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Often in the course of the philosophy of religion, the question of free will vs. determinism is brought up. Typically, the non-religious side claims that every human has complete autonomy and control over him or herself, doing whatever is willed and having unbounded freedom. The religious side usually asserts that there is some omnipotent, omniscient, omni-benevolent deity that has predetermined the path for each and every being in the world, including every human. In other words, each of our lives is fully predetermined and we have no significant control over the path our lives take.

I think that both of these views are too simplistic and too extreme to accurately explain the unique path—and thus the time, space, bodies, and the interactions and relationships between them—that each and every one of the more than six billion people on this planet has. Instead, I’d like to approach this question in a more systematic and mathematical way, keeping in mind that I am talking about an unbelievably complex and intricate system.

It’s a difficult task to convey the sheer size of this system, but a few examples may help. The Matrix put forth the idea of an enormous computer system that controlled human minds and constructed an artificial reality which was supposed to mimic our accepted reality. This is a good example because it is an attempt at describing a system that does indeed encapsulate the entirety of reality, but I think its effect probably falls short for many people that don’t understand the complexity of a contemporary personal computer.

Perhaps, then, a more convincing argument for the lay man will be one that involves direct perceptive experience and incremental construction of the system. Think about the last time you were at an outdoor gathering with masses of people around you. This could be a fair, an airshow, a carnival or theme park, a crowded beach, a convention, or some other mass gathering of people where shoulders are bumped and one has no choice but to move slowly through the crowd, maneuvering around each clump of people. At events like this the number of people ranges from the hundreds to the tens of thousands. Consider then that every single person in that crowd has an individual life, thought process, and unique path that he or she has followed up to the very moment that you meet in that crowd. This is the first layer of the system: a sample of complexity through sheer number of people in a relatively small example.

Just this simple foundation opens up many opportunities for exploration including thought processes, wills, individual actions, physical attributes, etc.; but because we’re talking about determinism (or the lack thereof), we’ll focus exclusively on each person’s life path—the series of actions, decisions, and thoughts that has specifically led each person to the crowd. I don’t think it should take any convincing to argue that every path is unique, but it should be at least mentioned. Now, we will consider a few of these several hundred or thousand paths and how they relate to each other.

Given any single one of these paths alone, we can safely say that it is complex, containing many turns (turning points) and forks (decisions), all leading to the end point in the crowd. Given a second path (also complex by nature), it is apparent to see that both paths meet at least once—at the end point. But there is a probability that these paths have crossed before at some point, say when both people were shopping at the mall and walked by one another. Each of these crossings forms a relationship. Relationships can be as simple as walking by someone to something as intimate as a marriage. Now consider three paths, then four, then five, then ten thousand.

We already observed that each path was necessarily complex on its own, but when combined with thousands of other paths, the resulting system is astronomical in its size and complexity. The pure number of relationships is staggering, nevermind the actions of each individual person and how those actions affected other relationships and directions of other paths. Then realize that this incredible system is not even a significant fraction of the system that emcompasses the social interactions on this planet. Multiply the number of paths by six hundred thousand and envision the number of relationships increasing at a near-exponential rate. Only at this point do we have a mediocre conception of what most of the socio-system of the world looks like.

Now, take this system that is so unbelievably complex that adjectives do not do it justice and call it “S”. From the beginning of our examination we were considering two explanations for the paths that humans lead (or follow): free will and determinism. The inconsistency I see arises when one tries to reconcile either of these notions with S. To explain, I’ll investigate them one at a time.

Free will as I defined it is each individual human’s ability to freely lead his or her own path as he or she wills it. The main problem with this conception is its lack of provision for things in the world that affect the path of the person being considered. In other words, even though a person has free will, his or her path will be largely decided based on factors external to him or herself, telling us precisely that the path of the person is not wholly determined by the person’s own will. Although a person has an ability to change his or her path at many points, the overall shape of the path is not a result of the person’s choices but of the forces around the person exerting their collective “will”. Even if a person drastically changes his or her actions (e.g. moving to Africa in one day on a whim), his or her path will still be shaped by the forces that already exist in the new direction which the person has chosen. This way, no person is ever completely free, but rather has certain points at which free decisions can change his or her position in the system. No decision short of ending one’s path (death) will ever free one from the constraints imposed by the system S, thus demanding a more comprehensive and complex explanation interfacing specifically with S.

Determinism, on the other hand, holds that there is some divine architect of the system and moreover that the same being has predetermined each path like a series of winding, twisting, and intersecting chutes down which marbles will roll. The problems with this conception, in my opinion, are the complexity of S and the apparent free will. We’ve already made an honest attempt at understanding the complexity of S, so we can see that architecting every single path that not only exists, but ever has existed and ever will exist prompts the question: “Why?” The common inclination here would be to claim that S is too complex to have been architected, but a simple move on the determinist’s part to claiming the deity’s infinite nature makes this a moot point. Instead, I ask the more perplexing and interesting question of why S was constructed this way or constructed at all. I see S as too intricate to have any specific purposes and thus move to dismiss determinism as highly improbable due to simple lack of necessity. Nothing is worth the complexity of S, so S must be self-regulating and self-fulfilling.

One could obviously take the discussion from here in many different directions including toward proofs for or against the existence of the Christian God, or the nature of the universe, but I only wanted to illuminate the debate between free will and determinism, explaining why I think neither fits with our beloved system S.