April 7, 2004

• Ok, well, my last post was philosophy, and this one will be… more philosophy. This isn’t really meant as an air tight philosophy, so much as ideas I've been playing with, but bare with me if you will. I was watching The Matrix: Revolutions the other day, and thinking about the main idea they toss around: that if you could see the motivation behind all choices, you could know the future.

  
  

  I suppose I tend to agree. "Free will," as it's normal called, is seeming more and more to be an empty term to me. It's either some random variance in our decision process, or is based on something. If it's random, then why refer to it in reference to moral accountability, since we are not responsible for a random factor. If it's based on something, then we must look to that thing, and not “free will.”

  
  

  Anyway, the question I was pondering was: why can we almost never see clearly enough to know the future. Haha, in The Matrix, all sorts purport to understand at least enough to see relatively well. My thought is that God is the reason for this. The mystery of him, the unknown, prevents us from perceiving his influence on things. From a more Calvinistic point of view (which I seem to be falling into more and more these days) that influence is grace. All good action we produce comes from God directly, not our own natures. This would fit perfectly with the sense of being free in moral actions, since we certainly cannot understand God's influence on us. So, we think our decisions free, because we cannot understand them. There is a factor we cannot grasp.

  
  

  Until next time. You have no free will:

  
  

  R v B
  R > A
  B > E
  ~A
  :. E

  • 9:47 pm
  • 3 Comments