Maya, about consciousness
For most of my life, I believed humans are born as a clean slate. I can't recall exactly how I came to that conclusion, but the picture was simple. From the moment we are born, every sensory input is like a character written onto the blank pages of the brain. We grow through what we see, hear, taste, and experience, and in the end, what we become is a composite of every piece of data we have ever recorded through our senses. At least, that is how a computer would build a digital person if it had to.
But as I watch my two children grow, and as I have learned more about life, I've started to doubt that.
Maybe we are not born as blank pages. Maybe we are born with grooves.
We seem to arrive with certain inclinations, preferences for some choices over others. Traits and behaviors emerge that look as if they had been there from the start. I don't know exactly why. Genetics may be a large part of the answer. More and more, I suspect we are wired at birth to lean a certain way. We are not programmed to become one exact person, but perhaps we are predisposed to make certain choices in certain circumstances more readily than others.
I used to think of DNA mostly in terms of physical outcomes: the body, our health, disease. I never thought of it as part of why we become who we become. Now I suspect it is, though I'm not sure DNA is the whole story. Sensory input shapes us enormously, of course. The people we meet, the places we live, the love we receive all leave their marks. But that doesn't explain everything either. There seem to be other, hidden reasons we haven't yet uncovered.
And if that's true, free will becomes complicated. It isn't absolute, because we may already be inclined toward some choices over others.
Then there is where and when we are born. Someone born into a business family in New York and someone born into a mining community in the Congo will grow up inside very different sets of possibilities. But set that aside for a moment. Imagine two people born at the same time, in the same place, under the same circumstances, because even equal starts diverge.
Even then, much of what shapes them is never theirs to choose.
You don't choose who else enrolls in your class at university. Yet one of them may become the person you fall in love with. You never woke up one morning and decided, today I will meet the person who changes the course of my life. The chain of events that brought them into your life began long before you had any say in it.
Or imagine you're driving through a T-intersection on a green light, and someone runs a red light you never saw coming. You made no decision that caused it, and you had no say in what followed. Yet a single moment like that can change the course of a life, and with it, who you become.
Neither of these takes away your choices. You still decide how to respond. But they show how much of the whole outcome, who we end up being, is shaped by things we never chose.
Still, I'm not ready to throw free will out the window and say every life is a predetermined sequence of events written somewhere in advance. That doesn't seem right either.
So perhaps there is another possibility. Maybe we do have free will (I admit I sound underconfident betting on it), but only within a framework that already exists before we begin making choices. As I see it, that framework has at least four layers.
The first is written in our DNA. It shapes our body, our health, our temperament, and the kinds of choices we are naturally inclined to make.
The second is where and when we are born. This includes our family, culture, era, and environment, perhaps even the collective level of consciousness of the world at that time. None of it is ours to choose.
The third is our interaction with other lives and consciousness around us, each following its own path. A long chain of events, entirely independent of you, led your future spouse to that same classroom. And think again about that accident. What if the other driver had stopped at Starbucks for a coffee? You would have crossed that intersection safely, never knowing how close you came. A seemingly meaningless choice by a stranger can alter the course of your entire life.
The fourth may be something we don't yet know, or cannot comprehend within the hard limits of our biology. Perhaps there are layers of cause we simply can't perceive, because we are inside the system we are trying to understand.
So I'm not sure why we are what we are, or why we become what we become. But it clearly isn't just the result of the choices we make.
Our choices matter. Maybe they matter enormously. But the person making those choices is already the product of countless things that happened before the choice was ever made.
So here is the question I keep coming back to. Is your present self who you chose to become, who you made yourself become, or who you were, in some sense, always going to be?
And if forces we never chose are shaping us, where exactly does free will begin?
More about who's writing this is on the About page. If this got you thinking, or you'd push back on any of it, I'd genuinely love to hear it: sharma.rujjwal [at] gmail [dot] com.
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