Thinking deeply is going to shatter my fragile little psyche one of these days.
It's true. I'm eventually going to hit upon a concept that my pitiful, three-dimensional mass of neurochemical signals simply cannot contain, and my brain will simply explode inside of my skull. Nobody will know what happened, but they'll always wonder.
I'm a fatalistic person. That is, as fatalistic as a believer in free will can be. But given the mathematics of any given event, an overarching course of possibilities and outcomes will become readily apparent should the viewer fully comprehend every nuance of the aforementioned event. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that math could be used to plot the course of any event that could possibly happen. Of course, that understanding of math is so far beyond me at the moment that I get a little light-headed simply thinking about it. Perhaps that's what it means to be God - to be so goddamned good at math that you can say with a rather high level of certainty what will happen in any given situation.
But in the end, I believe that the choice ultimately lies with man, regardless of any formulae to the contrary. Even so, I often wonder about just how different my life could be if I'd made a different decision somewhere along the way. For instance, I told a girl in the third grade that I liked her; she rejected me. Let's say this gave me a complex (and I'm not really saying it didn't, <.<) and affected my decisions for the next ten years (which it probably has). But let's say I didn't tell her. Let's say I waited until I developed the confidence to where such rejection wouldn't bother me, and wouldn't color my dealings with anybody, ever. My life'd be very, very different.
Now, I often contemplate whether I can reconcile my belief in free will with my belief that "things happen for a reason." I don't think such reconciliation is really very difficult to bring about - it's still a matter of individiual choices, as it always was. I make the choices I make for a reason, but the choice is still ultimately up to me. Perhaps it's just a matter of realization of a larger picture; whether I choose to have orange juice or apple juice is, in the end, irrelevant, because the universal timeline will ultimately hit the same terminus. The big picture stays the same because no one action, regardless of how large such an action would appear to mankind, is large enough to make a dent in the timeline already laid-down by a higher consciousness, sentient or not. Rather like a line that appears jagged up close that smooths out once seen from far enough away.
I'm a fatalistic person. That is, as fatalistic as a believer in free will can be. But given the mathematics of any given event, an overarching course of possibilities and outcomes will become readily apparent should the viewer fully comprehend every nuance of the aforementioned event. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that math could be used to plot the course of any event that could possibly happen. Of course, that understanding of math is so far beyond me at the moment that I get a little light-headed simply thinking about it. Perhaps that's what it means to be God - to be so goddamned good at math that you can say with a rather high level of certainty what will happen in any given situation.
But in the end, I believe that the choice ultimately lies with man, regardless of any formulae to the contrary. Even so, I often wonder about just how different my life could be if I'd made a different decision somewhere along the way. For instance, I told a girl in the third grade that I liked her; she rejected me. Let's say this gave me a complex (and I'm not really saying it didn't, <.<) and affected my decisions for the next ten years (which it probably has). But let's say I didn't tell her. Let's say I waited until I developed the confidence to where such rejection wouldn't bother me, and wouldn't color my dealings with anybody, ever. My life'd be very, very different.
Now, I often contemplate whether I can reconcile my belief in free will with my belief that "things happen for a reason." I don't think such reconciliation is really very difficult to bring about - it's still a matter of individiual choices, as it always was. I make the choices I make for a reason, but the choice is still ultimately up to me. Perhaps it's just a matter of realization of a larger picture; whether I choose to have orange juice or apple juice is, in the end, irrelevant, because the universal timeline will ultimately hit the same terminus. The big picture stays the same because no one action, regardless of how large such an action would appear to mankind, is large enough to make a dent in the timeline already laid-down by a higher consciousness, sentient or not. Rather like a line that appears jagged up close that smooths out once seen from far enough away.