Have you went down any internet rabbit holes only to come out with a deep set existential crisis? If so, what are they?
It’s somewhat specific to someone with my type of background; namely growing up in a family of young-Earth creationist, fundamentalist Christians, and learning that things like science and evolution are lies from Satan.
At some point curiosity got the better of me and I realized I didn’t even know what evolution even is, so I read up a bit about it. Then a bit more. You know, this actually kind of makes sense. Eventually the rabbit hole led to the existence of God. I remember watching a bunch of debates and expecting the most learned representatives of our Christian tradition to make some really great arguments. And… they… never… did.
Same experience. Right down to debate watching hoping for something to hang on to!
I went from a fundamentalist community to full blown antitheist to agnostic (after studying religious philosophy in college) to pagan.
My experience teaches me there are many, many great arguments for the existence of the gods. You just have to accept that gods do not fit the conception the christian fundamentalists have: there is no sentient entity in existence that is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent and omnibenevolent (towards humanity).
If, and when, you are willing to relax your criteria for what constitutes a god (mine are personifications of the forces of nature) and what your relationship with such a being should look like (I respect them, but worship no one), you too will realize that the “either god is perfect in every way and should be worshipped without a shred of skepticism or there is no god and everything is doomed” mindset is just another arifact of christian zealotry and brainwashing.
Here you go https://youtu.be/uSwJuOPG4FI
I only recently tossed a Handbook Of Christian Apologetics by Tacelli & Kreeft. I was never devout, let alone outright brainwashed into anti-science nonsense, but at the cusp of my reddit atheist phase I figured a question this big deserved a fair shake. So I got a big ol’ book of the best arguments anyone had. They all sucked. So that was that.
The one that made me put the book down and go ‘yep, atheist’ was “the argument from magic.” You think about moving your hand. Your hand moves by thought alone. Magic! Therefore, Jesus. I fucking wish I was exaggerating.
Took another decade to figure out the people pushing these arguments don’t actually give a shit about being right. The point is performing loyalty to the ingroup. There’s a conclusion, and it comes from people above you, so your job is to make whatever mouth noises get there. A monotheistic god is only the purest expression of that tribalist worldview.
I’m taking a grad school course about the psychology of decision making, and the science behind how we process and use data hurts my mind and soul. At some level, we are biological logic machines. The implications of that terrify me.
Free will.
It’s hard to accept, but free will is just not compatible with reality. It’s like geocentrism. It seems obvious on its face because of our limited perspective, but nothing else in the universe makes sense if it’s true. We live in a mechanistic universe and cause and effect doesn’t suddenly stop when the atoms are part of a human.
I freaked out for about a week once I came to realize how much of our society is based on a scientific impossibility. Redesigning justice, ethics, healthcare, the very concept of blame, etc. to account for this is a daunting fucking prospect.
Subatomic particles act in insane ways that are absolutely not mechanical or predictible. A very limited size of object behaves “normally”. I think believing that the universe mostly acts like our everyday objects is the skewed perspective.
Our current understanding is not enough to state that with confidence. We used to be so confident with classical mechanics and even claims that physics is almost complete. God knows how long our current probabilistic model will last before we find another better model. It may be probabilistic, or it may not.
Random behavior of subatomic particles doesn’t make free will any likelier either though.
If they act at random on a makro level their randomness would average out to zero. And that actually checks out, since the mechanical forces of the atomic and molecular level are known, observable, and provable. An apple drops from the tree to the ground, every time. Causality is still a thing, even if not observable at the subatomic level.
The only way to imagine a subatomically based free will would be some mechanic over which we, at will, could change the randomness of subatomic particles to behave in a predictable pattern and on a scale that’s grand enough to make the proverbial apple fall upward. Or at least make or synapses do something that they physically speaking wouldn’t have done otherwise.
Free will is as likely as magic. In fact it would actually be some form of magic - a volitional breach of causality itself.
on a scale that’s grand enough to make the proverbial apple fall upward
Not necessarily. An apple teetering on the edge of a cliff requires no grand change in initial conditions to have two very different journeys. If “you” are a metaphysical entity capable of altering the signals in your physical brain, your brain could deterministically amplify and enact your will, like gravity does to the apple on the cliff. If you have a metaphysical existence, this is a pretty reasonable mechanism for it to work.
