You Made Me Ink
(or Determinism versus Free Will, very loosely)
It’d be impossible to summarize all the arguments for determinism or free will in an article short enough to catch the attention of squirrely internet readers. If this were an Augustinian confession, maybe I could permit myself to wax eloquently, citing references using MLA or APA, laying the footnotes on thick enough so that my argument is drowned out.
But I’m not going to do that.
(As another side note, am I the only one out there that reads academic papers that cite every article since Gutenberg and wonders whether or not there is anything actually originally in the research. I mean, of course there is such a thing as due diligence and not reinventing the wheel and such, but come on, folks. If you stitched together a patchwork of quotes and links in your fourth grade essay on the dangers of monosodium glutamate, your teacher would return said paper to you with purple all over it. Purple, my teacher friends tell me, is the new red. Friendlier ink, with all that same condemnation.)
Wow, that was a heck of an aside. Almost Shakespearian.
(Do you ever wonder why Shakespeare included so many monologues? Maybe actors at the Globe were unionized and if he only had to pay one actor to be on stage for x percentage of the play, he could save a few shillings. I mean, the guy skimped on pillow cushions for patrons, so why wouldn’t he? The Elizabethan equivalent of being paid by the word?)
Here I am nearing the middle point of a supposed essay on determinism and I haven’t even mentioned it any more than in passing. Was that intentional? Was that the universe guiding my fingers? I would like to think not, but how can I be sure?
See, the arguments for Determinism vs. Free Will are kind of slippery, like the whole Schrodinger’s Cat analogy in Quantum Mechanics. It’s sort of difficult to still be inside yourself and know how or if you are being manipulated.
But without an all knowing (omniscient being the fancy term) deity (since some people hate the word God) it would be difficult to determine whether the observed in this scenario is acting freely, or if the observer’s presence is having a deterministic influence on their actions.
Take that Neil Degrasse Tyson.
Okay, I love Dr. Tyson, but sometimes I wonder about his dismissive attitude toward philosophy. Sure, philosophy has come up with some doozies, and will continue to do so (anyone out there thinking logical positivism, or is that just me?) but so does science.
That’s how ideas move forward sometimes, right? In great big leaps. Before that whole Tower of Pisa gravity experiment who would have ever thought that a heavy and a light object would fall at the same rate?
Intuitively, it’s easy to rationalize that the heavier object would certainly fall faster.
Oops, I inked. But was that just a chemical reaction, the long plodding result of a series of random occurrences stretching back into infinity? Or did I just lose self-control? Does the word self-control have an actual meaning if it’s all just one big jumble of causalities?
