Generalism

At time of creation brains are like computers; dumb. They start off only being able to do extremely basic, low-order tasks, typically hardwired in by parental genes or, for that matter, lab-coated boffins, and continue to do so until programmed to do otherwise. In humans such programming occurs every minute of every day from conception to conflagration. Brains are like sponges, they exist to soak up stuff; they may shed a bunch along the way, and they certainly do a great job of storing and processing what sticks, but everything starts with and hinges on that input, and it’s no surprise that our keenest senses sit in such proximity.

So what has this to do with determinism? Setting aside all strict dictionary and wikipedia definitions (though do feel free to indulge at your leisure), determinism simply states that we do what we do because of everything we’ve touched before. If we’ve swum, voted Labour, learnt French or ridden a bike backwards, not only will each and every one of those things affect what we do and how we see things in the future, we actually chose to do those things because of things we experienced before. Maybe our parents swum and were active in unions, or our grandmother is French and is the only way we can communicate, perhaps we learnt to ride backwards as a bet given to us by a team mate at the last swim-meet before going to vote for Tony Blair together.

Determinism.

For someone that has spent a large amount of his working life designing and developing computer software, this all sits quite comfortably. But for other perhaps more idealistic individuals, probably less so. For those people, I cite a clear and immediate example of determinism in action; my current work situation led me to look back at my past to figure out how and why I got here. This led to me reading an article discussing such philosophical conundra, which led to a heated debate with a dissenting friend, which led to writing about it all here, which led to you reading it.

Now my friend feels she has more free will than this all suggests, but to that I say simply, how can we have? How can we speak French if we’ve never been in a position to learn it? How can we even choose to speak French if we’ve never heard of either the country or the language? How can we be racist, sexist, agist, even give a name to any of those things if we’ve never been exposed to them before?

It seems completely natural that we are who we are because of where we’ve come from and where we are now. That we make the decisions we make, we listen to the music that we listen to, even read articles like this on such blogs, and in fact always will, all because of what has gone before. I can well believe that knowing all states, all physical and mathematical theories, rules and formulae would enable someone to predict every piece of it down to the last full stop on this page, as well as the time it took for you to reach it.

Would you dispute any of it? Maybe, maybe not, but whichever you choose, be sure that it was always destined to be the way you would choose, and like it or not, there’s probably not a whole heck of a lot you could do about it.