Not being predictable by us does not mean they offer free will.
The preconditions are so precise that you’ll never be able to get exactly the same results from trying to do the same thing twice - you’ll never be able to do the same thing twice. But that doesn’t stop cause and effect determining the outcome. There is no place where free will can enter in to any equation at any micro or macroscopic level and just having unpredictable microscopic events doesn’t give you control of your own destiny. This is totally separate from your own perceptions of having choices you make. Personally I find myself doing things I didn’t consciously choose to do. Once you start noticing them you might find more and more.
Here’s the thing, though: it’s doesn’t matter if free will is real or not.
Well, it does if our entire justice system is based around the concept of free will.
But we never could have designed it any other way (assuming no free will)
That also does not matter. Spinozan Determinism can be summed up as:
“If it could have happened any other way, it would have.”
But if we are truly deterministic beings, the factors determining our environment are incredibly important. Even (not freely) acknowledging that free will doesn’t exist we could very well (not freely) decide that we need a justice system in this society because we (not freely) want less crime, and people will (not freely) do less crime in a society where such a system is in place.
In the end it doesnt matter if people act based on free will or entirely predetermined. Or society developed as we are, and we put systems into place that seem to work. Sure, someone robbing a bank might do so for reasons that were predetermined in his brain and surroundings, but getting prosecuted for it would in turn become something that codetermines every future moment of his life.
The only think determinism really changes is perspective. It enables us to say: Okay I understand why I/they/you acted this way, or maybe I don’t understand, but can assume that there were reasons. That’s it. It lends understanding; it doesn’t have to chance anything.
Why do people always stop one step too short?
If there is no free will, the concepts of justice, blame, etc. still survive funtionally intact. If “chemical you” commits a crime, “you” are only not responsible if “you” is a metaphysical entity separate from (and that cannot control) the chemical you. But there’s no evidence that “you” aren’t simply the “chemical you”, and therefore fully responsible for your crimes. If “you” are a metaphysical entity separate from the chemical you, then “you” do actually have free will.
This is only not true if the metaphysical you exists but cannot control the chemical you, which seems reasonable but like… you can move your arm right now, by willing it to be so. Either metaphysical you has free will, or your conscious experience is the chemical you. Either way, your conscious experience is either the same as or commands your physical form, and therefore is responsible for the actions that you take, and can be blamed and given justice.
I dislike the conception of Free Will that asserts will is only free if it is not deterministic. Any system dictated by the law of Cause and Effect will necessarily be deterministic, given knowledge of First Cause. Together, those premises imply that the only way to be truly free is in a chaotic universe, i.e. one without a relationship between Cause and Effect, where decisions are completely arbitrary and have no predictable outcome anyway.
The fact of the matter is that you’re already free to do whatever you want, even if that’s shooting yourself in the foot or refusing the choice entirely and running off to live in the woods, and that’s freedom enough for all practical meanings of the word.
There’s a really good Kurzgesagt (in a nutshell) about this topic. (Also their videos are excellent in general, highly recommend their YouTube channel).
My thoughts on this are: we may not have free will but it still feels like we make choices so I will continue to choose to do things which matters to me and enjoy my time in the universe.
Robert Sapolsky agrees.
Sapolsky’s perspective ignores reality to generate talking points.
Just because a person has a limited set of choices, mostly determined by upbringing does not mean that we can predict any future action based on previous actions.
At best you may be able produce a chaotic model that gives probabilities of potential actions in any situation.
You know, there’s a very, very strong emotional incentive to feel agency, and endless aspects of experimental psychology has shown that you stress people or frazzle them or give them an unsolvable problem, and they get a way distorted sense of agency, at that point, as a defence.
Most philosophers think free will and determinism are compatible.
Toxoplasma Gondii - a parasite bred through cat poop. It is extremely common, easily spread through undercooked food (especially meat). It can affect your mental state to engage in riskier and more self destructive behaviors. Testing for Toxoplasma Gondii is not standard, but it is believed that 10-15% of the US population is infected with the parasite at any given time.
