An "Aha!" moment or how I learned I was a determinist.

I was listening to Reasonable Doubts last week and started freaking out a little.

Reasonable Doubts is a great podcast by these three guys who are really, really smart, and the episode in question was actually a two parter, and dealt with the idea of determinism- a controversial way of looking at how we as human beings make choices based on a causally determined chain of events.

It's a direct refutation of the Cartesian model of duality which explores the notion that the mind and body are two completely separate entities and while it feels right (where is the thing that makes you you actually located?) the advances in neurobiology that have come along recently throws that concept into some disarray.

As frequent readers probably are aware, I used to believe in the idea of ghosts, telekinesis and other supernatural woo, and as my intellectual path has led me away from belief in god, so too has it led me away from the woo as well. But a lot of that other stuff seems to be based, in large part, on the mind/body dualism argument, and though I've been discarding my beliefs in those areas, I chalked it up to being more skeptical and left it at that.

When my Dad died, I was seven. I didn't codify it at the time, but when it actually dawned on me what happened (he was not coming back) my attitude sort of changed to a very brief philosophy; shit just happens. That's a pretty advanced concept for a kid- the idea that control is just an illusion and external things can happen for no reason. It also set the foundation for listening to a podcast thirty some odd years later and actually hearing it instead of dismissing it out of hand.

When I learned about determinism last week, I was shocked. My first reaction?

I hated it. It couldn't be true. That everything we do, every choice we make has an unbroken chain of occurrences that led us to that point (and makes the choice inevitable) seemed terrible to me. Were we nothing but the product of biology and prior events? After thinking about it for a week, and then hearing the follow up podcast where a number of people had similar reactions brought me around 180 degrees.

It's the nature vs. nurture argument on steroids without the argument. Things do happen for no reason. We have nature: We start out with biological preconditions. We have nurture: We start out with a model of behavior based on the treatment we received as children. As we grow, things happen to us, and we make choices about what's happened based on what we have experienced before, but at the same time, that new event is added to the chain. Determinism takes nothing away from who we are, but goes a long way towards explaining why we are.

I'm pretty sure I'm a determinist, but that could just be because I have to be.