Grow Up

Did you pick what you ate today? What about yesterday? Did you consciously choose each item out of desire or did a lifetime of stimuli dictate the decision? Maybe it just happened?

If you watch a video presenting evidence of carcinogens in coffee, you may choose to skip your next morning brew. Unfortunately, that next morning goes terribly without your laser focus and pristine work ethic. You find yourself struggling to get any work done and go for a cup of coffee in the afternoon. You then finish the day, still caffeinated, and unable to fall asleep. Regretting ever listening to some overhyped conspiracy theory video, you go back to the daily routine of waking up and running for that morning coffee.

Out of your own “free will”, you made a decision to skip that morning coffee and get one in the afternoon instead. But that wasn’t the original plan. The goal was to skip the coffee altogether and save your body from all those carcinogens. However, you didn’t anticipate the hours of exhaustion and daydreaming.

Here’s something else to consider with “free will” in mind. We began as single celled organisms scattered around the globe. They were born out of some unlivable environment. They grew over a couple billion years with each cell struggling for survival and making as many copies of itself as possible. Now the Earth has me pounding away on my keyboard and you looking at a bunch of tiny flashing lights. Life began as a product of its environment and adapted as environments changed. We all started our journey at birth and now have years of experience influencing our decisions.

Examining “free will” is a way to begin thinking about how and why we make decisions. Accepting that the environment has a significant impact on everyone’s life, you may be able to focus in on what you should be doing and not what others should be doing. Perhaps you can work together and help others do what they should be doing as they help you. To be clear, I don’t find questioning the existence of free should change how we treat others.

  • If we don’t have free will then we can’t blame anyone or make them responsible for any bad choices that they make. Instead, as a society, we must have compassion and help those who make bad choices and guide them to a better path so we can all happily live together.
  • If we do have free will then we will continue to make decisions that assist us pursue happiness. We will use trial and error to traverse this world in search of satisfaction. We are in complete control of what we do and can often work together to achieve our goals.

These statements do not fully explore the implications of the existence of “free will”. However, I believe they’re a starting point and suggest that when making bad decisions, we need to reflect and change to correct ourselves. This is not some revolutionary idea as you can find variations of the same concept all across the internet. We should all strive to consistently grow alongside those around us.

I find working with everyone around me to accomplish amazing things to be one of the only ways to achieve satisfaction. Whether we have free will or not you can’t hate people for who they currently are, we all need each other. Limiting our pool of peers doesn’t allow us to grow in the long run. Although, anyone can be “dangerous” before we really get to know them. In the short run, someone may be bad and bring those around them down. In this case I see 2 obvious options:

  1. We can all choose who we keep around us. We don’t have to get along with everyone and have the choice to get away from them.
  2. If you focus on yourself, you can start moving forward and maybe they will choose to follow. Once your on your own path forward good habits are as hard to break as bad ones making it harder for people to push you around.

I find these idea very humbling when exploring them every now and then. No human has any foresight as an infant to assist them in planning out their life. I have a few friends born into volatile families that crumbled throughout their childhood. I often find myself caught up in my life that I lose sight of reality and begin acting as if everyone had the same past. When something upsets me I begin to question everyone’s actions, including my own, until I get extremely frustrated. Ruminating on “free will” or similar ideas brings me back to the idea that we are not the creators of our present success or failure. But we can be the creators of our future successes and failures. At this moment, I can try to blame a clueless individual for doing me wrong or we can try to grow up together.

The Implications of Our Lack of Free Will

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After writing my post, Do We Have Free Will?, I was left to wonder what that would mean for society as a whole, and what our world would look like from this new perspective.  Hence why I would like to dedicate this post to talking about the application of this theory.

The first application of this idea leads me to believe it should be theoretically possible to predict someone’s entire life.  I am not saying we are even close to having the capabilities to do so now, but maybe in the future, it will be possible. With the right materials and knowledge, I would bet anyone’s life could be predicted any minute before it happened.

Secondly, I think life would be a lot more peaceful if we found this to be absolutely true.  Most people, including myself, are initially sad when they first believe that we have no free will, yet as I thought through this, I realized it was not sad at all.  With no free will comes no responsibility, life just happens. If bad events occur in our lives, we would instead see them as merely something that happens, rather than happening to us.  Negative experiences would feel a lot less personal, which would alleviate us from any pain it could have caused.

