Thursday, April 15, 2010


Has What Has Happened Had To?


There is no such thing, I've lately come to feel, as the inevitable. The factual assumption that something was unavoidable because otherwise it would have been avoided is now for me a flawed proposition. It's much like saying that if it could have been, it would have been. Or if it hasn't happened, that's because it couldn't have happened - not yet being possible in the "now" of its yet to be fully written destiny.


Except that in tomorrow's "nowness" our destined somethings must continue to be born and flourish - so that tomorrow's inevitability can and will have derived its certainty from what was only possible today. And the day after tomorrow will predictably find a newer version of the inescapable revelations of certainty's evolving role in nature.


What's involved here is/was a basic assumption that the universe is lawful and obeys its laws without question - thus inherently predictable via the concept that unquestioned laws are unquestionably compliant. Random events always reduced to mere surprises from the unknown natural mechanisms that logic has told us must certainly exist somewhere in the cosmos to cause our wonder.


But if that logical assumption is flawed, so is the logic fashioned to fit its implications. Because for one thing, by some unknown reason, we've been given or acquired choices - not in my view needed (even as illusions) if laws that regulate causation are unquestionably reliant. Which makes me think again about the predictability function of these things we describe as laws, and to suspect that, reliable as they are, they will not guarantee that equal causes will have exactly equal effects if at the same time we accept that there is some level of indeterminacy in the universe.


Leaving us with a system that operates with perhaps the highest degree possible of probability, yet to at least the smallest degree short of a certainty. And so I've come to doubt, and effectively disbelieve, the proposition that the inevitable is such because it's truly unavoidable.


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And let me add the following as somewhat relevant to the above:


Would not a deterministic universe require all reactions to forces be theoretically predictable to a mathematical exactitude? And that once started, the progress of causative events could not vary one iota from that "time" to the end or endlessness of that universe's time, if either such an eventuality could have been destined to occur?


So in a deterministic universe, where the future effects of any causative event would never be in doubt, no predictive mechanism would seem needed absent of "doubters" evolving first to then fashion some calculative apparatus to maintain stability within an heretofore automatic process. Yet such selective mechanisms are here with us, and if, as some claim, illusory as to purpose, there'd be even less reason for their tangible forms to follow their illusory function.

It's as if somehow the illusion was needed of an indeterminate course in nature so as to preserve the secret from the expected inhabitants of that universe that they were making seemingly necessary choices for no reason except the need for them to believe that to exist at all, such decisions were necessary. (Some trickster god at work perhaps?)


So then is the supposedly pre-directed universe, its causative process without need for intentionality to sustain its effectiveness, nevertheless concerned with deliberately misinforming its formative mechanisms that direction and purpose must be decided by the mechanisms themselves? Doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense as an evolutionary prerequisite. Determinism not making a hell of a lot of sense in turn.