On predetermination

If a dog chews shoes, whose shoes does he choose?

13.8 billion years ago, the Big Bang occurred. In that fraction of a second, the world—no, the universe—had been completely written from start to end. The exact arrangement of matter and energy in that first moment resulted in the formation of trillions of planets, the emergence of every star, and countless events from then on. These events were not spontaneous, but rather the necessary results of the moment before it. Everything—from your birth to the reading of this blog post has already been determined. As humans, we are simply acting out the motions of a life completely encoded in that first instant.

Determinism: the idea that everything is caused by past events, and nothing other than what has occurred could occur. It's obvious that the physical world is mediated by cause and effect. If I throw a pen at the ground, and that pen hits the ground, it is because I threw the pen that it hit the ground. And so, we come to the reductionist conclusion that everything in this world is the effect of some cause which is the effect of another cause until we reach one original cause. Also known as the Big Bang. What caused that? Sorry to leave you hanging, but that's a conversation for another time. But stay with me, I promise we're almost there. If the physical world is mediated by cause and effect, what about the metaphysical world—our thoughts and emotions? How does the dog ultimately choose a pair of shoes?

In my view and the hard deterministic view, free will, as we know it, doesn't exist. Everything we think and do is the result of an unbroken chain of events. But I'm sure you think you have free will. Maybe, you think you can choose to stop reading this essay whenever you want. Well, really, that's just the result of previously established conditions like your personality, current state, upbringing, interest in philosophy, and hundreds more. Free will assumes there are options to choose freely between, but when all of these factors come into play, there's ultimately only one choice, always. But the conditions that dictate your brain, are they random? No, everything can be traced back to… You guessed it. The Big Bang.

So, whose shoes does the dog choose?

The dog doesn't choose. The dog's sharp teeth sink into a pair of leather shoes because of every causal factor of the dog's mental state and environment's physical state, making that moment inevitable.

Which brings me to you. You think you could stop reading this essay right now. Maybe you will. But all the factors determining whether you will keep reading are already set in place: your morning coffee or lack thereof, your tolerance for amateur philosophy, whatever led you to this page, and so on.

Yet, here I am, writing, trying to convince you to keep reading.

Because even after reading many philosophy and neuroscience papers about determinism, I can't make myself stop caring. Maybe the dog didn't choose the shoes. Maybe you don't choose whether or not to keep reading this blog post. But from inside the causal chain, the illusion is so perfect that everyone has no choice but to act if our choices are real. Intellectually, I'm convinced, but I can't bring myself to change the way I act. I'll continue to edit this essay as if I can find a better version, when in reality, the wording was fixed before I even came up with the idea for this post. I knew that but deliberated anyway. I couldn't not.

It shows up everywhere once you notice it. I can't help but think to myself sometimes: what if I did things differently? But things were never going to be different. What's the point then? Living a life written from start to end?

It's different for the dog. The dog doesn't know, it just chews. For the dog, there's no gap between what it feels like and what is determined. We're the unlucky ones who can see the strings and still have to stand here working the puppet.