Can we choose which path to take?

Great Debates
1

In a couple of threads that I’ve be lurking in, the topic of choice has been used to place responsibility of undesireable results/ behaviours on the person themselves. Obesity, Welfare, Crime, Speech patterns etc are a matter of choice. YOU chose to overeat, YOU chose to drink, YOU chose to spread your legs…nothing else matters except the end result of that choice, including what may have caused you to make that choice in the first place.

There’s always the statement; that person can choose not be a drunk, fat, criminal, uneducated etc; because I or my Uncle Charlie, chose not to and they can too. These people CHOOSE not to avail themselves of all resources available to them and only have themselves to blame for their situation.

On the surface it seems a fair enough statement. You know, be responsible for your choices and humans seem to have a myriad of choices…but do we really?

If Mr. Smith can choose to be an accountant as opposed to a pimp, if Mrs. Jones can choose not to have more children than she can afford to feed then, if little Timmy can choose not to be a street thug, THEN…

I should be able to choose to be a rapist, or a drunk or fat or lazy…but I can’t. I don’t have it in me. It didn’t enter my mind to have sex with my drunk semi-conscious girlfriend back in college. It didn’t occur to me to drink till I was blind everyday, although I come from a family of alcoholics. It didn’t occur to me that I had the choice to use my last token on a subway ride to a job interview or use it to hop on the subway and wait to roll a guy.

Those choices weren’t part of my life experience, they’re not accessible to me. They don’t exist, except in theory.

In this reality, those choices aren’t available to me. Sure in theory, I suppose I could beat my wife, abuse my kids, smoke crack, deal smack and build a tolerance to alcohol; becoming a drunk…but that’s not reality.

Again those other choices simply doesn’t exist for me. If I can’t wake up tomorrow and start dealing crack, then why is it possible for little Timmy to toss aside his 9 and pick up a book; even IF we have personal knowledge of people who have done just that? Does the exception make the rule?

The point to this is, If those bad choices aren’t available to me whether due to good breeding, common sense or good luck, then why would “good” choices be assured to people who we considered having made bad choices?

Can people still choose, when they really have no choice at all?

2

Just because you have a choice doesn’t mean you can make any choice with equal ease. I can choose to either eat a sensible dinner or to gorge myself for five hours at the all-you-can-eat buffet; both choices are available, but one might not be something I’d undertake lightly (I’ll leave you to decide which one’s which :wink: ).

So yes, you have a choice. You always have a choice. Just because some choices are harder to make doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

3

In a theoretical sense, yes, but like the OP was trying to say, the possibility of some choices being actually achievable is virtually nil.

I could choose to try to apply to NASA for a job. My math skills are astonishingly poor, however, and I haven’t even a rudimentary grasp of physics or geometry. Yeah, I could study day and night, but I honestly don’t think it would get me anywhere. I’m just not good at math. There is no way in hell I can ever work at NASA, and even a slimmer chance–if such a thing is possible-- that I could ever be an astronaut.

Nor will I ever be a supermodel, though I suppose I could get some headshots taken, and pointlessly troop to thousands of auditions. I’ll never be a publsihed author, though I did write a book for my own amusement. (It just wasn’t that good.)

Sure, choices exist, but we have to be honest with ourselves sometimes. I’m not pretty enough to be a model, nor am I good enough of a writer to become a published success. Nor am I smart enough to work at NASA. This is not self-deprication, merely honesty. Simply put, our dreams are not always achievable because of our natural limitations.

Take getting a college education, for example. Frankly, not everyone is “college material.” Some people just aren’t very intelligent. I’m not putting them down-- it’s just a simple fact of life. A poor kid who is not terribly bright has little or no chance of getting a scholarship, and if he has no athletic ability, he can pretty much kiss higher education goodbye.

Yeah, he could work his way through school-- assuming he can get a job paying enough to support him and pay his tuition-- but such a thing takes incredible ambition which is certainly not innate. Not everyone was born with a sense of strong determination.

4

There’s a difference between “having a choice” and “reaching your goal,” though.

