User:Estimpson

Eric Stimpson

Born: May 29, 1973 to Bill and Joyce Stimpson Birth place: Detroit, MI

Why are you YOU, and me ME? We could have been born any where, in any time, or not at all. And yet here we are, looking at each other, or at least you at me, and me imagining you... I find it impossible to not be utterly perplexed by how this could be so. It is perhaps utterly nonsense to actually wonder why I am me and not you or someone else entirely, and yet I find it such an obvious and inescapable question that to ignore it would be like forgetting to breathe.

I think my own life can best be understood in terms of before and after I came to this existential impasse. Life before the impasse was experienced and dealt with purely in the moment. I saw without being aware that I was seeing. Surely I was inquisitive, but in the sense that I thought behind every question lay a definitive answer. After the impasse, I learned to see every question in life as either unanswerable or trite. More than once this realization played out in what I can only describe as some sort of short-term, complete mental collapse. After the impasse everything seemed nuanced, even sight I recognized was illusory. What seemed exactly like seeing was just that, something which SEEMED exactly like seeing.

Do we have free will? The evidence against is apparent, if not overwhelming. If I were religious, perhaps I'd assume some unique interaction between my spirit, whatever and wherever that actually was, and some portion of my brain, uniquely under the control of my singular spirit, gave me the ability to control my thoughts, and therefore my will. And yet aside from the feeling of free will, which I certainly experience rather vividly, everything in the world aside from the animals of this planet appear bound to a much more mundane truth, they react with their surroundings in perfectly predictable and orderly ways. And even as that becomes complex, as in weather patterns, the resulting chaos is actually remarkably predictable and orderly. Random at time and in ways, sure, but easily distinguishable from directed, controlled, willed.

So absent religious interpretation, which I argue requires a rather stunning suspension of disbelief all of its own, and rather beyond what I consider myself capable of, the question of free will quickly becomes one of whether an illusion of free will, like the illusion of sight and all of other senses, could be so convincing that we'd all experience it as the true nature of our existence, or whether there could actually be a mechanism that would allow us each to more-or-less commandeer one single ship and ride it from dawn to dusk, just once?

I guess I would sum it up this way. I can't think of one logical reason to actually believe that we have free will. And yet, life as I experience it, no matter how illusory, only makes sense to me if I allow myself to fall for the illusion of free will.