I remember sitting in science class about 10 years ago being taught that what goes up must come down. Yet now that I am older and ‘think outside the box’ a little more than I did then, I don’t want to believe that the statement is 100% true. In metaphoric terms I have spent so long climbing up my ladder that I refuse to fall back down. I will always endeavour to climb, perhaps sometimes I will climb horizontally still moving, BUT never down! Sometimes we don’t have a choice to falling, but we always have a choice whether to climb again. I will always choose to climb.
I’m sitting in my house right now writing this, wondering what I can do next. How I can challenge myself to reach the next level. I’ve done everything up to this point in my life that I set out to do, it’s just now I feel like I am floating, waiting for the next surge of life to hit. Maybe that’s how it’s meant to be at the moment. I should perhaps take this time to relax and prepare for the next stage. How do I do that? Can we ever prepare? There are theories of a pre-determined existence where we are all here fulfilling our destinies just the way they were always planned. So from this we should be able to prepare fully for the next stage of life for anything and everything that is yet to come. I don’t know how I feel about this line of thought.
I like to think that I have complete and utter freewill, but the thing with determinism is that we can never really find out if it exists or is just a philosophical theory. Is chance a factor, how will we ever know? You see if the world really is all pre-determined, then every move we make has been known since the beginning of existence itself. Whether we choose to have milk or juice before going to bed tonight, is already known. We the ‘individual’ will think that we are making a choice later but the answer has always been known. This is the problem, this is why we can never know if it is true or not. That’s the brilliance of always choosing this side of the argument as it’s an argument that can not easily be proven wrong or untrue.
Casual determinism can be described as the belief that every effect has a cause and so from this if one pursues (e.g. science,) determinism can explain all natural phenomena and therefore produces a theory of everything. For example in Physics, the four fundamental forces of nature (gravity, strong/weak nuclear force and electromagnetic force) under the theory would be unified and hence the goal of quantum gravity could be achieved. This idea of casual determinism came from a French Mathematician by the name of Marquis Pierre Simon de Laplace of the early 19th Century. A quote I like from Laplace;
"We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at any given moment knew all of the forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that compose it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit the data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom; for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes."
-Marquis Pierre Simon de Laplace
This theory can also be called the Laplace demon theory.
I learned about this in second year philosophy class. Chance, Coincidence and Chaos, I loved that class, it really got me thinking about the world and my place (or what I think my place) in it is. I learned to challenge my own thoughts in that class, and I suppose if there is any point to this blogg it is that I suppose I don’t really have to do anything to challenge myself as the world already does it for me. Either by chance or a pre-determined fate I am challenged everyday in all sorts of ways. It’s all down to how I think about life and choose to accept or not accept it and the things it throws at me.
So my opinion is that it doesn’t matter if life is pre-determined or not, freewill is a state of mind, I think I’ll go get that drink…orange or apple?