Everyone can try to be an Olympic-class track and field runner.
No one is promised they will succeed.

5

In this, I think I agree with Karl Marx, who said, in his “18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon”

6

I am of the opinion that you don’t really have a choice - ultimately.
Everything you do in your life from day 1 will affect what you do or decide to do the next day, although not necessarily consciously. Your genes, of course, have a lot of effect on your decisions in life, but they do not alone determine them.
So each decision you make you are “destined” to make.

Now, I’m not talking about pre-destination in a religious sense. Not that a god-figure has already mapped out your life. I consider this a hybrid of free will/predetermination. You do have free will, but your past determines your future actions, not someone who planned it out from the beginning.

7

In the majority of the other threads, the posters who are saying that obesity (for example) is a choice are not saying that it is as simple as that. What they are saying is that, “there are extreme cases where people have _____ problems and as such physically cannot be anything but fat but in 99% of the cases (choose your own percentage), there is a great deal that can be done to not be fat.”*

One poster in the obesity thread (can’t find it though, I thought it was about page 3, but it was ridiculous enough that I believe it to have been a hoax) said that she could go on a diet** but she uses food as a reward for doing good things, as a substitute for friends and as a punishment for not being “good enough.” She doesn’t exercise beccause she is too ashamed of what she looks like to go to the gym and work out in front of other people and has too short an attention span to stay home and use workout videos.

In this case, I believe it’s obvious that the person has chosen to be fat. Yeah, she has problems that are the cause of her lonileness and blah, blah, blah (if you look hard enough, you can use whatever you want to justify your “condition” whatever it is). The end result is she’s fat because she wants to be fat. Or, conversly, that she couldn’t be bothered to do the work to be skinny. Being fat might be unpleasant, but working out and getting on a healthy diet is more unpleasant.

There are thousands of stories of people who have turned their lives around, rags-to-riches, etc. and to a large degree, they are people who made a choice and stuck to it. Of course, not everyone who makes a decision and works towards it succeeds, but people do this sort of things all the time.

I do agree with the Marx quote that the circumstances shape the man as much or more than the man shapes the circumstances.

  • There’s also a huge difference between being big and being fat or obese. A lot of the people who were crying out that they were “naturally” fat or whatever probably weren’t anything other than big, just hypersentisized to it. There are also a lot of times that someone would want to have a lot of fat on them, but that’s another discussion.

** I made a comment about diets not necessarily being starvation/hunger inducing, but no one seemed to pick up on that.

8

Let’s try this again. Today some fool in a semi nearly ran me off the road. I watched him pull into a rest stop. I had the choice to either continue to on work or pull over, follow him into the men’s room and split his skull with a tire iron.

Since it is NOT in my nature to split people’s head open with tire irons, that choice didn’t exist for me. It wasn’t going to happen…ever. I didn’t have to wrestle with it or talk myself out of it.

In other words, that choice wasn’t there and it will never be there; unless we’re talking some tramatic event. But has most people don’t have life altering events, it ain’t gonna happen.

Point being, you will never convince me otherwise and showing me one or two or a dozen commuters who did bash in the skulls of a trucker won’t change me. I don’t have it in me to do the same.

If my logic’s flawed, please correct it.

It seems the height of arrogance to assume that people who live in certain way do so merely out of conscious choice. That they can choose to change, like one clicks on a light switch. Or they have enough inspection to realize that x behaviour is based on “Y” and isn’t normal, especially when everyone else is doing it and reinforcing that behaviour. In reality the odds of such change, at least unassisted are nil and people need to recognize the reality of the world.

That’s not to say that change isn’t possible, but it seems naive or worst to expect people who live a certain way for generations to suddenly see the world without the sins of their fathers…even if we know people who do just that.

I don’t see the difference in realizing that I CAN’T choose to engage in random acts of violence due to whatever shaped me, to that of a person whose life experience does give him that choice, but only that choice.

