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Hard Determinism

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More about the hard stuff…

I am a hard determinist. I believe that humans have no free will and that the weight and momentum of history in all its forms has brought me – and you – to this particular moment of awareness. This seems to be my foundational belief.

So what would the weight and momentum of history have me write?

My adoption of hard determinism has brought me great comfort. Combined with an understanding of trauma and my personal history it has freed me from any element of guilt over my small crimes and disappointing behaviours. I can accept that I was responsible but that hard determinism provides the most mitigating of circumstances. I don’t need to sentence myself and it isn’t helpful to anyone.

It was the universe and the me it made the moment before that made me do whatever it was and whatever it will be next.

All this applies to all humans, to my cats, to all living things and to Donald Trump. This is a challenging thought.

If we are all spinning around with our consciousnesses propelled by forces that are so strong that our free will is an illusion how should we act? Do we “act” at all if we are simply compelled? If I chose to sit still and do nothing I would have been compelled to sit still and do nothing. Instead I am compelled to write. And to resist.

Perhaps there are channels – complex weaves of various force, strengths and breadth – of compulsion behind every moment pressing us through spacetime and its four dimensional waves of uncertainty and possibility. All other possible actions and outcomes collapse as each (illusory) moment passes.

The weight and momentum of history that made me and continues to make me includes the evolution of my biology. It is the function of my biology as a human to compel me to survive and thrive to reproduce and nurture both my genetic code and that of my group and my species. I have no choice but to surrender and comply. I am coded for physical health, sex, learning, culture, competition, othering, violence, greed as well as love, empathy and altruism. All of these elements and others are present as a result of their utility over time.

These compelled elements of the survival, reproduction and the nurturing of the individual, the group and the species is the arena in which personal, social, economic and political relationships play out. It is the balance of the determined application of those positive and negative elements at any given time that determine our experience as groups, classes, societies, nations and – especially with the existence of global warming, pandemics and nuclear weapons – our species and all others.

We have no free will. We are compelled to act. We are compelled to survive in society with others – a polity – and so compelled to interact with that polity in one way or another. Even sitting still and doing nothing is political. And sometimes I have done that. I have been compelled by history and circumstance to fall asleep in the passenger seat and let someone else drive. 

Now I am compelled to act, to seek to understand the newly unstable political environment and express myself within the polity; to write. And to do that effectively I will have to investigate and explore the experiences and motivations of others who also have no choice and for whom – to their relief – the concepts of guilt and punishment are irrelevant. They may have to be quarantined though…

CVs

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I have lived for over 73 years. In the last two years, I have become more and more conscious that I am approaching the end of my life. Various parts of me have gone wrong; various parts of me have needed some adjustment or some medical intervention. Today I’m not too bad. My knees are not too sore, my hip is not too sore, my eyes are not hurting, other parts of me are not hurting very much, and I progress.

73 years is, for this little creature, a very, very long time. I’m not convinced that I’ve used my time wisely, but I do know I’ve used it in the only way I could have done, because I know now that I have no free will.

It has been very varied. It’s been a life that has carried me from post-war black and white austerity in the 1950s, through the excitement of the Beatles and rock music and the changes into a sort of colourful world at the end of the 1960s, through watching wars in Vietnam and the Middle East and other places around the world, through finding out about wars that I didn’t know about at the time.

I have been fortunate not to have been conscripted.

I’ve worked with remarkable people. Sometimes I look at my CV and see the places that I’ve worked, and I think about the men and women I’ve worked with—some of them my own age, some of them much, much older than me, most of them I suspect already dead. 

Sometimes I’ve wondered how they went and how they died. I hope they didn’t die in great pain, and I hope they came to accept their end because we’re hurtling through space on this little rock that’s hurtling around the sun, which is hurtling through space itself, and it’s incredibly unlikely that we even existed in the first place. But here we are.

Me with my CV and all those people I worked with. I could draw up another CV of all the people I’ve loved but I won’t do that because it’s unfair to them and probably unfair to me. 

I just wanted to say it’s been a fascinating, challenging, frightening, exciting, varied, and wonderful life, and I hope you all have a life like this. Speak to you soon, I hope. Bye bye for now.