I've been contemplating the notion of free will for a couple of years now, having read Sam Harris's book on the subject, and I've come to the conclusion that we have no free will at all. Not only do we have no free will, but everything that's happened in history could only have happened the way it did. Which means, if you follow the logic, that the future - the further future's past - can only happen the way it will, and must therefore be "written", as in preordained. There can be no other logical escape from this fact.
That doesn't mean it's predicable, of course. It just means that everything, including these words and your thoughts, are inevitable.
I've been explaining this reality to a number of people in recent months, many of whom simply don't get it. We have agency, after all, or so it seems. You, reader, can choose to stop reading, right? You can choose to re-read the last sentence, or come back to this tomorrow. But the point is that it's a subjective experience, and not something that's bound by anything but objective laws of the universe. You are, after all, bound by the physical laws, and so is your brain, body, bloodstream and hormones.
But this article, posted in The Guardian a couple of weeks ago, says it best. I don't think I can explain it any better than this.
The implications are profound. If the future is preordained, then these very words must be. How you react to these words must be. It's mind boggling.
But the truth is that so many things in reality are mind boggling. Exponential growth is a simple example. Double a singe cent on the first of January, so it's two cents on the second, four cents on the third, eight cents on the fourth, sixteen cents on the fifth, and thirty two cents on the sixth of January, and on the first of February you end up with $21,474,836.28. How absurd is that? But it's true. Get yourself a calculator or a pen and paper and work it out.
You want to trace back your ancestors, to see how far back they go? I did it recently, using the online ancestry sites. I got back to my great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandmother, who was born in the 1400s. Isn't that amazing? But here's the thing: she had a great, great, great, great, great...grandmother, too. Who was still my ancestor. And she had the same. In fact, if you were to go back further, you'd get back to stone age people.
But that's just it. I'm not "descended from stone age people", because those very stone age people - my ancestors - were descended from people even further back. And they were descended from people - or some kind of sub human - even further back, still.
In fact, if you were to trace your ancestors - or my ancestors - back even further, you'd go back to primordial lifeforms. Go back further still, and you'd find your ancestors were amino acids. Further still, and they'd be basic, non organic chemicals.
Did they have free will? Of course they didn't. And yet we've evolved from them, over billions of years.
There can be no other explanation.
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