Subs = wisdom

HI FRIENDS

I am in a good mood since my toe isn't hurting that much anymore and I just drank hot chocolate while watching a funny movie. Many of you may not be surprised as to why I am blogging at 3:35, but I shall explain to those who are less familiar with my wayward sleep schedule. I have been desperately trying to normalize my sleep cycle all weekend, and I think this may work. So I stayed up the whole night studying for Immunology and went to sleep at 5 PM. I woke up at around 11, so I am going to stay awake as long as I can one more night, perhaps taking a nap in the morning. And then by 10 PM tomorrow, I will be sufficiently tired to go to sleep and wake up at a normal time! Theoretically, it should work very well.

By the way, if you were curious to see what last week's dance performance looked like, you can view my Facebook album entitled Post-Aghaaz Photoshoot.

So...on Friday evening, Ramya, Arthi, Moksha, and I went to Subway for some late night veggie delites ended up immersing ourselves in a deep discussion about fate and determinism for four hours. Many points of view changed that night. I for one do not believe in "fate" in the traditional sense: the idea that my opinions and actions have no role in determining what happens to me in the future and that I should just stop being proactive and let time run its course. I do however believe that there is only one possible course of events in time--only one path on which all things will eventually occur. I was annoyed by this idea at first, but it makes a lot of sense. "Every event, including human cognition, behavior, decision, and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences" (Wikipedia).

Think about it this way.

A particular event, such as me rolling a die and coming up with a 4, can only happen in one way. You might think of a dice roll as a random event, but it's really not: the outcome is causally determined by many things, one of which is: the precise amount of torque and force I exert on the die, which may be determined by my present mental state as defined by a certain pattern and number of firing neurons, which may in turn be determined by a variety of things including my genetic makeup as well as what I had to eat that day...you can go on and on back into time until you extrapolate the causes of my rolling a 4 to the one event in the beginning. We don't know for certain what that is (a big bang?), but it's like the push that starts a very long line of dominoes.

You are but one domino in this very long sequence. You don't decide to fall, rather, you are caused to fall by a previous event and you don't really have a say in whether or not you would like to fall.

It's not a very likeable idea, I admit. All this time, you thought you were a being capable of making and decisions and determining your own future. The idea that everything you do was bound to happen anyway is really unsettling. Do you have any free will at all? Technically you don't--so why not just give up everything you're doing right now? It's faulty to think about it that way, because in letting the idea of determinism influence your current "decision" will put you in a bit of a paradox.

What do you think about this? I would like to hear your comments