to tell you that you have free will. You have agency. You can change your life for the better. And no.

THIS IS NOT A SELF HELP POST.

You can’t do anything. You are limited in the things you can decide. But there is choice within that spectrum. And you can make that spectrum bigger.

Your choices are your own, even though of course they are influenced by your environment.

I used to think we humans were little cogs in the engine of the Universe. That our actions were as mechanical as the flow of planets. But that’s wrong.

We are the mover unmoved.
We are the prime mover.
We are akin to mini gods.

We can be the originators, not only the consequences of physical forces. We are mini gods because we are the origin of so many things at the same time that we are influenced by all those other many things.

Free will comes in degrees. You can aspire to be freer. You can exercise your will unto the world.

Make sure you use it to increase beauty, goodness, and truth.

Have a wondrous day.