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Finding Meaning in a Deterministic World (Part 2)

Continued from part 1.

Philosophizing is nothing but mental masturbation unless it guides one's decisions. With this in mind, I needed a way to rationalize taking action while believing in determinism. The paradoxical answer I've come up with is: it was predetermined that men would have agency.

All events to come will be played out according to the laws of physics. But this is not mutually exclusive with agency. When one observes two processes or pieces of matter interacting, they can describe one as the causant and the other as the reactant.1 With a flame under a pot of water, the flame is the causant and the water is the reactant. With or without the water in the pot, the flame remains a flame. With or without the flame, the water in the pot turns to gas or stays a liquid. Agency is the state of being the flame.2

Given men have agency, the inner workings of the mind will be a major cause of one's life outcomes. So you can send any "oh determinism means no free will means no reason I should try" ideas packing. That settled, we can question what to do with one's life.

The way I answered that a year ago was to take the least resistance path to what I perceived would bring happiness: weed, surfing, and girls. I have no regrets and the surf lifestyle is certainly better than the lifestyle of the sad lot of office drones in Goolag. But having no regrets does not mean I am happy with the choices I made.

Although men have agency, one is not free from the consequence of one's actions or lack thereof. As much as I enjoyed myself, I felt pain from seeing my btc addy have its UTXO's turn into STXO's.3 In addition to getting poorer I was getting dumber, actively by smoking weed and passively by forgoing intellectual activities such as learning a new language. I knew I was stunting my development, but I did not understand4 to what degree.

Continue to part 3

  1. Please forget your chemistry lingo, I'm making my own words here! []
  2. Since reactions can happen in simultaneous directions, agency is scalar. []
  3. spent transaction outputs. []
  4. Or rather hid from myself []

3 Responses to “Finding Meaning in a Deterministic World (Part 2)”

  1. Diana Coman says:

    Ugh, do NOT make your own words, wtf! Search for the correct words, instead and if you can't find them, learn to search better.

    There's a lot you should know before you can claim that the word does not exist and proceed to extract it correctly in the shape its lack marks all around - as you'd have gotten to know it during all that search for it in the first place...

    Your "causant" and "reactant" derps are most likely trying to be active and passive respectively.

  2. whaack says:

    My diana_coman simulator was ringing alarms when I came up with my own words. As always I should have listened to it. Yes "active" and "passive" would have been fine replacements for the letters I threw together.

  3. [...] whaack 6326 273B 61A7 00AF 4CD9 5A7B 8C6C AB19 24A6 4DEC « Finding Meaning in a Deterministic World (Part 2) [...]

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