What decides our life?
Back when I was in high school, during a journey homeward in a train I gazed out of the window at homes, farm fields, children playing, buildings and shops, and a lot of people. That entire journey got me thinking into how life would be different for those people. Since that moment, on every travel, I would ponder about the lives of individuals I see, thier varying life experiences and what decided thier life.
The circumstances into which one is born might be the single most influential thing that decides one’s life. Yet one doesn’t get to choose it. Isn’t that a disheartening realization that we have no control over the initial conditions of our existence. However, there’s a silver lining: once born, we hold the complete authority over our life. We are free to make decisions and choices, and have life in our hands. The Humanist religion convinces us that our free will is the key to our life’s meaning. This instills in us a sense of hope as we have got the power to shape our lives, atleast from the moment of our birth, until Do humans really have free will?
“Do humans have Free Will” is a centuries old debate, with many believing in its existence throughout history. Much progress havent been made in this belief until humans cracked open the mysterious human body black box, revealing no soul or mind as we traditionally imagined. Classical mechanics challenged the belief in free will with its deterministic view of the universe, where everything in existence is seen as an unbroken cause-effect chain. It appeared that free will had no place in such a perfectly deterministic world, — until, perhaps, it does not.
When Classical Physics was about to hit the the last nail in the freewill’s coffin, Quantum Mechanics emerged and made it significantly difficult to argue for determinism. It introduced the randomness present in the world as in the decomposition of radioactive atoms. Hence the perfectly deterministic view of the universe is opposed and the universe as we know now is composed of deterministic events and random events.
Yet, we’re left pondering: does randomness truly grant us the freedom to choose our life’s path? If every human choice ever is either deterministic or random or a combination of both, then how can it be really free? What can a lack of free will mean to us? What decide our lives?
