in which a review of my kitchen table in the context of free will. or possibly the other way around.

I was looking at my kitchen table a little while ago, and it got me to thinking about free will.

When I look at my kitchen table, sometimes it occurs to me that it doesn’t really exist. What I see as a kitchen table is really just a collection of various sorts of stuff which itself is surrounded by various sorts of nothing. Mostly, there’s just nothing.

When you think about it, this is true of most things.

Free will, for example.

It’s very possible that there’s no such thing. It’s very possible that, in the same way my kitchen table is not really as solid as I perceive, the concept of free will might well be less solid than we imagine. It’s very possible that only at our scale of reality, in the world of our perceptions, can we imagine that such concepts as kitchen tables and free wills exist.

Some people find this distressing. They think that if a study reveals that free will doesn’t exist that it will mean free will doesn’t exist. It scares them to think of a world in which there is no choice. But that’s not what it would mean if we discovered free will doesn’t exist. Anymore than it would mean that kitchen tables don’t exist. Science proved the non-existence of kitchen tables ages ago but, for the most part, the world carries on pretty much the same as it always has. At least when it comes to kitchen tables.

Whatever happens, I imagine that it’s probably best to go along believing in the notion of free will in the same way that I believe in my kitchen table. Just because something doesn’t make sense in one reality, doesn’t mean it becomes meaningless across all realities. That’s not how reality works. A lot of the truths we cling to are only true from a certain point of view.

If tomorrow I adopted the point of view that my kitchen table didn’t exist, for example, then I would be faced with the decision of where to put my coffee.

 

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ttfn.