It Seems We Have a Choice

I had a dream the other night, one of those that turned the world inside out. Awake, I pay attention to anything that might be important, ignoring the rest and making decisions based on what I know and feel.

In the dream, I became aware of every effect linked to its constellation of causes, which were effects of other causes, and so on in regression to the beginning and progression to the end. Imagine knowing all the whys and wherefores always and forever. 

Just a dream, but I recognize this transcendent perspective as the root of determinism, an idea that I reject as an excuse for irresponsible behaviour, as if any choice is already decided, all reality laid out in a four dimensional map, no need to obsess, just go with the flow and be whatever comes your way. Whatever you decide, that was the plan.

I have wrestled with this notion before and never held it down for the count because it is one valid dimension of a larger truth, that free choice is real but not absolute.

Free choice is real, I think, at least as real as the value of a five dollar bill. You might argue that the value of a five dollar bill is illusory. It's just plasticized paper. But you have to admit that there are places around here in 2023 where you can trade $5 for coffee and a muffin, and that feels real. On the other hand, the value of a five dollar bill is subject to any number of influences that will change it into something else. Next year, depending on inflation, it might buy the coffee but no muffin, or if the plantations are in drought, then no coffee either. At the end of things, a fiver will become just another piece of persistent human detritus lost in the mess left in defiance of the second law.

Just so, free choice has meaning here and now, as does determinism. The miracle within which we exist is that we may make something yet undetermined out of that predetermined freedom. Coffee and a muffin or a gift to a beggar, we have a say in what happens next, and so we go on wrestling with mysteries we will never understand, doing our worst or our best or just getting by.

I've used a lot of words to say what other's have said more simply. Harry Adaskin, putting his bet down on free choice, once said, "If you do a thing a certain way, you get a certain result." Another writer (I can't remember who) objected that when things go wrong it isn't necessarily because you did something wrong, and if they go right it isn't necessarily that you did something right, allowing room for multiple causes beyond control as in my dream. And it's true: determined and free we are both free and determined.

You may recall the butterfly effect, a phrase used by the mathematician Lorenz as a metaphor for the consequences of minor alterations on chaotic systems such as storms. Human society is such a chaotic system, full of examples of the butterfly effect.

Consider gentle Jesus, one itinerant rabbi among many, teaching love for all including enemies, demonstrating generous compassion for the disadvantaged, forgetful of self, forgiving of others, offering his story royalty-free to a chaotic future. Disciples of Jesus have remembered him here and there; for example, our happy nun who spent her days feeding the homeless and embracing everyone. Others, over the centuries, have reimagined Jesus as champion of wealth, power, war, genocide, care for self and indifference for the rest.

When clear intention may yield such contrary results, why would we choose one path over another? This question presents what I call The Flutterby Defect: life flitting past while we act as if nothing matters. The alternative is that everything matters.

Perhaps everything matters, 

every tentative tremor 

of our flightless wings 

reaching for the sky 

while we learn to fly.

It seems we have a choice.

Then shall we live a life at ease
and watch it flutter by,
or join endangered species
like a dusky butterfly?

And if the winking stars can find
direction in the night,
shall we not trust with heart and mind
the source of love and light,
and brave the chaos to be kind 

and gentle while we might?

For it seems we have a choice.