The Pre-Made Choice
October 2nd, 2008Choice is a way of life. We choose the car we drive, the country we live in, the wife we love; we pick the choices that dictate our lives. But this is as good as how far we know. What if we really didn’t have a choice? What if all the choices we’ve made were all preselected? And that the choices we made was all part of a determined universe?
Two things come into play: Free Will and Determinism.
Free Will is the belief that everything is based upon the current mindset we have and any choice that we make is conceived from momentary decision-making. People choose to act in a certain manner because they choose to do so. Anything that happens without a cause is because of free will. We choose to act in a certain manner because we think we can benefit from it the most rather than doing otherwise. For instance, if someone finds himself in a crossroad and takes the right turn, he chose to go to the right because he thinks he’ll be more likely to arrive to his destination.
Determinism is the belief that everything that happens is caused to happen and it includes what we do, think or say. People who believe in determinism believe that things are as what they are today because nature and science caused them to be such. For example, rain causes plants to grow; agricultural society, through an evolved knowledge passed from generations, tells us it is so. Heredity tells much about the disease each person is likely to contract; science (specifically genetic engineering) tells us it is so because each offspring will inherit 50% chance of having the same disease the parent has. (50% is actually an average. It has been shown that an offspring can inherit more or less than 50% of their genes, but the average and the mean is 50%.)
Great thinkers of the past and the present alike have been hounded by this dilemma and no one to date has given an answer that satisfies most people. The problem of free will and determinism is much like the question of whether God does or does not exist as there is no concrete, quantifiable and scientifically accepted evidence that can logically categorize his presence or absence. Asking the question, “Is there really free will?” Is like asking, Why doesn’t the clock ever stop? Like my answer to this question, freewill is best left as an unfathomable mystery as I believe, much like the great thinkers of the past and present, we could not do anything more.
I’d have to say that the human mind is a complex organ. Surely there’s more to it than just chemicals and hormones but the points presented above has lead me to believe that the human mind is sophisticated enough to ask this question about the Pre-Made Choice but is not competent enough to answer it.