asks; do we have free will?
asks; do we have free will?
Thank you to everyone who offered suggestions for what philosophical question I should tackle today. I chose this one because I feel it is incredibly important. The moment one invests any faith in the "we have no free will" argument, it becomes far easier to justify the shitty things they have done, are doing, or will do in future. No free will means you are not truly responsible for your actions - the universe is, and thus you've little need to make an active effort to be more than your environment shaped you to be.
That is why I believe this issue is of the utmost importance. But I was looking for a challenge, and the question "do we have free will" on it's own is perhaps not as difficult as I had hoped. So I have decided to make it more difficult by explaining free will within the parameters of a universe where fate also exists. This is because, based on what I have seen, many who believe in fate have a hard time believing in free will. If I can provide a plausible explanation as to how the both can coexist together, then I will consider this challenge a success.
I will be honest. I just wrote a shitload of words and then deleted them. My initial approach to this task was to bring the concept of fate under the umbrella of free will. By making fate a choice, and a pull of sorts that we can decide to ignore, then it is not difficult to entertain the possibility of free will.
However, I had to remove all the text because it just occurred to me that many people will look at fate as something that is fulfilled throughout every second of your life. If every single thought, decision, or occurrence in the world is fated, then my initial explanation would no doubt fall embarrassingly short of convincing anyone.
I suppose it is convenient then that I also just had somewhat of an epiphany. Now, I feel I have an explanation to this that is not only plausible, but likely. I have the wording of google's definition of fate to thank for this serendipitous realisation. While the definition itself was not anything I could not have written myself, the terminology used in the sentence really sparked something in my brain. The definition offered by google is as follows;
the development of events outside a person's control, regarded as predetermined by a supernatural power.
You and I are both people, so we should both know what a person is. We only need to ask, who am I? If we are honest with ourselves, we will then learn that "I" is simply a story that we have told ourselves to make sense of our position in light of our environment. It then is no surprise that the word "person" comes from the word "persona" which referred to a character in a play.
This is important because we can then learn that a person is fundamentally bound to the present. The person you are now will be different from the person you are after you read this post. Depending on how much what you read here effects you, you may not change much at all. But there will be a change, even if it is simply that you leave this post thinking I am dumb. That change still makes you a new person, because your story about yourself is now richer.
Now that we have established a person is bound to the present tense, let us now take a small look at time. If you can imagine for a moment that there is a supreme creator who made this entire world. From their perspective, do you believe that time would appear the way it does to us? Or would it be more akin to our perception of location? I have felt for some time that for the Creator, time is location based as opposed to a restricting linear force. I received a couple of comments last week that got me thinking seriously about time as a circle, and for the purposes of this explanation, I would ask you to do that too.
If we consider time as a circle, then we can accept that there is no beginning of end of time. If time is a circle, then everything that has happened in the past is in fact happening right now, just at a different point on the circle of time. Just as everything that will happen in what we describe as the future, is also currently transpiring on a different point in the circle. "Now" then refers only to what point on that circle one's conscious mind as at, and can be equated to "here" in a geographic sense.
If we look again at googles definition with these two understandings, we may observe a third;
the development of events outside a person's control, regarded as predetermined by a supernatural power.
I do not believe there is a word in the English language for what I am about to attempt to explain, so you will forgive me if it isn't the easiest thing to follow. But, if a person is a human's current story, as dictated by which ever part of time they are consciously existing in, then what would one call the sum of all persons one would be throughout their life time?
In other words, if we envision a human life as a circular ring, and if we can point at any part of that ring and know that at this point of time on the circle, this is a person, then what to do we call the entire ring? Contained within that circle is every single event and every single decision made within a human's life time, and though that human has had to experience time in a linear fashion, we should not assume that when the world was Created, the entirety of that ring was not already there.
If this is the case, and if time is simply something we experience here. then whatever I am going to do, has already been decided. But it's been decided by me. If time is a circle then right now, at a different point in time, I am dying, and being born. So fate, within this context, doesn't have to be a plan that someone else has for you. It could simply be the choices you have already made when observing your life free from the confines of time.
Fuck. This is truly a difficult one to articulate. Let me try again a different way.
By observing the world around us we can see that everything physical is subject to time. This is why rocks erode away, why compounds break down, and why living beings grow old and die. But if we are not purely physical beings, then we must wonder whether a part of us, perhaps the part known as the higher self, is not at all physical, and therefore not subject to time at all.
*Note: I just realised that the word "spirit" is in fact the word I was looking for earlier. The spirit is the part of us that isn't subject to time and therefore is experiencing life not second by second, but in it's entirety.
So if we consider then that fate is merely a physical future - there is no past, present, or future beyond the physical - then we can see that fate is simply the life we've already lived, are currently living, and will live in future.
Seriously my head has started to hurt so much trying to grasp how my spirit can be free from the burden of time, and I just want to go think about this for a while.
This didn't turn out exactly as planned, but I feel that in a few hours or days I will have something very interesting to share.
To wrap this up in a few seconds so I can fuck off for a think, I am implying that that the supernatural force spoken of in google's definition of fate - is us. It would then read somewhat like this.
fate is the development of events outside a person's control, regarded as predetermined by the same person's actions at a different point in time.
I shall have to apologise for just posting this messiness, but I have spent enough time on it that I ought to be earning from it, so I am going to post this now and follow this up with a refined and hopefully far more coherent version; though the subject matter may not be free will in the next, for I feel I have found a unifying theory of sorts, but I haven't yet figured out what the fuck I have unified. Anyway, we can call this one a failure in terms of explaining things, but it was exceptionally useful for me as a thought exercise, so thanks-