Determinism is Uncomfortable

Time for a little departure from the kind of content in my other posts. Or is it? The whole concept of determinism has been floating around in my head for some time, and my brain just had enough and decided I needed to purge all this out into writing. 

A lot of people don’t buy into determinism, and that’s fine. This isn’t a concrete “This is what I believe and everything else is wrong” post. You’ll almost never see content like that from me. It’s philosophy, and none of it is hard science. It’s just the whole concept of determinism is so mind blowing if you follow it all the way down.  

Determinism makes people uncomfortable for a lot of reasons, I think. We want to believe in free will. That we are all the makers of our own fate. Determinism suggests to some people that we are puppets. I don’t see it that way at all. I do want to take a moment to say that I am not talking about Theological Determinism. That assumes an all-powerful God is at the root of everything. My understanding is a bit more on the causal side.  

On a broad sense, determinism is the idea that every event and action is the result of preceding events and pulls in the concept of universal connection. 

 

If you want to get the big picture with this, the idea is not to look at how the greater world at large affects you. You start small. You’re reading this right now. What led you this? Did you see my Twitter post? What led you to that? At what moment in time did you decide to take out your phone or open your browser and see it? Why did you decide then? Were you tired? Maybe waiting on an appointment?  

...And then you keep going. Apply it to why you choose your bedtime (or not), or why you chose to eat what you had for breakfast.  

...And keep going. Think for a moment about how we are the product of our upbringing. So much about you today, is because of the smallest bits and pieces of your past. The things people taught you, the things you saw, etc. This is where a lot of people become uncomfortable. It involves looking back and tracing back all the way. All the way to where? The beginning of time, presumably.  

Let’s step back for a moment and approach this from a less personal place. 

A leaf smacks you in the face while you’re taking a walk one evening. It causes you to stop and look down at it in your hands. Where did that leaf come from? It’s the tree on the corner. That leaf was healthy and firmly attached to that tree a few moments ago. But it was knocked loose by a squirrel who was fleeing a car speeding down the road. The person in the car is in a hurry because they’re late to an appointment. They’re late because they laid in bed too long reading a blog. They laid in bed longer to read that post because they were groggy. They were groggy because they were up late to complete a project for a deadline. The deadline came from their boss. Ergo, that stranger’s boss is the reason that leaf hit you in the face. And it keeps going down the line. You don’t stop with the boss. Everything going backward came from a previous action.  

It kind of spiderwebs out because causality isn’t linear. There are multitudes of things going on around us every day that affect us.  Just now, someone dropped a pan in our kitchen which startled me and caused me to make a typo. There was a whole line of events that led up to that other person dropping the pan. It’s almost unfathomable, but hard to ignore once you get rolling on it. 

 

You could say “That’s too broad! It’s like saying I’m sitting here right now because my grandma twisted her ankle 30 years before my birth!” Well it’s possible.  

I could go on about this at length, but this is pretty far off base from what I usually write about. I might come back to this again at another date.