Dear Jon (I honestly hope you don't get that reference),
Since you're in the future, and you remember just about every significant event in the past, can't you predict my future and give me some sound advice (what to avoid, missed opportunities, ect.)
- JPS (2011)
One week in, and you're already making demands?
ReplyDeleteWell, as a matter of fact, I have tried on several occasions to change our lives. While it doesn’t disrupt the space-time continuum - or something equally tragic - I cannot enable you to cheat the system of life.
First of all, I have since stopped trying as a courtesy to you. I want you to experience what I did, the way I did. I want you to be surprised. I want you to be shocked. I want you to impress yourself, and disappoint yourself all the same. To dole out your future like a fortune-teller would be to essentially spoil the story of your life.
But even if I was willing, nothing I write here would have any lasting effect over your decision-making. That is because I am infringing on your ability to make choices. This is best explained as an example:
Let’s say that I travel back in time to an important moment in our life - a sales pitch at a restaurant, for perhaps. By observing this event after the fact, I would already know exactly how you are going to dress, what you will say in your pitch, and how you’ll say it. I’d know exactly what you were going to order, how it would be prepared, and what beverage you’d choose to wash it down. And I would know whether the executives would appreciate or reject your ideas, well before they are ever presented to them.
With that in mind, consider if I was to sit down near your table (disguised, of course), and were to watch as a waitress offers you a mint candy after dinner. I would (from my perspective) already know that you are going to take it. But if I already knew, how could you ever make a choice?
There are several possible answers. From a biochemical standpoint, choice is simply an illusion; a chemical process in the brain, realigning and readjusting to different environs and stimuli. And like all chemical reactions - fire, explosions, oxidation, evaporation - under the same conditions, the brain will arrive at the same conclusions at a precise moment, time and time again.
This concept, however, doesn’t seem to account for how I am able change your environment by affecting the past. If I warned you in passing about the mints being poisoned, or knocked the tray from the waitress’ hand, or detonated your car in the parking lot, chances are that you would no longer be in the position to make the same choice.
However, I haven’t allowed you to choose against taking the mint in the end, because I have changed the circumstances, and through that I have removed the original decision altogether. Your choices have been changed from: whether you desire a mint, to: whether you want to be poisoned/eat mints off the ground/watch your car burn.
(I want to point out that this is an extremely simply decision, that has no dramatic effect on our lives.)
Choice, I suspect, is far more than an illusion, but whether it exists depends entirely on where you’re coming from. From my clairvoyant perspective, you have already made all the choices you are going to make up until my time. In that sense, every event in your life has already happened from my point of view. But to you, living in the moment, these choices are unraveling in real-time. That is because while your choices have already been made (from my viewpoint), you are only aware of the choices that you have come to understand at that point in time.
It’s simply a matter of perspective.
@Jon Present: Sounds like he doesn't want you to have nice things when you grow up.
ReplyDelete@Jon Future: Choice may only exist in the moment of its occurrence.
Imagine that, I become a better writer when I grow up.
ReplyDeleteJPS (2011)
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