Pre-determinism, Freedom and Suicide...

Some thoughts, been reading Sartre. I’m not talking about the theistic or non-theistic notion explicitly because I will simply disregard the theistic concept at the start. In a godless universe there is no god to predetermine or predestine things.

Everything we do, or say, all our actions, some people believe are pre-determined by some past or future chain of events. This is a somewhat true description of our actions but only to a small degree.

First of all, it is true that everything we do is a natural reaction to some stimuli as processed by the brain by millions of neurons firing off and internal drugs altering our bodily processes. So, if everything is a nervous reaction to some stimuli, we might as well believe that determinism exists. But, one thing we are leaving out here is that there are an infinite number of external stimuli that we could be exposed to, and if we can have a different reaction to each distinct stimulus then, it follows, there are an infinite number of ways in which we could act or react due to or to different stimuli.

When we accept this, the whole idea of determinism breaks down.  If there are an infinite number of unpredictable stimuli we could be subject to, and our actions are defined by our cranial reactions to the stimuli, there is no determinism. If we could live for a million years, we could do different things, perform distinct actions every day and not have an exact repeat of any incident.

This is the other thing that makes man free.

To reiterate what I said on a previous post - We are a collection of vibrating atoms amongst an infinite number of atoms and that is precisely why we are free, these vibrations don’t have any pre-determined settings, they are free to vibrate and react to other vibrations around them, producing random results. Once we realize that everything is us and we are everything and our actions are not defined by any set of universal absolutes then we are free to do anything.

Of course we have physical limitations on our actions, but that in itself does not have anything to do with the fact that in every situation we can make distinctly differing decisions, because in any situation we don’t want to be in or are seemingly out of options, we have at least one other option – suicide. The existence of the choice of suicide is very vital to human freedom and a huge blow to pre-determinism.

The simple existence of the choice of suicide at every point in time in anyone’s life proves that we always have another option, - we can escape any situation by suicide. If life was pre-determined and our life’s “pathways” were already laid down, we would not have this opportunity. And in a pre-determined universe, we couldn’t commit suicide and escape any situation until the death by suicide itself was determined or predicted by some external force or chain of events. In a pragmatic sense it is certainly true that most of the time when people commit suicide it is due to some chain of events – some bad things that happened in their life. But this does not take anything away from the fact that we have this choice at every point in time while we are alive. This demonstrates that we are free to choose even if under certain circumstances it does not appear so.

We cannot be free in a pre-determined universe. We are free and nothing is pre-determined – my actions today or tomorrow, what I say or do to you – I have the freedom to decide all these things. The concept of pre-determinism is not only false; it does not make sense in a free universe.