Determinism Again)

Yesterday I spoke of the physical-materialist theory of determinism, which maintains that all of our behaviors and “choices” are actually predetermined programming. The stimuli to our senses come from an environment that we cannot control, and our reactions to those stimuli are dictated by the preset mapping of the synapses within our brains.

Input + Function = Output, and because the Input and the Function are controlled, so is the Output.

Free will and control are only illusions that arise from the fact that the environment and the brain mapping are so complex that we cannot predict the outcomes before they occur. But just because we mortals can’t predict those outcomes, doesn’t mean that they aren’t predestined. The things that we do are simply the things that we were always going to do.

Moral License)

If this theory is true, though, then I cannot be responsible for anything that I do. I might feel as though I make my own choices, that I wrestle between decisions, but that’s simply my computer-brain evaluating between two programmed priorities, until it finally settles on the option that its biological algorithms were pre-weighted towards. I was always going to come to the conclusion that I was going to come to, and I am no more responsible for coming to that conclusion than a domino is guilty of falling when pushed.

Thus, if I decide to kill another person, there was no alternative to that outcome. There was no option for me to have chosen otherwise. I might have chosen differently if I had been born to a different environment, or if I had a different composition of the brain, but the function and the parameters were already set, and so I simply had to give the only possible output: murder.

And if I were to go around proselyting for this worldview, and the logic of it were to incite a person to decide there was no morality and that he truly was permitted to do anything and none of it would be his fault, and if he were to then go out and planted bombs that killed hundreds of innocent schoolchildren, well it couldn’t be helped because his mind was already such as to take the input of my words and derive those predestined conclusions. And it couldn’t be helped that I inspired him to do those things, because I was also predestined to make those arguments. And though it may appear to the outside world that I had influence and he had choice, even though everything in our natural perception and experience screams at us that such is the case, it would all be a lie and an illusion. The creation of that terrible, bloody would have been necessary and unavoidable.

Common Sense)

The horrifying conclusions of determinism are reason enough to reject it, but even more important than the unacceptable nature of its ends is the fact that it defies so much of our common sense that we have to conclude it isn’t true. Like I said in the last paragraph, everything in our natural perception and reason tells us that we actually do choose what we do, and that the evil are guilty, and that people can decide whether to live as good or evil.

Determinism asks for an even greater level of blind faith than any system of religious morality. It not only asks us to trust its claims, but to do so against all of our perception and reason. It asks us to deny the apparent and obvious reality to accept an unprovable and theoretical one. Everything natural and instinctive about us protests that is a lie, and that would explain why its ends are so horrific and destructive. A reality based upon a lie can only end in obliteration, for a lie is the inversion of reality.