Free will

I don't believe in God. I do believe in the universe. Because it is clearly objectively real, and there's no evidence that God exists as anything other than subjective ideas in human minds.

So I love it when the universe appears to have a message for me. I emphasized appears, since the message I got today from the universe is solely mine. Maybe it's just a coincidence that two authors I've read recently had similar things to say.

No matter. I'm merely sharing what each of them said, which makes a lot of sense to me.

First, I get regular emails from Joan Tollifson where she communicates a fresh essay in line with her particular view of Zen, Buddhism, and spirituality in general. I've become a big fan of Tollifson after reading her book, Nothing to Grasp. 

(I've written several blog posts about the book.)

I liked her newest essay, "The freedom to be exactly as you are," so much, I've included the whole thing as a continuation to this post. Just click on the continuation link and you can read it. Here's an excerpt that reminds me a lot of how Robert Sapolsky describes the illusion of free will in his book, Determined.

In the conceptual picture of cause and effect, it certainly appears that people make things happen. We can seemingly control some things, such as opening and closing our hand, but not other things, such as the functioning of our spleen. These relative differences cannot be denied. We are conditioned to believe in free will and in our responsibility to accomplish great things, be a good person, do our duty, and so on. We habitually judge ourselves and others, compare ourselves to others, and think that we (and others) should be better, stronger, smarter, wiser, more compassionate, more successful, more attractive, more something than we are.

But we don’t actually get to choose the role we are playing in the movie of waking life. No one can simply “decide” to be Martin Luther King or Ramana Maharshi, or to not be Adolph Hitler or Pol Pot if that is the part we’ve been given. Even if we seemingly “choose” to change such things as our name, gender, career, hairstyle, religious affiliation, or anything else, each of these “choices” is a choiceless movement of life itself. Every apparent individual is the result of infinite causes and conditions—the whole universe is moving as each one of us and as everything that happens, and no form ever actually persists for more than an instant. You are not the same as you were when you began reading this article—the whole universe has shifted.

Second, Brian Klaas has written a book, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters, that has nothing to do with Zen or Buddhism, from what I can tell after reading about half of it. Yet these excerpts are very much in line with what Tollifson had to say above. They just approach the subject differently.

(Here's a link about how different sperm from the same man differ a lot, if you don't believe what Klaas says about this.)

Motivational posters tell you that if you set your mind to it, you can change the world. I've got some good news for you: you already have. Congratulations! You're changing it right now because your brain is adjusting slightly just by reading the words I've written for you. If you hadn't read this sentence, the world would be different.

I mean that literally. Your neural networks have now been altered, and it will — in the most imperceptible, minute way — adjust your behavior slightly over the remainder of your lifetime. Who knows what the ripple effects will be. But in an intertwined system, nothing is meaningless. Everything matters. 

You may think this all sounds a bit trivial or abstract, but consider this: You might decide, or you have already decided, to bring some new humans into the world. Without getting into graphic detail, the precise moment that a baby is conceived is one of the most contingent aspects of our existence. On the day it happens, change any detail — no matter how insignificant — and you end up with a different child.

Suddenly, you have a daughter instead of a son, or vice versa — or just a different son or daughter. Siblings often diverge in unexpected ways, so any change in who is born will radically change your life — and the lives of countless others.

But it's not just the one day that a child is conceived that matters. Instead, amplify that contingency by every moment of your life. Each detail in the entire chain-link architecture of your lifetime had to be exactly as it was for the exact child who was born to be born. That's true for you, for me, for everyone.

Yet again, the motivational posters have sold you short. "You're one in a million!" they shout at you with uplifting glee. Try one in a hundred million, because that's how many competitors, on average, your single-celled predecessor outswam to successfully become half of yourself. 

You matter. That's not self-help advice. It's scientific truth. If someone else had been born instead of you — the unborn ghost whom you outcompeted in the existence sweepstakes — countless other people's lives would be profoundly different, so our world would be different, too. The ripples of life spread out, in unexpected ways, for eternity.

Click below for the entire Tollifson essay.