“I could’ve been Anyone…

…but could I have been anyone other than me?”

For those who know me, it won’t take long to decipher from where I borrowed the above quote. For as long as I can remember I have been interested/obsessed with topics like determinism and the abstraction of time. Even a simple analysis of the idea of determinism leads down endless rabbit holes, leaving the subject wondering if anything is worth stressing over. What difference does it make what I do or say? If everything has been predetermined, and the laws of physics are truly behaving in predictable (if however convoluted and microscopically mysterious) ways, then we are left with two logical and contradictory responses:

1- There is no reason to stress out about anything. (+)
2- All of my life’s achievement’s are not my own doing (-)

Or at least I thought that was the only way to logically respond, until I read the book God and the New Physics. In it there is a very compelling description of the difference between determinism and fatalism. The Cliff’s Notes version is that a Fatalist sees all human action as inconsequential and futile, whereas the Determinist still places value on things like consciousness and free will. There will be many more posts about these subjects in much greater depth, but for now I think I’ve reached a conclusion:

Ben Franklin’s initial thoughts notwithstanding, consciousness is not a coincidence. What we do does matter. And no construction of a Multiverse (again, more on this later) will change the fact that God has bestowed upon human beings (at a minimum) the ability to collapse the quantum chaos into the observable reality that we all collectively experience. It’s highly unlikely that many people have explored the strange mystery of quantum uncertainty but to ask the question of “where is x,” when distilled down to a sufficiently small scale, becomes meaningless. It is empirically and fundamentally impossible to know where a piece of quantum mass exists until someone actually tries to observe it. Until then, it exists (whatever THAT means), in a variety of possible states of being, some more likely than others.

But to try and bring some unity to all of the above random thoughts, all of this has profound ramifications for the concept of free will and human consciousness. What we do matters, and in some sense (at least microscopically) reality does not take its current form until we look at it. Perhaps God has imposed upon our world a set of rules and in some sense things are deterministic, but He also bestowed upon us the ability to shape things (or perhaps His will is collapsed by us being made in His image).

It’s a hyper-complicated Power of Positive Thinking. I could have been anyone, and yes, I think I could’ve been someone other than me.