Will Freely

The entire debate about free will seems to rest on shaky ground. It is possibly one of the most ill-defined concepts of the modern age, and branches into almost every scientific faculty thinkable (physics, biology, neuroscience, statistics) but let's go about some philosophy bashing first. My argument is with myself, as I've found reasons to believe that free will is existent, and reasons for why it isn't plausible at all. Let me share them with you.

To say you choose not to choose is contradictory.

Is it theoretically viable to consider ourselves in a world that is both deterministic and chaotic?
See, Chaos Theory actually doesn't defend the concept of free will in the slightest. Even though chaotic systems are unpredictable, their behaviour is considered deterministic in that despite their movements being far too complex to be calculable, they still are determinable.

Perhaps free will is illusory. To believe in free will means to imply that my thought processes act outside of my environment, i.e. not a reaction to stimuli. But the truth is, I can only react. If the universe is deterministic, it means that everything we have done or will do stems from long lines of causation that extend beyond a single individual, from before we can even be born.

In order for free will to exist, we’d have to get rid of both determinism and indeterminism, which by then we would have nothing left. The rules of chance say that an event could happen or it could not happen. There is no in between. There is a Latin term that describes people who exist outside the rules of all we know: 'causa sui', it means 'creators of their own cause'. None of them exist.

What's a scientific discussion without some God thrown in, eh?
Theists believe that God awards them free will. Yet they also believe that God knows the future. They demonstrate free will cannot exist simply by believing it does. If God fails to know the future, He'd lose his godlike nature. Free will's existence would contradict the very idea of an all knowing 'God'.

 Does this mean that life is meaningless? Not at all. It means that although I don’t have any choice in the matter, I am able to experience life, beauty, variety, a slice of unpredictability and love - which makes life worth living.

But maybe we can live in a deterministic world and still have something that resembles free will...

Perhaps the notion of free will is truly subjective and depends on from where in spacetime you look at the bigger picture. If we accept that the universe operates in either a deterministic or indeterministic way, we essentially understand that this means the future (in principle) is fixed. But this future is only knowable from the outside, if the past can be evaluated simultaneously with the present. From where we are - imbedded within spacetime - we cannot know the future. The future always appears unpredictable from our stance, and this is what creates the illusion of an open future. Of free will.


We are slaves to the butterfly effect.

Human and Haunting

This holiday, I read a non-fiction book titled ‘Children of the Holocaust’ by Helen Epstein. It details the unexplored plight of the first generation born of Holocaust survivors. It is an interesting perspective to consider – what were the effects on their children? What must it feel like to know that your parents were part of some atrocious act that is the subject of so many history books?

Reading accounts from this generation has enabled me to better understand the human psyche. Each one of those children could relate to the need to do something about the holes in their lives that were a result of having lost a part of their parents to a war they could not fathom.

In some sense, I feel as if I am a part of this clique. We all are children of survivors. I’ve grown up hearing my parents’ somewhat morbid stories of their childhood, everything that determined who they became. My father would always conclude these stories by telling us that his children are now his life, and he’d never want for us to go through the things he has. As would any parent.

But this left me with more questions than answers, more uneasiness about how I wanted my life to develop. Does it disappoint my father when I take food for granted after having heard his experiences of not having had food for days? Of course it does. But I feel as if I’d lost the carelessness generally awarded with childhood. I sometimes feel as if my life is the replacement of my father’s misplaced one, and that I must take advantage of every moment to be happy, in his stead. This is burdensome.

The effort is like trying to graft a foreign branch to a native tree. The graft would not take. Sometimes I need to be sad.

My life is little less than a cosmic blip on the universe’s radar, fading before it can even be seen. This life of mine is so tiny in the greater scheme of things; but I still would like the chance to live it as I see fit, instead of living within the boundaries that are forced upon me. Do I consider the expectations of others, or do I disregard them in the name of individuality? Is the real me lost between the yellowed pages of my parents’ past?

The truth is that we have only one lifetime to live, and we cannot spend it searching through the past for ourselves, because we’re not there. We’re here. My parents were different people before I came to be, and I’ve come to respect that. In the same manner, they ought to respect that my lifetime is mine. I need to make my own mistakes.

I do not want to live just because I happen to be alive. Routine bothers me. I want to be alive so that I may live.

It’s just, no one gives me time. Time to discover who I am right now so that I have an idea of who I want to someday be.

When I Arrive, I Bring The Fire

‘There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace – those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move toward death.’
                                                                                                             (Excerpt from 'Dune')

I have done some light reading on the Greek philosophers of old, and their perceptions about the nature of the world, how it fits together, and why it works the way it does. Here are a few of them that still resonate in my head:

Empedocles believed that there were only two forces in the world – Love and Strife. Love brought things together, whilst strife pulled them apart. He claimed that this explained how things could change and yet the world could stay the same.

