| the blog of human failure
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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