Life and Decisions
Do we have a free will, or what else makes us do what we do?
Several hints have appeared during recent days about an old thought: when we choose our path forward, do we then have some equally choosable options, or are we somehow restricted?
In order words: do we have a truly free will?
One of the hints appeared in a post on Substack Notes:
Now, this was building the platform but led to a reader responding like this:
And that is in itself an interesting way of thinking: that the components of a bridge might have a will that makes them stick together as a bridge. An old philosophy of everything in nature having some kind of soul.
Little children tend to believe in this: when they have tried to navigate a set of knife and fork, tying their shoelaces, or whatever they are learning to use at the moment but still do not master, they may at some point throw it along the floor while shouting “stupid fork!” or “stupid shoes!”
Computer users also do the same thing, no matter the age, when suddenly the computer opens a popup while they are in the middle of writing some brilliant thinking, leading to the cursor and the keyed-in being everywhere else than where it was supposed to be. A “stupid computer!” has been heard more than once in such situations, or, in my personal case, “damn Microsoft!”, because I am fully aware that it is in fact Microsoft who have done this to me, knowing how annoying I would find it.1
We want to impersonate things. Somehow, it is natural for people to do that, and we then teach children that things do not have a will, it is not the thing that behaves badly. Rather, it is the one using the thing who just uses it in the wrong way. Training, patience, and careful attention to what you are doing will then bring you much further than throwing things on the floor while shouting at them.
But then again, what if… Spiritism exists for a reason. As we do not always see the full scope of connections between all that is happening in a highly interconnected world, we then try to look at just a fraction of the world. This is also what science is doing: isolating the sub-system that will have a closed circle of causes and effects. Only, nature isn’t a divisible system — it is really all connected.
“When a butterfly moves its wings on the other side of Earth, it may lead to a storm here later”, a popular saying goes. I think that some scientists have countered that claim, but systems thinking, as this is part of, does have a value in everything we do. Everything really is connected.
So, when you see a pattern in nature, and it reminds you of intelligence, maybe even relatable to a person who is no longer physically among us but whom you remember — then it is easy to wonder if that person is somehow represented by the thing.
Or you may consider the thing to have its own soul in itself or living in it, such as when the Icelandic people hear a rumbling in the mountain, they may think that a troll lives there, or when a branch of a tree seemingly decides to break off right in front of you — not yesterday or tomorrow, but right at the moment when you pass it.
Of course, not all such stories about things having a soul or a spirit within are actually meant to be taken seriously. Sometimes, I’m sure, people have told such stories for the purpose of entertaining each other.
Fairy tales got dragons and magic, not necessarily because the storyteller believed in that, but rather because it made an interesting story. It made the children who were listening to it, wonder about all the amazing things there could exist in this world, even if they knew that these particular wondrous things were just a story. Just made up.
Sagas and other stories about gods ruling the world may have had similar backgrounds, even though we today like to believe that the ancient Vikings believed in Oden and Tor, and and the ancient Greeks believed in all the famous 12 gods of the Olympus.
But now to the free will. When we see things in nature, seemingly lying planless around, such as the universe accidentally spread them and stacked them, whatever is the situation, through millions of years, we can easily feel that nature is a wild and hostile place — no help at all. But then we get an idea: what if we rearrange things a bit, then we’ll have a house, or a bridge, or whatever our imagination can lead us to thinking.
Where exactly is that imagination coming from?
I wrote, as a reply to the above-mentioned reply on Notes, in two steps — a reply, and then a reply to my reply:
My point is that whenever we are to make a choice, whenever we try to see which options we have — then there aren’t an endless amount of opportunities. The opportunities may be many, but what we see in front of us does have dome kind of order, even when it looks chaotic. That order matches something in our minds, like the pattern I mentioned, which then even may remind us of a person we knew. Or make us think about the stories about trolls and dragons we once heard.
Whatever we experienced previously, will have an influence on what we see now. And whatever anybody ever told us, would be influenced what they had seen. So, what someone once saw will affect what we now see as a potential order from chaos - our imagination, our creativity.
In an article by
, some clever thoughts are introduced about how we see things — how we treat the options we have in life. Giving up something isn’t necessarily the same as failing or losing, it can be the exact opposite, since it leads to new possibilities. Davor gives an example with his daughter’s dilemma: should she continue spending four hours a week studying guitar playing, which she dislikes, or should she give that up and do some of the things she likes more? He uses this example to illustrate what I mention just before, that giving up something can actually be equal to winning from the new opportunities it leads to.
