We were studying Brownian motion in school. Some experiment or other which demonstrated the model led me to contemplate determinism, I extrapolated the cause and effect, the predictability, of one molecule encountering another to a person, to the world, to the universe and to the whole of creation.
Tim and I would sit together at a bench. He dismissed my thoughts, after all he was a fervent Christian and in my conception of things there is no place for a soul.
I have thought about determinism ever since. I believe it is a philosophy with many followers but I am not sure and keep meaning to buy a book about it. It is amusing to apply the notion of predestination that it implies to morality, to social behaviour. The concept of free will collapses only to be reinstated when it's understood that it's nothing more than the way we live, a reflection of the way in which we think, and therefore retains all of the qualities that it always had, at least almost all of them. In other words, it doesn't matter if you see any given action as the result of a myriad of electrical impulses in the body, exchanges between cells of proteins and enzymes and all of the other, near infinite number of processes both within and externally, or as a result of a 'conscience choice,' it's all the same.
I wrote a song about it, as a matter of fact, called 'Impulses and Motivations.' I have made a video as well, which will be on Youtube one day, but it is taking forever to find the right people at the right time to finish it, it has been well over a year. In fact, I only have ten more seconds of footage to film but I am very pleased with it. It features bees and Dino hatching eggs and spiral staircases and ominous trains and everything.
Tim, who now works with Microsoft, a young Tory and an ardent Protestant, was haughty and pretentious. He was one of the only boys in our comprehensive school who would use a briefcase and on this particular day, the day of the Brownian motion class, I was whiling away time by changing the combination of the lock on it. I had discovered that you could feel which number was the correct one very easily but, unfortunately, it turned out that my method wasn't foolproof. Tim had a tantrum when I realised that the case was locked but I didn't know the correct combination. For my carelessness I had to carry the case all the way home in the summer sun, a journey of two miles, it became heavier and heavier. Finding the correct combination of the nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine possibilities took forever and made my fingers sore.
Tim and I would sit together at a bench. He dismissed my thoughts, after all he was a fervent Christian and in my conception of things there is no place for a soul.
I have thought about determinism ever since. I believe it is a philosophy with many followers but I am not sure and keep meaning to buy a book about it. It is amusing to apply the notion of predestination that it implies to morality, to social behaviour. The concept of free will collapses only to be reinstated when it's understood that it's nothing more than the way we live, a reflection of the way in which we think, and therefore retains all of the qualities that it always had, at least almost all of them. In other words, it doesn't matter if you see any given action as the result of a myriad of electrical impulses in the body, exchanges between cells of proteins and enzymes and all of the other, near infinite number of processes both within and externally, or as a result of a 'conscience choice,' it's all the same.
I wrote a song about it, as a matter of fact, called 'Impulses and Motivations.' I have made a video as well, which will be on Youtube one day, but it is taking forever to find the right people at the right time to finish it, it has been well over a year. In fact, I only have ten more seconds of footage to film but I am very pleased with it. It features bees and Dino hatching eggs and spiral staircases and ominous trains and everything.
Tim, who now works with Microsoft, a young Tory and an ardent Protestant, was haughty and pretentious. He was one of the only boys in our comprehensive school who would use a briefcase and on this particular day, the day of the Brownian motion class, I was whiling away time by changing the combination of the lock on it. I had discovered that you could feel which number was the correct one very easily but, unfortunately, it turned out that my method wasn't foolproof. Tim had a tantrum when I realised that the case was locked but I didn't know the correct combination. For my carelessness I had to carry the case all the way home in the summer sun, a journey of two miles, it became heavier and heavier. Finding the correct combination of the nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine possibilities took forever and made my fingers sore.
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