Quote:It's like a hugely complex game of knockdown dominoes, with literally billions of intersecting chains going on at any one time in any one persons life.
Therefore all choice is is the end result of a web of different causes. There is no actual choice, because you were going to choose the cheerios all along. Just as that last domino will be knocked down a certain way, determined by the movement of the very first domino in the chain.
The illusion comes in that we experience time in a straightforward fashion. We can't examine, therefore know, the future.
Everything we do something that appears as if it were a choice, the fact that we do not know which way we will act seems like freewill. It isn't.
But considering the illusion of freewill is indistinguishable from the real thing without stepping outside of linear time, it doesn't really matter.
It's all pedantics.
Alright this is eating at me. On one hand I can see how you could believe this. In a weird kind of way it sort of makes sense... sort of... But in other ways it goes against everything I believe. And I mean
e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. Unless I'm misunderstanding you of course.
I don't know where to begin. As we all know by now (I hope) I'm pretty strait forward about my life and the things I have been through. I'm not ashamed anymore of those things so I talk about them freely. I hope no one finds this offensive, but all I've got is what I am and how I got where I am today. The domino effect makes sense on one hand because I can see that certain things in my childhood led up to certain situations I put myself in later on in life. However, I believe I ended up in a lot of those situations
because I didn't know I had any other choice than what life threw at me. Which sucked pretty bad at the time.
To say that all choice is is the end result of a web of different causes sounds utterly ridiculous to me because that is saying basically nullify's how I got where I am today. At one point in my early 20's I actually believed I was destined to be raped every two years. I had a bit of a pattern going on in my life at the time. However, upon further introspection on my part I realized that the choices I was making in my life at that time were what was causing the end result I was getting. Basically I was going out and drinking with men I didn't know and then wondering why I was getting raped. It just happened to be that there seemed to be a common reoccurrence almost every two years to date.
When I realized this, even in my alcoholic state of mind, I realized the solution to the problem was to stop drinking with men I didn't know. So I did. I started drinking alone... (LOL, oh boy) However, the cycle stopped. I turned from one way of living to another by a matter of choice on my part. To say it was anything less than that is to take away my free will. I could have continued in the way I was going but I didn't because I didn't like what the end result was so I stopped the action that was causing the negative reaction. How can you explain that away and say it was some sort of cosmic thing that was destined to be?
Please know I'm not trying to be rude, nasty, or offensive to anyone in saying this. I've just got to say it though. It seems to me that this kind of theory is nothing more than a scapegoat to keep from having to take responsibility for our own actions. If there was nothing we could do about it since it was just part of this chain of events that were destined to happen in our life we would have no responsibility at all in what we do because after all we can't control it right?
Yes what you are saying makes sense, but there's a couple of things I disagree with. 