I have discovered that I am a fatalist. In this realization, I feel not only that I have come to a certain philosophical "checkpoint" for a burgeoning idea from since my teen years, but also, in a welcome breath of relief, reconciled a gnawing, uncomfortable pressure I've lived with for much longer that keeps me on constant alert for making the "right" decision at every crossroads. It is a variation of Kundera's einmal ist keinmal, the recognition of our own insignificance not in the face of a vast physical space, but under the churning wheels of a temporal one, where cause and effect move but in one direction. However, instead of being pained by the inconsequence of existence, I am set free by it.
This entry tells the story of my arrival at this "checkpoint".
I: THE MICROCOSMIC ILLUSION
When I was in 10th grade, I was exposed to Calvinism and the role that predetermination played in its doctrines through Ms. Seabreeze's American History class. Up on the third floor of my high school building, I remember our class collectively struggling to understand a belief system that sprang from the Christian roots of doing right to get into heaven, while simultaneously stating that God's mercy was the sole determinant of the fate of one's soul. How, we protested, could a religion promote predetermination without seeing its followers, lacking incentives to follow God's decree, lapse into chaos and sin? "Think of it this way," we were prompted by Ms. Seabreeze, "You still have the freedom to make a choice about your actions. It is just that God already knows what choice you're going to make." The fact of God's knowing the outcome of an event didn't negate the freedom possessed by an individual to impact that event.
Although this idea was but a drop in the bucket of our course, and we moved on quickly from Calvinism to other 16th century developments that would impact the earliest years of American history, I was intrigued by this idea that, although counterintuitive, was not self-contradictory. A comfortable atheist, I sought to test this concept against the laws of logic by removing the element of religion in a thought experiment; I replaced the role of God with a fortune teller who always accurately foresaw the future, and imagined that this clairvoyant laid out 5 playing cards before me: a king, a queen, a jack, a joker, and an ace. I was tasked with picking out any card of my choice, and she, with her back turned, would aim to make a prediction about my selection.
Well lo and behold, because she was a true fortune teller, she correctly predicted my card selection 100% of the time. She therefore saw the future not as a series of diverging paths, each one leading to a different outcome, but as a singular path that held only one possible consequence. However, the paradox that emerged was that from my perspective, as a humble seer only of the present, my freedom of choice was never in doubt. I always had the capacity to choose any card that I wanted; the only pressure I felt was my own internal decision-making process, over which I seemingly had complete control. Predetermination, or "fate" (for those inclined to use a more romantic term), could exist hand-in-hand with free will. It is only the shift in perspective that affects the perception of reality.
For a little while, the logic of this pleased my 15-year-old mind. But, naturally, ideas beget ideas, and I soon was faced with overcoming the obstacle of this fortune teller's theoretical existence, a pound of flesh that I had essentially concocted out of thin air, and who sooner or later I had to pay back to the stoic gods of reason. For my conclusion to be more than the bastard child of an adolescent thought experiment, I had to answer the question, In the physical world, just what does this fortune teller represent? What, in tangible form, is all-knowing, would observe the actions of every individual, and could foresee the decision of every traveler who came upon two roads diverged?
The answer I came to - an idea that has only grown more nuanced and ingrained in my mind over the last ten years - was the Universe. The Universe, including all its physical manifestations, is the system that encompasses everything that ever has been, is, and will be, and therefore the perfect candidate to play the real-life role of the fortune teller*. The Universe is the only entity from which the perspective of all physical dimensions (AKA all events that may occur at any given moment in time) and all temporal dimensions (AKA the timeline from beginning to end of any particular event) can be seen. Although this perspective does not invalidate the perspective of the individual human being (or a bacterium, for that matter), it is the only one that takes into account all other perspectives that exist, and therefore the only one of the two that is complete**. Given this trump card, the second conclusion I arrived at - one that, this time, held water beyond the theoretical confines of a thought experiment - is that the microcosmic, individual perception of control over one's decisions does not exist in the holistic context. In other words, free will is an illusion.
Although by the time I was a junior in college, this was a "gut-feeling" belief I held to (still being utterly unfamiliar with the bodies of work of Howard Bloom, Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel Dennett, and other authors who would come to illuminate my understanding...including Albert Hofmann, if I may get cheeky***), my intellectual understanding of it was still tenuous, and it took another five years for it to develop into the fuller (albeit still very skeletal) idea that I've just presented. It had even further to go in terms of trickling down into my pragmatist views on living. That second half of this story, shedding light on why Kundera's "lightness of being" for me is not unbearable but one of life's saving graces, and why fatalism represents a falling into place of still more puzzle pieces in this existence, will have to wait for another time.
*Although I was incapable of making the connection at the time, of course this meant by extension the Universe is also God. But that is for another blog entry.
** Because of its completeness, according to mathematician Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem it is therefore also inconsistent. This holds in my analogy because the complete perspective of the universe necessarily encompasses a multitude of conflicting (inconsistent) perspectives by individual human beings.
***...which I may, because this is my blog!