Thales said the world floats like a log on endless water, and that all things are full of gods. But when people think of things that are full of gods, they always think about death, and sunsets, and the Niagara Falls; never of doorknobs.

Parmenides was conflicted about reality not being real. He made the beautiful observation of noting that reality could only be understood by thought – which is a disastrous notion in itself. The rational mind is a terrible tool for the job, as it only seeks logic. It searches for justice, and never considers that there may be none. It has this notion, which it clings to, that the truth would save us, though it is quite obvious that precisely the opposite is often true.

Heraclitus was bothered by the fact that everything changes. This perpetual change in the world happens whether or not we notice it. He concluded that since fire changes everything it touches, fire is to blame. Everywhere we look, the world is on fire, burning invisibly, changing before our very eyes.

What senses do we lack that we cannot see or hear another world around us? How do we know we know what we think we know? And if we find that after all we don’t know what it is that we once thought we knew, how do we know we are who we think we are, or thought we were yesterday? You follow?
The thing about being alive is that we have a false sense of control. The world works, whether or not we are an active part of it.

Newton’s Third Law states that for every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction. I’ve taken this out of the mechanical physics context and applied it to what we know as karma. Let me clear something up: It does not work in the future tense. It works pretty much as Newton summed it up – everything you do to me is already being done to you.

I Want To Breathe

I want to breathe as I want to write.
I need to write as I need to feel.
I must feel as I must live.

I hope things are beautiful. And when they're not, I hope to remember this moment in which they are. Someone you haven't even met yet is wondering what it'd be like to know someone like you. Can you understand? For all my despair, for all my dejection - my life is still a myriad of colours that I cannot comprehend. As soon as you think you are done, you are. So keep learning. Never be done.


What does it cost me to share my life with you?
What do I lose by giving you all that is me? You may have my name, share my knowledge, bask in my humanness. This will seem precious for all of three seconds, but then what will you do with it? What will you die protecting?

We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things, we have given someone something. That, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul by taking a picture, we identify our secrets, our pasts and their blotches with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes one less of oneself.

But it's just the opposite. More is more is more - more bleeding, more giving.
When you find someone with whom you feel you can share your words with, you stop in shock at all that you are - it all feels rusty, feeble, everything you are seems meaningless from having been cramped in the small, dark recesses of selfdom for so long.

"Life has been some combination of fairy tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning."  ~ Sylvia Plath

Who you want to be is not nearly as important as who you are right now.
I see skies that aren't there, and I read words that were never written. To have a mind that is so beautiful and full, it is annihilating. I need to breathe so that I may share myself with you. All of this so that you may have a part of me in you, and I will never die.

Paint

People make me angry.
So incredibly angry.
I am a temperamental being, and am easily frustrated or irritated. But anger is new.

It gets to a point where my internal rage is at risk of exploding.
But I am very rarely outwardly angry. You've not experienced my anger.
It would hurt people, I know this much. So what do I do? I keep pushing it further down, searching for more crevices in the deep, dank recesses of my mind. Thus far, it's been an effective shock absorber. That is correct; I absorb the aftermath stemming from tumultuous earthquakes, violent eruptions from the blood lava that brings me to life. Each day, I find myself ebbing in and out, bleeding into myself.
It scares me to think that someday, someone might see all that is raw within me. The putrid stains left on the wallpaper of my brain, the ugly remnants of my own insanity having feasted upon me. It makes me cry, because of what my anger is insidiously doing to me. I cry because I keep myself alive so that I may destroy.

The Hierarchy

There is an unspoken hierarchy of readers. It is determined by the way in which they tackle a book.

At the top of this imagined pyramid are the purists – people who read to soak up the elegantly constructed literary style and savour brilliant metaphors, inventive characters, breath-taking imagery, and sparkling dialogue. These are people who appreciate words, in themselves. The story is beside the point. In fact, many of them believe the plot is a mere distraction from the art. They see the wood beyond the trees, as it were. I dare count myself among them.

Not far behind are the academics – readers whose infatuation stems from the classroom, perhaps the first novel they were made to analyse and never got over it. They’re often underlining or highlighting, turning down pages, looking up words they’re not familiar with, and scribbling pithy comments in the margins. These readers are those that appreciate by thorough dissection and analysis.

The book worshippers are next. They ensure all their books are covered, preach about bookmarks, and absolutely NEVER let a book touch the floor. They look at the book as a sentient being, a living, breathing object of desire that must be treated with utmost respect. They make a point to read every word, every footnote, every single detail.

And then there are the readers who just want a good old-fashioned story and make no qualms about it. They skip over long descriptive paragraphs, skim through digressions, and zero in on the who-what-where to the nth degree. A subcategory of this is people who read books for sex, violence, or any other particular proclivity, and speed-read passages that don’t interest them or don’t stick to the canon.