9

Not to turn this into ANOTHER fat thread…

In college we had a friend who was fat. Every now and then we would make a comment. One weekend a bunch of us went to his house for dinner. His mother made a huge amount of food. We ate our fill and were going to leave the table, when his mother asked us why we hadn’t finished the all the food.

We told her we had, had enough and she looked like we had just spat in her face. I mean, it broke our hearts; so we finished the food AND the dessert. We all considered putting our fingers down are throats we had eaten so much.

The fat comments ended that night.

We just looked at each other asked, “how could he not be fat, living in that house?”

And yes he’s done every diet you can think off…

10

I believe that there is no way that you can possibly make different decisions in life and that every decision that you make is pre-determined. Here is why.

At the beginning of the universe there was a big bang (or maybe not but lets pretend there was). At that one point gas and dust and whatnot was spewed out at whatever rate. Well no matter how complicated the math or physics of the situation was, if you were capable enough of understanding them, you could probably figure out where certain gases would end up and how they would form based on their movement, composition and density, no? I mean lets just pretend that it is possible to understand the the underlying physics of “empty” space and do the math and physics to say what will happen to all of the gases after they explode from the singularity. If you could do this you could plot every single thing that ever happened from that point on. Yes the math and physics are beyond our comprehension, but if there are no outside forces other than the universe itself acting on the universe, then anything is theoretically possible to predict.

The only reason people think that they are making “choices” is because they are aware of themselves and the process that goes into making them act on those “choices”. Any choice you think you are making was already made billions of years ago, you just aren’t aware of it.

11

Whether actual free will exists is an open question.

It is possible our brains are very complicated but at least partially non-deterministic computer in which a stochastic element to calculation is inherent in its operation. A “Probabilistic Turing Machine” is somewhat similar, conceptually.

To what extent quantum phenomena contribute to this non-deterministic model is not known with any certainty, because it is not known how important the uncertainty principle is to the basic function of our brain. On the face of it, probably not very, given the size of the computational units, and the warm, dense environment they operate in, but there may be subtle effects.

At any rate, this non-determanism could have chaotic results; and if those chaotic results are at some level derived from quantum phenomena, than our behavior is fundamentally probabilistic.

If that’s the case, even an intelligence posessed of all the information about the universe any given time (the state of every particle in the universe) cannot predict with certainty what we will do years down the road; it could only provide the likelihood that we would do some or other thing.

So, you could say that from the outset we will be more likely to do one or other thing, but there might never be certainty about what we would do. Worse (for the infinite intelligence, operating somewhat like a Deist God), there would never be any certainty about how far from the likely path we would stray at any given juncture. Hence we could wind up in wildly different places than predicted from the starting point.

Maybe to our conscious mind, this feels like we are making a choice. For all intents and purposes, that’s what we’re doing. We may essentially be free agents; but not free in the way our intuition tells us, but rather free in that we observe ourselves more-or-less randomly bouncing around, and record this phenomenon as “choice”. It makes little difference in the end. Effectively, if this is the accurate model, we’re on our own.

12

No. This Newtonian concept of determinism (“The Clockwork Universe”) was shredded to bits by quantum theory. The uncertainty principle is the death knell for predestination.

“all the information about the uiniverse” is incomplete. You cannot know everything there is to know about anything, at least on a subatomic level. The more you identify one aspect, the the more uncertain you cause another aspect to become. I’m pretty sure you’re stating this, but the quoted phrase gave me pause.

13

Well, I think it’s possible to know the state of every particle in the univese within the limits of uncertainty. But you can only know how the system will evolve in a probabilistic way. I guess the way some people express it is to say you can know, based on the measured state of every particle, what the wavefunction of the universe is. What you can’t say is what state the wavefunction will collapse into when you measure it again, only the possible values of this state. You certainly can’t know what’s going on when you’re not looking, and worse, every time you look, it affects the system in a way you can’t predict exactly. It’s correct to say that because you can’t know everything about the present, you can’t know everything about the future. However, given what is knowable you can say how probable anything in the future is, if you measure the state, and you know the wavefunction. This is a weakened form of determinsm, called quantum determinism. But within those limits, “free will” of a sort is preserved.