The Perils of Determinism
“If you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?”
To almost every one of you reading this, and to me, time is a linear concept. We perceive one moment to occur after another. We represent this on an axis running from left to right in the countless graphs we draw, we talk about things that happened back in the year 2000 and we look forward to the future. The human experience characterizes time in a perfect straight-line.
Despite the obsession with time travel in pop culture, the science available to us has not been able to produce anything that speaks to its practicality. Given this, the conclusion any rational person would come to is that we cannot change past events (that is, what has happened will always continue to have happened, think 12 Monkeys), and that our actions in the present will shape what comes of the future.
But, what if time was not linear? What if we could bend and shape it to our own will, or at least, have access to our past, present and future conveniently?
In fact, the concept of non-linear time in not alien. To the Yupno tribe in Papua New Guinea, time flows uphill and is kinked. The Pormpuraaw aborigines in Australia perceive timelines from East to West. Some Mandarin speakers in China have been known to represent time in vertical axes. But, even these interpretations convey the flow of time in a general direction, and do not imply in any way the possibility of us becoming Time Lords.
What if time was circular instead? Where would time begin and where would it end? Would we perceive time differently, and would we know beforehand what’s yet to come?
Among the many profound themes addressed in the brilliant sci-fi movie Arrival is this concept of time. It plays with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (which speculates that language shapes how we perceive reality, and maybe even space and time), and extends this concept to the unravelling of events in the story. If you haven’t watched the movie yet, please do. While my intention here is not discussing the science of Arrival, the movie was indeed one of my key motivations to write this post.
Through the study of an alien language, by building a Tesseract, or by some other fancy way, let’s assume that you had access to any part of your life; that you would know what you would be doing and where you would be in ten years; that you would see who your children would grow up to be in their future. What would you do? Would you change things?
Note that this is different from the concept “what has happened will always continue to have happened,” because now it means your future too will happen in some sort of pre-determined way. Arrival ends this conversation in an abrupt, non-controversial way when Dr Louise Banks passively accepts the future that she’s seen. She is not resorting to consciously change any of her actions so that she can design a different future.
Unlike in Arrival, we cannot see into our future. Yet, the belief that our future is pre-ordained looms large in almost all known civilizations.
This school of thought is known as determinism, and has had a signifiant influence in science and philosophy. Put simply, determinism is the belief that all events that happen around and within us (including our thoughts and decisions) are in accordance with a fixed reality that is dictated by the universe.
For example, according to determinists, what you’d eat for breakfast in exactly 365 days from now is already determined, or to be more dramatic, when and how you’d die is already fixed. All you can do is work up to it, albeit unintentionally, by living each moment after the other subject to the order of time.
I find this incredibly demoralizing.
The most disturbing element of the possibility of a determinate universe is the absence of free will it implies. If you are simply a recipient of a predetermined experience, incapable of making one for yourself, would you passively embrace that life? Would you accept to live through your days as that vegetable?
On the other hand, is there really such a thing called free will? Isn’t every one of our actions a product of our experiences, and in some way or the other influenced by external factors?
The debate between determinism and free will is a rabbit hole I wouldn’t go down right now. Indulge if you are so brave and you will find yourself having an existential crisis. But I do want to talk about detrimental effects caused by deterministic ideologies.
The concept of determinism is deeply rooted in our culture thanks to the ubiquity of astrology. Even the Buddhist teaching or Karma draws heavily from the deterministic unravelling of events. In theology, the determinate world is also often attributed to be the work of a divine entity, such as the God of Abraham.
“They too affirmed that everything is fated, with the following model. When a dog is tied to a cart, if it wants to follow it is pulled and follows, making its spontaneous act coincide with necessity, but if it does not want to follow it will be compelled in any case. So it is with men too: even if they do not want to, they will be compelled in any case to follow what is destined.”
– Long & Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 62 A.
If everything we experience was supposed to happen anyway, why bother putting in any hard work, at all?
This passive acceptance of fate is why we still see tricksters making millions off fortune-telling and astrology. It’s why we casually assign to Karma all things that befall us. It’s why we ascribe our accomplishments to the Grace of God. It’s why we accept our failures as destiny, discounting and discouraging genuine effort in the process. It’s why we shy away from responsibility, and it’s why we, especially in Sri Lanka, don’t celebrate individuality and seek validation in the divine instead.
The universe is a vast and intricate place. It’s more elaborate and far expansive than our most creative imaginations. While we surely do not know all its secrets, believing that it operates as a clock wound up in the beginning of time to which we are supposed to “tick” away until the end is rather dehumanizing.
In fact, quantum mechanics has already dealt major blows to the deterministic school of thought. Werner Heisenberg, a pioneer in the field, made a notable contribution to this backlash against determinism when he popularized his celebrated Uncertainty Principle. Based on this principle, which in its most basic sense states that the position and momentum of a particle cannot be simultaneously measured with high precision even with perfect instruments and technique, physicists argue that uncertainty is inherent in nature. This introduces fuzziness (and in my mind, a little more colour and craziness) to the clockwork universe popularized by the likes of Newton and Einstein. It takes away the degrading fait accompli of a determinate universe.
That’s the thing about the future. It fuzzy, and cannot be predicted with certainty.
It’s not a bad time to burn your horoscopes and have faith in yourself.
