The Infinite Freeway

These recent realizations has been a long time coming, in reality my entire life so far, yet the irreversibility of the journey, the point of no return, I only recently passed. It is a very gradual process as well, but in some weird way I have always known where I would eventually wind up. I knew the end destination, but had no clue as to the route to take. Providence? Yes and no. I think it’s more a case of listening to yourself, quietening the noise around you, getting to know your inner core. This is a very intuitive process which no one can really teach just as no one can actually think for you. Lord knows, it took me a long time to realize this but looking back, knowing what I do now, the answer was right in front of me the whole time and this is where the intuition served as a compass. But finding the route is difficult since it might take a lot of detours to get on track. “Livet må leves forlæns, men forstås baglæns”, as Soren Kierkegaard famously put it. It translates into something like: “Life is lived forward, but understood backwards” and this is something I can now honestly agree with. Life is a sketch, only hinting at what we want it to look like and just when we know enough to finish the image, time is up. This is Milan Kundera’s analogy and recently popped up in my favorite Oscar contender of 2015, Boyhood. As Ethan Hawke’s character puts it to his coincidental son, “adults are just winging it”, we don’t have a template to live by, we just have to deal with life as it happens, basing our decisions on a mix of experience and instinctive intuition. This brings me into the realm of determinism, my new omnipresent non-dictating, passive and all-encompassing religion/philosophy/paradigm/belief system and/or spiritual advisory board. Determinism takes the stress out of life. It realizes the unbearable lightness of human existence vis-à-vis Kundera; it doesn’t really matter what you do in your lifetime, the improvised choices of Boyhood; just make decisions in the here and now, and the retrospective wisdom of Kierkegaard; your journey will only make sense once you’ve reached your destinations (plural as you are always going to be travelling). It also acknowledges the universal clockwork guiding everything which is why I always hesitate in naming myself an atheist, besides the fact that it has become something of a buzzword these days. Because even though determinism requires no belief as such, and only relies on everyday observation as will become evident, it is still determined by forces beyond our personal control, forces that if you wanted to you could perceive as a form of divine force. Carl Sagan said that “science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.” So even though it is sometimes easier to label yourself as an atheist or agnostic and then leave it at that, it is sometimes not what you are actually in essence believing. (Having recently tapped into Richard Dawkins, I’ve learned that this branch of atheism is called pantheism, more on that later!)

At the heart of determinism is of course the many times aforementioned road taken, your own personal legend as Coelho terms it and this essentially is the only legend you have to care about, since it is the only one that you have any degree of control over. To stress my semi-compatibilistic approach to determinism I will draw and expand on an analogy that was originally featured in Escape from the Planet of the Apes and in true determinist fashion entered my world through various random circumstances at the exact right time to make perfect sense. My version of this analogy looks as the road taken as a freeway moving from the past into the future via an infinite number of lanes. Even though this is a one-way street, the driver, i.e. you, has free choice as to when and where to change lanes, speed up or slow down, take an exit or over/underpass, i.e. life choices. It follows however that you can still only choose one route and never reverse to change your route. You can attempt at moving back towards the same area of freeway you veered away from, but always while continuously moving forward. If you take an exit though, you could potentially leave certain areas behind for good. This is the irreversibility I was referring to earlier. At the same time over/underpasses might get you places faster, but in doing so you might reach areas prematurely and lose your way, unable to navigate these strange new areas, jumping in too soon so to speak. Listening to yourself means turning down the radio of the car and not texting while driving so you can concentrate on where you need/want to go and not accidentally miss an exit by staying in the wrong lane. Needless to say, this is tricky, but isn’t that life in a nutshell. Your environment could be heavily trafficked, shielding you and cutting you off, making it harder to pick your desired lanes, these are the obstacles life throws at you from time to time. This is where you sometimes have to cut in front of people and risk upsetting them in order to reach your destination but this is sometimes a necessary evil to avoid being stuck perpetually in heavy traffic, unable to move to where you want. You might be blessed with a fast strong car, making it easier to navigate the freeway or you might be on a bicycle, severely limiting your range of motion. The starting conditions are unfortunately out of your hands, however you can work towards a better vehicle over time. Concordantly, being born into privileged vehicles could also make you lax and unfocused on navigation, potentially crashing your car early on. Sometimes too many choices complicates navigation as I see with Danish drivers all the time.

Obviously putting kids in the backseat will not ease navigation, nor will a front seat driver help. Other people in your car will always complicate navigation, as I will demonstrate in another post. But of course only up until the point where you feel comfortable enough in your navigation and driving skills that you can start picking up hitchhikers, carpool and eventually bring the family, i.e. start one. Traffic and passengers could be the factors that determine the minor adjustments in your driving as long as you don’t miss those crucial exits. This is why I think it’s better to drive fast and determined when you still have more than half a tank of gas and then slow down once you feel like you’ve made significant headway, because eventually we all run out of fuel and die. Finding where you want to go and then how to get there is the tricky part. Following traffic or a GPS might be safe but also limits power to choose your end destinations. If you succeed in tuning out the noise and avoid easy seductive shortcuts and take the challenging if slightly risky route away from congestion I think you will find that the freeway opens up and carries you steadily in the right direction without concern for missing exits as you are now constantly moving in your desired direction. You can then turn the radio back on and maybe even activate cruise control for a while. Should you play it safe however, you might find yourself in a jam stuck with other angry commuters making it exceedingly harder to go anywhere while slowly burning though your gas until you eventually run out, feeling unfulfilled and filled with regret, longing for that exit not taken.

Even so, this analogy demonstrates that you do have power to choose your route even if you consciously take a route that you know might not be right but is guaranteed safer. The risk is that it might eventually land you in a jam, so although it might seem easier from the get go, this route could be treacherous. This is where your intuition comes in. What makes my branch of determinism semi-compatibilistic is this intuitive sense of where you want to go. This intuition might seem like pure instinct, going with your guts, but more and more I think it is guided by your experiences and thought processes up until that point, after all isn’t that what guides all our decisions. Given how these ideas and notions come to us completely random, care of the universal clockwork, given that our very existence, as species and individual animals, is a result of this randomness, isn’t any decision we make just another accumulative effect to this unbreakable series of events. One thing leads to another. This is the key to determinism. But is it pre-determined or being determined in the moment it happens? Both, hence semi-compatibilistic. To be developed...