| the blog of human failure
Let me introduce a hypothetical subject to you all, and you can let me know what you think about it. Let’s say you were a 15 year old male and you had a girlfriend. Now with full knowledge and willing consent of this girlfriend, you videotaped the two of you having sex at that age of 15. You then kept that video tape for 20 years until you were the age of 35 years old. You are no longer seeing this girl, but you still have the tape.
Does the fact that you are in the tape mitigate the child porn aspect of watching two 15 year olds have sex? Is it OK if you watch the tape for nostalgia but not OK watching it for sexual pleasure? I mean, it’s you in the tape, so this has the strong possibility of being a loophole. You were the one there having the consensual video-taped sex with another age-appropriate-at-the-time partner. How can it be immoral for you to watch a video tape of something 20 years later that if was perfectly moral for you to actually be doing and video tape yourself doing 20 years ago?
If you think it is immoral for you to watch the tape, that must mean that you think your identity significantly changes over time to the extent that who you were 20 years ago is not even the same person as who you are today. After all, you are not even entitled to watch a compromising tape of your other self.
Let’s take the idea a step further. What if you and your girlfriend, both at the age of 35, consensually video tape yourselves having sex? Now it is 45 years later and you are 80 years old. You no longer are dating the woman in the video and you no longer look much like the 35 year old you. Are you entitled to watch a video tape of the 35 year old you having sex at the age of 80? What about watching it for sexual pleasure as opposed to nostalgia? Is it too pathetic and creepy to watch a 35 year old version of yourself having sex?
If you think it would be pathetic or creepy to watch the tape, you must again think there is a significant difference in identity between the two versions of yourself, where you are again not entitled to watch a compromising tape of what was 45 years ago perfectly acceptable behavior.
Your current identity will over time make you a separate person from your past identity. Does this mean that the 35 year old is not entitled to the awards and accomplishments of the 15 year old version of himself? Does this mean the 80 year old is not really entitled to a lifetime of accomplishments simply because he is no longer the same person who performed them? Do I have to throw away this video or what?
In college I minored in Philosophy. The reason I did that was because at my university you could take any five random Philosophy courses and be granted a minor in it. We’ll get to that in a second. What you’ll learn in any run of the mill freshman Philosophy course, besides that god doesn’t exist and how to be a real asshole about it (”I mean, I can’t prove that there’s no invisible blue fire-breathing dinosaur in the room with us, but that doesn’t mean I have to be agnostic about invisible blue fire-breathing dinosaurs, am I right? So what are you ladies doing after class…”), is that there’s probably no free will in life whatsoever.
To break it down simply, we are physical systems and more specifically our brains are physical systems. Because of this they are subject to natural physical laws of cause and effect from and to other physical systems. Something stimulates my brain, a chemical process occurs, and my body reacts. There is no room for the idea of free will if humans are just devices of automatic reaction. “Well what about my soul?” you ask, voice quivering, bangs and tears in your eyes, trapper-keeper pulled tightly into your crossed arms against your chest. “Well where is your soul located?” your philosophy professor will undoubtedly ask. You’ll soon learn that your soul is riding atop an invisible blue fire-breathing dinosaur in the good place that is no place.
I bring this up because if we do indeed have no free will then me being a lazy piece of human garbage is either a genetic condition that I have no escape from or the result of environmental factors that I have no control over. I would otherwise feel horrible that friends and strangers alike seem to be working hard - living interesting, vital, and meaningful lives - but I know that the inability to work hard is just a condition of my natural being. I’m cursed by the fact that I’m a human and self-aware, because otherwise I would have no way of being cognizant of how worthless I am. Thank god that my laziness naturally tilted the table of life so I would roll gently towards a minor in Philosophy to find out I had no hand in making myself the useless person that sits in this chair today. It also helps knowing there’s nothing I can do about it.
The only bad part is that occasionally some scab shows up who asserts that he used to be a lazy person but then he “got his life on track,” and started working hard. I’m perfectly willing to accept that through the randomness of life some disparate factors coalesce and make people start working harder. I guess I just hate how they get to be self righteous afterwards and that they start rationalizing the change in themselves they had no volition in creating. It was no more your free will that got you into that car accident then it was your free will that made you go to physical therapy every day, so stop bragging about it.
As a side issue, if someone is acquitted of a murder for reasons of insanity, shouldn’t that verdict also apply to all of his previous parking and speeding tickets? If he couldn’t help killing someone he certainly couldn’t help not moving his car between 8am and 6pm. The defendant should get that money back to pay for his future counseling.
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