I once heard that there is a Greek philosophical idea that we have come suddenly into existence with a fully realized past. It segues with my interest in the ideas around free will, intrigued by Sam Harris' idea why it doesn't exist. These fall in line with one another.
I often think about this in the sense that I have wondered why I feel like the path of my life, all of the trillions of decisions made, were not made by me, they just happened to me. Part of the illusion, assuming it is an illusion, is because the person I am now would not have made so many of the choices I made, and that our faulty memories are incomplete. Life is full of regrets because we grow and change, and looking back we feel shame at our younger selves behavior. Its unfair to make this judgement, of course, but our present judges our past relentlessly.
Looking back I also remember all of the times I should have, or could have been maimed or died. And how many times I could have killed others. Luck yes, no one maimed or died. Or was it fate, whatever that is? There was no luck, things happened the way they did because given the circumstances and the nature of brains of the people involved, what happened was going to happen. Fate. As Dr Harris illustrates, if you disassembled the lives and brains of the people involved, then reconstructed them exactly the same way, there is no reason to expect anything other than that the outcomes would be exactly the same. We would be the same people, same situations, making the same choices. No free will, things happened the way they were going to happen, and in remembering, a fully realized past.
It explains why we keep making the same decisions despite ourselves. As we experience new things and they affect us, they change how our brains make decisions, but what direction that is isn't up to us. The new us is built by the old us. We don't make decisions, our brains do and they make those decisions before we are even conscious that a decision was made.
Which brings us back to the idea that my life happened to me, but it wasn't actually mine in a conscious responsible way. I was swept along, and it just happened while I was there. Or maybe I just think it did. Time passed, I was there, but I wasn't really making the decisions, my brain was, is. And so... I feel like my life happened, I think, but I wasn't really there. I remember it as a filmstrip, but never experienced it. Think about it... why do we make the decisions we make, why do we get a visceral response we have to experience, and work to filter our response, if we can? Where is all of this coming from? Consciousness? What even is that? Is it the brain that makes the decisions without "us" or the part that thinks it made it? The modern bicameral brain, more MacGilchrist than Jaynes .
These days I work hard to overcome my nature when it annoys me, and I have the sense that I am being my better nature. That being said, maybe I just like the decisions my brain is making more today, and my today brain looks back on my past brain's decisions annoyed with it?
Here's to me today, making many of the same brain choices, but responding different enough that sometimes I appreciate progress. I am a better person today than I was yesterday. At least I think I am. I need to ask my brain.
