I just turned 23 years old. The most pressing question about this time in life is what you want to do in it. Follow some passion? Make an impact on something? Earn lots of money and chill? Almost every time I sit trying to answer the question, I always end up wondering ‘In the end does it even matter?’
Paradox of free will/Determinism
Growing up, most of what we study of science in school is deterministic. In other words, we study the universe how it works and try to formulate it in mathematical equations which then we use to predict the future. This gives rise to philosophical idea of Determinism, i.e., given complete knowledge of the state of each and every particle in the universe at a point in time and how they react with each other, one can precisely predict the state of universe at any time in the future or past. The time along with free will loses its meaning. Because as the future is already determined, it shouldn’t really matter on what you do right now; or even what you do right now isn’t dependent on what you think; or even what you think right now isn’t really in your control and so on. The whole concept of individualism and making an impact, making huge life changing decisions seems moot. Is that it? What we do in life is not really a choice and that’s why it doesn’t really make sense to sit and think about it? Well not that fast.
Quantum Mechanics – Hope
The well known Schrodinger’s cat comes to the rescue. For those who don’t know what a Schrodinger’s cat is, its a cat in a closed box which is simultaneously dead and alive until we open the box to see its state, i.e, it is not deterministic. In other words, if you repeat the experiment multiple times with the exact same initial apparatus, the cat is alive in some cases and dead in some. So this cat represents the behaviour of fundamental particles according to quantum mechanics. For people who didn’t understand a thing, quantum mechanics just defines a world where you never can predict the future in a perfect manner. The most famous scientist in our generation, Albert Einstein quoted “God doesn’t play dice” and was seemingly not happy with this development, while on the other side I think we should be grateful for it as this give us some kind of hope that some combination of this fundamentally random particles gives rise to free will in ourselves thus making the decisions we make on what to do with our life all the more important and thus thinking about it meaningful. These videos by Veritasium and Vsauce have a better shot at explaining this if all I just said went over your head.
Human Colossus
So till now we established the fact that there is still a possibility that we might actually possess free will and ability to make a decision what to do in our life. But the main question still remains unanswered – Why does it matter? So here’s a long (very loooong) blog by Tim Urban(which i shall break down more in my future blogs), which introduces a concept of humans as cells of big human colossus. Once you consider that image, it becomes a lot more clear about things one should not be doing, like avoid becoming the cancer cell as Vishen Lakhiani explains perfectly in this video, understand that whatever you do impacts the complete Human colossus and try and do things that serves a greater purpose, the collective goal of the Human colossus.
The collective goal
There is always plenty of existential questions which the colossus try and answer by pushing the boundaries of knowledge and by advancing itself and ensuring its survival long enough to find all the answers all while always trying to have fun along the way.
PS: Currently we(the colossus) need to get our shit together because we are farting badly, and thus climate change. More on that in future blogs. Till then go here. 😛
ravijain056 