But it made me consider some aspects of choosing in a comment (text copied here, as the Substack editor doesn’t want to embed it):
Very clever words! I agree all the way but would like to add two things:
1. Your 8-year-old daughter may find a third way: rather than continuing or giving up, she could aim for a plan that will bring her to a new phase in her guitar studies. Let's say that 1/2 year like now would bring her to a level that allows for cutting down the lessons to two times half hour per week, which will still be useful and bring her forward at that time, with the skills she has achieved by then. It will, with some efforts now, allow her to spend more time a bit later on other things that she likes. This is just an example of the thinking, you and she can probably better evaluate what will work and what not. But it is not just about continuing or quitting, it is about choosing the path, also for a while ahead.
2. Both your daughter and everybody else will get advice from the surroundings, and will be guided very much by that. Sometimes seeking this herself, other times not. There will also be demands and decisions that arise from lack of knowledge, etc., so there is not necessarily a free choice to go the winning or the loosing way, as it will be perceived, there will be bigger challenges choosing one way than another. We do not have a 100% free will. We cannot just do what we want. And we are not personally responsible for everything we end up doing. A lot of it is to follow orders or fit in to a pattern that has been defined by others.
What I am basically saying here, is that 1) we can only choose the solution to any dilemma that we can see, but there may be others, and 2) the universe does limit us, and so does everything in it. So even if we can see a third or a fourth option, it may not be possible at all, or it may simply be unreasonably complicated, or it may be considered dangerous, stupid, or whatever to go with one or more of the options, which leads us to choosing something else.
We get advice. We act upon our knowledge. And we try to do what looks reasonable, but we can almost never just pick and choose from all thinkable options. We are restricted by our surroundings, and guided or misguided by whatever people around us or even what the nature or the universe somehow seems to see as the right solution.
So back to the bridge that maybe built itself: when someone 900 years ago decided to build that bridge out of those stones, in that spot, with that shape, it was probably to a very large extent the result of the way the stones were lying around, the way the river was floating, the weather, the life situation, the advice given to the person through their life, and many other such details.
The bridge, therefore, probably wasn’t really built out of anything like a free will: it was built as an almost inevitable result of the circumstances. And the stones had their fair share in that set of circumstance, which you could say was the same as a fair share in the decision.
With this kind of thinking, the bridge might actually have built itself, just using the convenient presence of a human being to make it happen.
Actually, I do believe that both Microsoft and others are doing such annoying things on purpose. I am just now writing this on a Chromebook. Google announced, not long ago, when I opened the computer, that the updates it had received until now would stop - and that I should buy a new Chromebook to again get such updates!
Funny, since the new ones are completely identical to the old ones: there hasn’t been any technological development in this area since my Chromebook was made, and the exact same model with the same specifications is still available to buy. The operating system, Chrome OS, is free, and the computer itself has been made and sold by another company, not Google, so what purpose could Google have for demanding from me to buy new hardware? And now, on top of that annoying thought, the computer has become slower, lagging behind when I key at a reasonable speed. A bit worse from here, and it becomes close to useless.
Not too long ago, I got a similar message on a Windows computer. Six years old, no longer the most modern, but I had happily used it as a “typewriter” - a dedicated computer for writing, with nothing else than writing-software on it - for a distraction-free writing experience. Two weeks after the out-of-support message from the manufacturer, Microsoft pushed an update to Windows onto it, that made it useless! The new Windows version introduced a lag in the trackpad, making it very annoying to work with, and when I asked Microsoft how to get rid of the problem, their reply was: “update the trackpad driver”. Well, that was exactly not possible, because, as a strange coincidence, the manufacturer exactly two weeks before had stopped updating the drivers.
While this is not a matter of a mysterious soul living in the computers, these are such cases where I find it appropriate to shout out loud: “damn Microsoft!” or “damn Google!”
Actually, this could be extended to the knives, forks, and shoes mentioned: maybe the design of these things were not very suitable for a small child’s still evolving hands and fingers? Maybe the child actually understands this well, however, not knowing who designed the things and therefore impersonating these unknown idiots through the products themselves. Just a thought.