subject: How Free, Really, Are You? [print this page] In the traditional Newtonian view of the universe, we are individuals with the capacity for free choice. The model used to describe such a universe is the classic clockwork machine. It's a four-dimensional universethree dimensions of space and one of time.
In such a clockwork universe, the outcome of our lives is self-determined, in a linear fashion. You make your choices, you reap the outcome. It's a simple matter of cause and effect, and it places the responsibility for how your life turns out squarely on your shoulders.
But Einstein, Heisenberg, Bell, Bohr, and others have shown us that we're not isolated monads in a universe of linear cause and effect. We live in a cosmos that is all of a piece, a single fabrice, so that everything is subtly dependent unpon everything else.
We're like a cork bobbing on a sea of influences.
Why do two people with similar backgrounds turn out so radically different? Two people born in the same family, such as depicted in the movie and book A River Runs Through it.
An extremely minute variation can, over the course of time, result in a profoundly different outcome. It's like a ship whose bearing is only one degree off compass. The ship will eventually find itself hundreds of miles off course.
Our two basic ways of discerning things, thinking and feeling, are inherently unreliable.
Just look at history, and the disasters that have occurred in the wake of convictions formed from thought or emotion. We choose what we deem best from moment to moment because that's the only way we know of knowing. But the choices are made out of patterns of thought and emotion, and those patterns may not be healthy. If someone hits us, we don't know any way to respond other than to hit back.
Societal choices, more often than not, are the result of expediency, statistical fallacy, sentiment, political or media pressure, or personal prejudice and vested interest. Crucial decisions affecting the lives of everyone on the planet are made under conditions that vritually guarantee failure.
Societies fall back again and again on patterns of past behavior. Although we ascribe our actions to reason, much of what we do as a human race is totally unreasonable. Our actions flow from patterns we recognize because we're familiar with them, used to them. It feels right because it's the known, the familiar, the well-trodden.
The notion that our actions are the result of thoughtful decisions is a grand illusion. The decision-making process is virtually automatic, not thought out at all. Millions of bits of data and their correlations and projections, far beyond what we're conscious of, are processed by the brain with tremendous rapidity. We arrive at decisions out of these patterns, not out of consciousness and awareness.
Decisions, then, which seem simple actually aren't. They are the result of incredibly complex forces, countless influences. How else can we make sense of the way we repeatedly stab ourselves in the foot?
We think we live by virtue of forces we can control. But in fact we're governed by hidden forces over which we have no controluntil they at last become consciousness.
Freedom of choice, then, isn't the place we begin. It's the place we hopefully end up. Freedom of choice correlates with awareness, consciousness.
The less aware we are, the less free we are.
In the main, we're not a free people at all; that's merely an illusion we live in. Most of us are like corks bobbing on a sea of happenstance, with influences beyond our recognition moving us to and fro.
