Are we responsible? - Part 2

“[God] is the greatest democrat the world knows, for he leaves us “unfettered” to make our own choice between evil and good, he is the greatest tyrant ever known, for he often dashes the cup from our lips and under cover of freewill leaves us a margin so wholly inadequate as to provide only mirth for himself at our expense…”- Mahatma Gandhi

In my last post I came to an abrupt ending about how God is responsible for everything and we couldn’t hold anybody accountable for their actions as they were pawns in a bigger and grander plan. The theory seemed plausible as it appealed to your abstract mind and it also went along with the delusions which we have come to accept, until I mentioned the serial killer and the paedophile. Suddenly, a Pandora’s Box opened, filled with emotions that engulfed the abstract mind refuting to qualify it.

Let’s revisit the issue again. We established the actual absence of freewill as our decisions would be based on our prejudices, genes, upbringing and many other variables, moreover, the options we choose from, is also not controlled by us leading us to believe there is some higher power that has authority over it.

Is that entirely true? If we look closer at each decision, we realise that the decision to choose between right or wrong still lies with us. If we can decide between right and wrong aren’t we then, partially responsible for our actions? I also talked about how each decision inadvertently becomes a factor for a future decision. Zooming out into a more macro view we can conclude that an eco-system then becomes responsible for its own actions.

Recent research has pointed out that religion and its offshoots were evolved as a necessity for the human race to survive because it set the rules for distinguishing right and wrong and also encouraged to work for the common good rather than for the ‘self’. The common good often included the good of the ecology too. Many civilizations have long perished (ecocide) as a punishment for ignoring the common good.

The question of God’s existence still remains unanswered. Everybody has to have delusions to keep them going, the more deluded they are, they more happier they seem to be, but don’t be deluded by our apparent inability to control the future

“Choose to believe never inherit it”

Are we responsible? - Part 1

Coming from work, you decide to have a chocolate tart. Upon checking your wallet, you find you have just enough for one from the deli down the road. You then walk up to it to find a social activist standing in front of it, asking you to donate money for a cause, in which you, incidentally, believe in strongly. You can either chose to buy the tart or put the money in the tin. The choice is completely up to you. It is your “freewill” to make a decision.

Consider this argument

(1) You do what you do — in the circumstances in which you find yourself—because of the way you then are.

(2) So if you’re going to be ultimately responsible for what you do, you’re going to have to be ultimately responsible for the way you are — at least in certain mental respects.

(3) But you can’t be ultimately responsible for the way you are in any respect at all.

(4) So you can’t be ultimately responsible for what you do.

You can’t be ultimately responsible for the way you are (mentally), because the genes you inherited and the past experiences you have been through, is not your doing. Therein lays the argument between freewill and determinism or in simpler terms, the argument between you deciding your own fate and God charting it out for you.

We believe that we are free to decide between choices. However the choices and the biases we have are the constraints that we can’t control. It’s determined by the billions of decisions made by the millions of creatures throughout time.

Let me elaborate that with the chocolate tart example, you must have felt hungry because you couldn’t eat anything with tea because you had a phone call from your client, who for some reason had decided to call at that particular moment when the tea trolley comes along. The chain could go on like that. The social activist guy decided to stand in front of the deli because of another chain of reasons. His choice of social cause to support is another chain and your inkling to that particular cause is another one (Example: The activist might be rooting to reduce cruelty against dogs because his girlfriend is into it and you might be inclined because you love dogs). There are many other chains of reasons like a cause and effect machine leading to that particular instance where you had to take a trivial decision.

The existence of freewill then becomes questionable. Mankind has attributed the job of determining the choices and creating our biases to God. This explained everything that humans couldn’t fathom and made our lives simpler.

Let’s try to bring some math into the discussion by attributing a variable to a decision. The value of the variable is inadvertently linked to the billions of decisions that led up to that particular decision. To buy the tart, donate the money, or just walk off, can be the most likely values for the chocolate tart problem. However, each decision has a probability component based on your past experiences and prejudices. We may argue that we are capable of taking rational decisions, but Freud came along and proposed that the unconscious has a bit more say in things than we perceived it to have. The existence of such a probability then definitively proves that “freewill” is a tad bit exaggerated.

Since freewill is out of the picture, then by default, God should win this argument hands down. He plans out the entire existence of nature and also makes us think that it was our own idea. Charles Baudelaire once mentioned "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn't exist”. So is God, the devil himself?

If the theory of god being responsible for everything holds water; that implicitly implies that we are not responsible for our actions. We just have to wait out this “menial” existence on earth, which will by any means, progress according to the master plan.

So the serial killer, the pedophile, even Judas all stand vindicated, as they were just pawns for something much more important.

“I believe in God, I just don’t like him”

This a two part essay.. The next part will be uploaded next week