"So divinely is the world organized that every one of us, in our place and time, is in balance with everything else."
Goethe
Here I am lying in bed yet again unable to sleep because my mind refuses to cease to think. I think about philosophy and I think about chaos. I appreciate chaos. I appreciate randomness and spontaneity. My life appears to be chaotic. Take my environment for example, my room is a mess, my car is a mess, my education is a mess, my finances are a mess, and at the center of it all is me. The chaotic mess I call my life revolves around me, constantly, without fail. Like an atom, all aspects of my life are part of it. My room is an electron, my car-a neutron, my education- a proton, my finances- I don’t know, another electron. And at the center of it all, is me, the nucleus. The point is, all these things are scurrying around the nucleus in their own direction, but always orbiting the atom. This is organized chaos.
When thinking about the philosophy of chaos versus that of my own, I embrace much confusion. My philosophy on life, on everything, is based solely on the concept of balance. I find myself asking, “Can balance even exist in chaos?” I tell myself no, naturally, there is no balance in chaos. Then I ask myself, “What exactly is chaos? What exactly is balance?” I look this up, and find that chaos does not originally mean ‘disorder’ as we have come to define it, but in its Greek origination, it meant rather, ‘unpredictable’. Balance is what it is to have opposites that are completely different from each other but that coexist in unison, making the difference of one entity balance that of its counterpart. To have balance is to be alike, even in difference.
Not only do I believe in balance, but I believe in the idea of fate. I believe that every living person, every object, every idea; everything in its existence has a purpose. And what is fate? Fate, or destiny, is the idea that there is a fixed or natural order to the universe. This means that not only does our future have a purpose, but that it is predetermined for us. Not only does this fate affect us, but it affects every other person and thing in this universe. This idea is often referred to as the butterfly effect. Not only has this idea always fascinated me in the theory of quantum mechanics, but also when I apply it to other aspects of life. The term butterfly effect comes from the theory that if a butterfly were to flap its wings, it would make tiny changes in the atmosphere that may ultimately create (or prevent) a tornado. Though the flapping of the butterfly’s wings is just a small change, when taking place in a larger system, it will cause a change that will set the course of events for large scale phenomena. Whereas, in the event the butterfly had not flapped its wings at that precise time and location, the trajectory of the system may have been completely different. This effect also has another name, known as the chaos theory.
As in the movie I Heart Huckabees, there are ultimately two basic theories of philosophy. One is that everything is connected. And the other, is that nothing is connected (chaos). We would think that if nothing is connected, that nothing matters. Our actions would be irrelevant. If both destiny and chaos exist, than what use would we have for morals, ethics, or civility, if the application of them makes no difference in the outcome of things? This is something to think about.
But first, back to the chaos theory…
The interesting thing about the chaos theory is that it is not chaotic at all under our standard definition. In the situation of the butterfly, it would appear to be disorderly because the butterfly operates under free will. The affect of the butterfly’s motion may or may not be relevant, depending on what the butterfly chooses to do.
So now that I know that chaos isn’t really disorder at all, but rather, unpredictability, I bring free will into the equation. The next question is, “Can free will co-exist in a chaotic environment, where the future is all ready predetermined through destiny?”
I have chosen to write this, no one forced me to. Had I not met someone who had gotten me further interested into the idea of philosophy, would I not have asked these questions? In that case I may have not written this. The course of my life thus far has led to the psychological events which has led me to write this. Not only did one event lead to the writing of this, but many events did, many events which could have been affected by other events as well. A system of linear events is orderly, but a non-linear system, though still deterministic, appears to be less orderly as there is a higher probability of differentiation.
For example, each choice that we make is a cause and each cause has an effect. I think of it in terms of dominoes. Whereas the force I apply to the first domino in pushing it forward (cause), sets the course of events that will lead to the falling of each domino thereafter (affects). But the problem with this is that life isn’t linear, life is a network of choices.
The compatibilist definition of free will states that free will is not the ability to choose independent of prior cause, but as an agent who is not forced to make a certain choice. Compatibilists, being determinists, argue that all acts that take place are predetermined by prior causes. This means that all the events of our past, lead us to make a certain choice, we have the ability to choose something else, but that fact is that we won’t, because past causes have led us to make a specific choice. For example, I could have the choice to go camping, but due to my past experiences with camping, though I have the choice, it is inevitable that I choose not to. If you want to look at fate through a cliché lens, hypothetically speaking let’s say that the woods I could have chosen to go camping in caught on fire, and all the campers died a fiery tragic death. You could say that my bad experiences previously in camping, though irrelevant at the time, were a result of fate, because it was not my destiny to die in that specific fiery incident.
Back to the theory of free will in comparison to dominoes…A simple example would be this lame diagram I composed. Though in any given situation there may be multiple even infinite choices.
Simply speaking let’s say that there are two choices, yes or no, you can choose yes or you can choose no, but either way it is inevitable that they always come back to the same conclusion. Everything is networked together, so that no matter what path you choose, in operating your free will, the outcome is deterministic, and will thus be the same.
In the movie The Butterfly Effect the idea is whether or not, if the means to do so were possible, you can change the course of fate. The character is essentially trying to not only cheat death, but cheat destiny. Though he goes back in time again and again and makes a different decision in different situations, fate still realigned itself to manifest its initial path. This is also the same idea in the Final Destination series. Death is the perfect example of deterministic chaos. Though you have free will, and can make any choice you chose, the fact that you are going to die, a certain way at a certain time, is inevitable. There is no choice in death, this is our ultimate fate.
These are the conclusions I’ve come to.
The future is predetermined but still chaotic because to the unknowing human mind it is still unpredictable. We cannot predict our future, and therefore it will remain random and chaotic until it unfolds
The universe is a network of organized chaos. In it every thing, every particle, creature, thing, every noun that you can thing of is connected. As Dustin Hoffman explains in I Heart Huckabees, everything is connected. He uses a blanket to represent all the matter and energy in the universe, everything in existence is part of it.
Me
You
The challenger explosion
Scented crayons
Bowling balls
Spam
Old Richard Simmons workout videos
The 3rd amendment
All these things, though different, are essentially the same.
“There is no remainder in the mathematics of infinity.”
For now I think I’ve solved the majority of questions that have been puzzling my mind. Even though this all may seem pointless, there is no greater question in existence than simply, “Why?”
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