That’s actually my favorite parasite! Toxo really wants to live inside a cat’s digestive tract, so much so that, when a rodent gets it in their blood, the baby toxos produce cysts in the brain (and liver and muscles) that hypnotize the rat into being attracted to cat poop. This leads to the rat hanging around where cats poop, and therefore getting eaten by the cat, and ending up happily back inside the cat’s GI tract.
The universe. The Big bang, time, quantum mechanics. Is our universe infinite? Is it the only universe? Did the Big bang start ours and will it end with a big crunch and will that collapse just cause a big bang that repeats and if so what iteration of that cycle do you suppose we are in? And does each universe behave the same, similar laws and physics and such? Stars, planets, etc?
Deconstructing from religion. It was a lot. I’m better now, but being stuck in it all was overwhelming and was like being in an existential crisis every day until it ended. I just went along with it and kept it all inside for decades and it wasn’t fun.
Consciousness and our sense of self. Is consciousness an illusion? What even is “me”? It includes all the gut bacteria and mitochondria with different DNA than us and our brains are these amazing pattern recognition machines that also have abysmal memory storage and recall, but can notice the tiniest of nuance sometimes, but also can’t remember where we put the thing we were just holding 2 minutes ago. And all the while our brain is confidently telling us “I am me” and is processing all the inputs like sights and sounds and interpreting all that into what we think we see and what we think we heard. But did we? How would we know if upon seeing the color red our brain interprets that as blue and we confidently declare we see red.
In the old Star Wars Expanded Universe, there was mention of a Shawken Device which, if operable, could destroy the universe.
This has led me to conclude that the universe probably isn’t infinite.
In an infinite universe, all possible things should be happening at the same time. This would necessarily mean that someone invented a device/mechanism/reaction that could destroy the universe, and successfully activated it, thus ending the universe.
There are only two possible conclusions that I can draw from this thought experiment, which are not mutually exclusive:
- The universe is not infinite, and/or
- It is not possible to destroy the universe.
Relativity proved that time isn’t a constant thing where all things occur at “the present”. You can have situations where person 1 sees an event happen as A B and person 2 sees that same event happen as B A.
That means time isn’t some absolute framework that reality exists in, but something more like a property of matter or space or something.
Also the speed of light seems to be applicable here. Or more accurately, the speed at which events propagate through space. If you pushed a button to end the universe wouldn’t that event only go at light speed out in all directions? So maybe the button has been pushed (maybe an infinite number of times too) and all the shockwaves just haven’t gotten here yet.
You can have situations where person 1 sees an event happen as A B and person 2 sees that same event happen as B A.
This is only true if A and B are not causally related. If A causes B all observers will see A causing B.
In an infinite universe, all possible things should be happening at the same time
Misunderstanding of infinity.
E.g.: 1.101100111000… is an infinitely long number, yet it will never be bigger than 1.2 nor smaller than 1.1, it does not contain all digits, nor does it contain all possible combinations of 0s and 1s.
- The universe is almost definitely not infiinte, but we will never be able to prove it.
- Have you heard of vacuum decay?
It’s only infinite in the sense that it’s beyond our measurement. And whether or not it is infinite doesn’t even matter to us because of the speed of light and the expansion of space itself. There is a sphere around us that is all we will ever know or experience or be able to affect. Outside that sphere other things can and do exist, but we are fundamentally separated from them forever. There are entire galaxies we will never see because the light will never reach us. That is wild to me.
Well we know nowadays that the universe isn’t infinite, but is expanding, and the speed of expanding is accelerating. We don’t know if that will keep accelerating, if the universe will keep expanding forever.
How can you know or prove something isn’t infinite if you haven’t even seen all of it yet? Isn’t proving it impossible? We could prove it to NOT be infinite, but it’s like proving the non-existence of something, you can’t really prove an edge doesn’t exist just because you haven’t seen one.
Because of the cosmic microwave background.
Here, this covers it quite well on a very basic level https://www.space.com/33892-cosmic-microwave-background.html
