23 outubro, 2011

Breaking patterns

I've been thinking quite a bit about the issue of 'free will' lately. I recall this Google search on the subject I did a few months back. I didn't save the link I shall refer to along this post. But I was really surprised about my ignorance on the subject. Since most people I've talked about this with seemed to have a similar grasp of free will as me, I suppose this ignorance is shared by the most of us.

One of the first things the article brought up was the fact that in a major way, 'free will' is a matter of semantics. One first needs to understand what it actually means. I feel like I still do not, so I won't go there. I'll just bring up the obvious, which we paradoxically seem to be all aware of and yet ignorant about. What is it really which we can choose?

Nothing. Or so close to nothing that nothing is indeed the best discrete approximation to the nearest "somethingness" multiple of "Planck's constant". The fact of the matter is that what we have control over is so negligible that it's hard to feel like it's actually worth anything. And yet we strive to. We live our lives as if it were. Even those who "choose" to die by committing suicide, whatever is the meaning of that choice, seem to be intentionally pursuing something looking for a certain outcome. Why?

I'm not sure 'why' is really a pertinent question here. So I'll ignore it for a while and move on with what is it that we can choose. Yes. We can choose who we talk to. However we cannot choose them to talk back. We can choose what we say. But we cannot choose how they will react to that. And that's still at such a minute local scale! I won't even bother mention how little control we have over what happens in Andromeda Galaxy. So there.

In the end, if you look close enough, you're just an observer. A defective self-aware arm-robot in an assembly line. Being self-aware is actually part of the defect. You look around and the other robots seem to be working fine. They're doing just what they're supposed to, keeping the line moving forward, putting together whatever it is that they're supposed to put together and passing it on.

If one looks closer there might be more to it. But that's as far as I can see right now. Now please just hand me over those two pieces and tell me how to put them together and pass them on, will you?

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