Free from free-will

Okay kids, time to learn, and time for me to be a fucking nerd. Ya know, I gave a speech on free will vs. determinism in my speech class... Half the class was looking at me like i was talking about the wave-collapse function of a quark (har har!), the other half looked like they wanted to just hand me their fucking ears. But whether you give a shit or not, I say you should. This shit is liberating for me.

We go around thinking that everybody is completely 100% purely fresh-sqeezedly responsible for what they do. This is completely an illusion. Life can only play out one way, everything else is just a possibility. Some people realize this and call it Fate, but that's making it seem like there was some kind of planner. The planner turns out to be luck.

A roll of the die seems random, but upon a closer look, every edge of the die hits the the table at a precise angle, every atom is shaken in the very same way. From the start to the finish, it was determined to land on the number it was bound to land on - as if the entire process was a mathmatical equation with with the face of a die slapped on it. Sorry to break it to you folks but we're the very same way, just slap on some skin. How can we not be? Existance can only unfold in two possible ways. Either it could unfold in complete random chaos, where nothing is determined, or it can unfold precise, determined down to the very last atom. If nothing was determined, we'd be nonexistant soup. We're obviously not soup, so existence is determined.

Everything comes down to heredity and environment, and these two elements combined make up every slice of reality. The hand you're dealt is either lucky or unlucky. If life can only play out one way, with every other possibility being just that - a possiblity, how can anyone really be blamed for what they do? Everything comes down to the roll of the die.

It's a hard concept to swallow but it must be, however most people will have their cake and eat it to. Some would like to believe in fate and free-will, without realizing the two aren't compatible. We can look back at auto accidents and say "oh well, shit happens", yet separate the car from the person and all of the sudden they're 100% morally responsible for their actions. Why should "morally" even come up in the first place? An auto-accident is the outcome of a precise matter of cause and effect, but so is human behavior, the same holds true are our actions. This means, there is no such thing as a "murderer", just a brain that is determined by a series of cause and effect events that performed an act of murder. The act of murder was transient event, it's symbology crumbling thereafter. This is not to say that a murderer should not be locked up. Incarceration serves its structural purpose by keeping the "unlucky" ones away from the rest of society. But if the happenings of a child, who "unknowingly " pulled the trigger on another child is looked on as an passing of unfortunate events, when is it ever not? Bad luck is in the air when misfortune takes place but it's luck all the same - and if luck is exactly what it sonds like, luck, when can we ever escape it?

It is our mistake to think our future is undetermined, as if life could unfold to be anything but a linear chain of cause and effect. Our future may seem indetermined, but it is only unforeseen. If our past is determined, so is our future. Free-will is merely an illusion as we stand on the crux of our past and future. With unabashed ignorance we think that while everything is determined, we live somehow undetermined. The wisest of us all will look back upon the pieces of our history and realize that every regret exists in futility, and every resolve to change was determined by our past. Those who have shed the absurdity of free will realize that while we live as our choices are indetermined, intellect could provide greater insight. Then there are those who insist, that although the past wouldn't have turned out any other way, the future will be an exception. This is only a testement to the resilliance of the human mind, to fool itself so successfully into thinking that perhaps there are shades of grey to be found inbetween determined and indetermined events, and this shade if grey is free will. There is either determined or indetermined. So what is it, determined, or nonexistance?