How about them multitask readers, hmm? Those who read while cooking, cleaning, talking on the phone, or driving. Which is stupid. These people often boast about their vast collection of e-Books. THOSE ARE NOT REAL BOOKS FFS. Nothing can compare to the sensual feelings paper between your fingers can evoke.

The bottom feeders come next and include the status readers, a group of wannabes who don’t really want to read the book at all, but want to be seen with it – like arm candy, the proverbial young blonde on the arm of a famed tycoon. They skim the book for plot and carry it around like a designer bag. For shame.
Even worse are the people who listen to audio books, the new version of condensed books, or read novelisations of current movies. These people consider themselves readers, but they’re not. They’re just hopping onto any old bandwagon in the hopes of being included in conversations. Know this now; I will not endure you. I ought to group the narcoleptics in this category of non-readers. People who’ve had the same books sitting on their bedside table for months, and also the bathroom readers; you know, the ones with magazine racks near the toilet that hold dog-eared collections of outdated YOU magazines. You disgust me.

But let’s not forget the hopeless unfinishers – people who like choosing books, buying books, starting books, but the only thing they can’t seem to do is finish the book. They continually deceive themselves, thinking this is the one book they are going to read all the way through, and I do think they are well-intentioned, but like diets and New Year’s resolutions, the will to persevere usually fades. Alas.

However, in my opinion, the most frustrating category is the people who read a book, and JUST DON’T GET IT. I hate when I have to point out a most obvious lack of comprehension to one of these.

There are hundreds more subcategories. I might delve into those in my next rant.

You're Stupid

Interacting with people is a difficult process if you're nothing like them.
This is because most people are stupid.

Typical conversational question: "How do you come up with such cool ideas? Please tell me so I can be as cool as you." Now I don't know how to answer this enquiry without insulting the person. I don't want to say, "I'm sorry to report that if your brain does not create ideas, you are dead." And I can't say, "Everyone gets ideas. If you're getting bad ideas, it's probably because your brain is defective." My most likely reply would be, "I'm far too busy to be bothered with your ludicrous and insignificant question. But thank you for asking." The truth is, there's just no graceful way out.

In fact, from now on, I'm going to charge anybody who gives me their opinion. People are idiots. If I have to listen to their opinions, I deserve compensation.

Now let's consider why people are stupid:

1. Stupidity doesn't hinder reproduction.

Humans are a rapidly growing element of Earth's ecosystem. There are more and more of us all the time. As species go, we are incredibly successful. But stupid people have been around since the beginning, right? There always has been stupid people, and there's no dearth of them now. We like to allude our evolutionary success to the fact that we are able to survive longer than our caveman predecessors, hence the increase in populace. If that were so, then cockroaches rule the world - they have the numbers, and they're not stupid enough to believe that it's because of the size of their brains.

Stupid people breed. Exponentially. Stupidity actually enables the growth of the population quite a bit. Think about people who get married, have kids, and say - "Now why did I do that? Oh yeah, I was stupid." Not thinking clearly is very helpful in making the whole mystery of chemical attraction seem worth pursuing. The bonding process, which is essential for human survival, doesn't give a damn about what we think of as smartness, it cares about irrationality and chemicals, both of which it highly values. None of us would put up with each other for a moment if it weren't for the saving graces of stupidity and bonding.

2. Nothing shocks us anymore.

Many times I see people doing something stupid, and I'll proclaim to myself as such. That emotional jolt I experience is my brain's way of reminding me to never be as stupid as the person I just saw. This is my body mapping out what I should and shouldn't do, and making it stick by attaching it to some emotion (usually disgust, because people are disgusting). In modern times, however, it has become socially acceptable to do stupid things. Think of something like Jackass that commends stupidity. People witness such idiocy with reverence. They're way past the point of being disgusted because their brain no longer recognises the difference between stupidity and humanness. They never will experience the profound visceral stupidity reaction that heralds intelligence. Sigh.

3. People are sheep.

And I don't mean they taste good. Okay, maybe they do.
What I was referring to was the inability of Other People to make informed decisions for themselves, mainly because they lack the desire to actually attain information. Instead, they are led almost willingly by others.

Technology magnifies the ability of one person to have a big impact on other people. Sadly, these positions of power are held by the people who are equally as stupid - but have a larger ego. This explains why stupidity is immune to education - all the educated ones are holed up together, getting infinitely more intelligent (refer to previous blog post), while the rest of humanity tends towards the other extreme.

I assure you, the limit does not exist.

In fact, it is my belief that scientists will eventually learn how to convert stupidity into clean fuel. It is truly the only unlimited source of energy.