A third application of this theory is that I am the universe, and more specifically, we are the universe.  I came to this conclusion by considering what makes us ourselves if we are not the ones doing so. As a recap, by stating that we have no free will, we are assuming that we are controlled by the nature and nurture that dictates every part of our personality and thoughts.  To go further with this line of thinking, one must consider what dictates nature and nurture, and this is where the universe comes in.  

The universe is everything from the room your sitting in, to the force that rotates our entire galaxy.  It dictates the process of natural selection that the human race goes through which developed an ingrained sense of selfishness and the desire to seek answers in such a mysterious world.  The universe makes us who we are today, and since we define ourselves by how we act and think, then it would make sense to consider ourselves as the universe.

I am not going to lie, I do not think humanity is ready for these realizations.  Our economy would crumble, laws would become optional, and personal motivation would cease to exist.  I think these things would happen initially and over time they may be restored in a new, brighter light, but I am not sure.  I’m not sure if society is ready for the transition, for a new take on how we see ourselves and others.

This is why my take away for the post is not to run around the streets naked because Jake said life does not matter.  I write about this to get you thinking. To start the process of seeing the world from a different light. Not to get rid of the old light you hold, but to instead hold both.  To compare the two and see the flaws in either one. I think humanity as a whole goes through most of life with tunnel vision on far too many subjects, so let us try to change that one thought at a time by considering the seemingly impossible option in an unbiased way.

Do We Have Free Will?

Do we have free will?  This question has been considered since Socrates took his first step.  I find this question to be so intriguing because in so few words such a complex question emerges.   A question with dozens of interpretations, yet only two possible answers.  

I should first clarify the angle I plan to answer this question.  When discussing free will, I am questioning if we are responsible for our actions, or if our actions are simply laid out for us.  This does not imply that there is a higher being or some type of destiny we are all given. I am instead questioning whether we rule ourselves or if we are ruled by ourselves.

As of now, there are two factors that define us as humans: nature and nurture.  Our internal characteristics, such as genetics, make up the “nature” part of who we are.  While on the other hand, the external things we experience, like our environment and upbringing, determine our nurture.  With centuries of debate on which portion is more influential, the one agreement everyone has come to is that the sum of those two parts result in who we are. 

In an effort to understand nature, one can think of genetics as a written code from within us.  This written code essentially shows the spectrum of what our personality and tendencies can become. To put it simply, our genes allow for personality traits to form more and less easily depending on what we experience throughout our life… yet it is also a bit more complicated because it also partially determines what we experience. Hence where the nurture fills in.

In this same reflexive way, nurture works similarly.  We are born and raised in an environment that we have no say over.  The parents who raised us, the house we lived, and the location we grew up, these are all part of our life that help determine who we are today. And as they influence us, they create us and then we in turn create them back. So, to summarize the process in a sentence: an experience, or nurture, allows for the gene, or nature, to make a trait that determines our actions that create a future experience that reinforces or alters the created trait. 

Interestingly, when we consider these truths in such a fashion, it seems to be a bit out of our control. And that is exactly what I would argue in this post. These are simply the cards we were dealt, and our genetics told us how to play them.

A common argument to this claim is that we make decisions all the time and those decisions can affect our environment.  For example, the college we choose to attend will largely affect the rest of our life. And because of this, one may argue that we do have a say in what environment we surround ourselves in.  

The problem with this argument is how we make decisions.  Decision making is based on logic and reasoning from our past events and knowledge we have received.  When faced with a decision, our subconscious memories of similar experiences create that gut feeling we get when weighing our options.  These subconscious memories sway us one way or the other, and largely determine our choice in the matter. With this understanding, we can conclude that our knowledge and logic is a sum of everything we have experienced and been told.  Which once again, we had no choice over.

As you have probably guessed at this point, I do not believe we have free will.  Both nature and nurture, the two things that create us, are not determined by us.  They are instead forced onto us and determine our every thought, which includes our decision making as well.  It is because of this that we can never break away from our predetermined selves. We are the people we were always going to become, and we do not rule ourselves but are instead ruled by ourselves.

To read more on this subjective I have written a post that quickly looks at the implications of this theory. Therefore, feel free to follow the link to my post The Implications of Our Lack of Free Will

** As wise as these words may be, I don’t totally know if they are true anymore. Funny how life works like that. Feel free to read the hyperlinked post which discusses an idea that logically eludes to us actually being able to take control of ourselves. **