Crucible of Uncertainty

Random question: Does free will exist?

Everyone will, or should, say free will exists.

If there were no free will we would cease to function as a society. You couldn't praise those who did good and lifted up the community because the praise doesn't belong to them; they had no control over their deeds. We wouldn't be able to punish those who do wrong. There would be no punishment or rehabilitation because those criminals couldn't be help responsible for what they did; they have no free will.

So for the sake of being good citizens we must all believe that free will exists. That raises the question: Do you believe in free will because you believe it exists or you do you believe free will exists because the belief in free will is inherently tied to life and responsibility?

In other words, do you believe in free will because you do or because you have to?

Do the things we do occur because there is something inherent within all of us that allow us to choose, or is every occurrence due to random chance?

The extremely large and finitely small is a concept that is lost to us in our microcosm. There is a reaction that occurs when you leave sugar out. The sugar will slowly, but surely, break down into CO2 and H2o. The reaction is extremely favorable and will give off a lot of energy. Sugar is more stable as CO2 and H2o. There is an enzyme that catalyzes this reaction. It can take an amount of sugar and convert it within five minutes. The same reaction without the enzyme would take over 9 million years to achieve the same result. The enzyme increase the speed by a factor of 10^14. 10^14 is a number that most anyone cannot fathom. Reactants reacting at such speeds cannot be comprehended. There is nothing to compare it to in the perspective world that we live in.

Who is to say that out of the seemingly infinite possibilities out there, trillion and trillions run their course within a time frame we can't measure? What if everything is spontaneous, that we have no control over anything, but the elimination occurs so swiftly and thoroughly that since their is no delay between thought and action we assume we must have chosen the action?

Take a computer. A computer is built, a computer is made. The end product is dependent on a myriad of variables: where it was built, by whom it was built, when it was built, was it a prototype or conveyor belt computer. On and on. You can see that with each option differing answers will result in a computer that functions very differently. A computer that was built 10 years ago couldn't do a fraction of the things that computer do now. A computer built to be used in an academic setting will never function the same as a gaming computer. You see where I'm going with this?

Creation limits opportunity. The mere act of being created limits your possibilities by an innumerable fold. We are shaped in a huge part simply by when and where we are brought into this earth.

Then there is the other seeming infinite variables that we come across.

Imagine an infinite amount of dominoes forming lines and paths in an infinite amount of directions. We focus on one domino. It falls over. We try and track the line back from the domino to account for it's action. There are an infinite amount of dominoes coming from every direction. There is no way to tell which domino caused ours to fall. To compensate we simply say our domino fell over because it chose to.

This is free will. The culmination and elimination of every possibility hitting and crunching against the barrier until one that is favorable slips through. This is reality.

We can't control the causers before us. We can't control the contents of our birth. And when dominoes from every direction knock us down we can't dictate exactly which one caused the fall. To compensate we invented the concept of free will.