Stimulus & Determinism
Stimulus is all around us. It stimulates our actions and our behavior.
There has been a long argument on free will and determinism.
Some people have a feeling that they have a choice. A choice to make whatever out of their life. It sure sounds good – I would like to believe that, but I just can’t.
When you’re born with a heart disease – you sure won’t be a bodybuilder. There are a lot of things you can’t do when you have a heart disease. Then there’s mental illnesses and other health issues which limit behavior of your body.
If you don’t have legs – you can’t run. If you don’t have wings – you can’t fly. So having the human body determines our behavior in some way.
There are many issues with free will.
The first issue is – we understand life as humans, if we would be bees we would understand life as bees.
Our surroundings shape our behavior.
Imagine you wrote a book on some topic, you sent it to the publisher and the publisher can accept it or deny it – this shapes your reality. Everybody is manipulating reality to their advantage.
When we’re talking about determinism, we realize that many of our actions are influenced by the outside world. Imagine you have to go somewhere and it rains – you then take an umbrella.
All life is made of small choices. There are choices we make consciously and there are choices we make unconsciously.
Unconscious choices like eating, drinking water and taking a dump are influenced by stimulus inside of your body. Breathing is done due to need of air. Your body needs resources to survive – to get resources you need to do certain actions.
Imagine a cube with no windows and you’re in it. There are no doors and nothing. Just you within the cube. Your actions are limited to doing pushups or situps or any other exercise with your body, then imagine you get a ball, then your actions increase – you then go to examine the ball and then decide is it dangerous or not.
Having elements within your range increases your actions. Having money allows you to buy some resources when living in a society.
Where I’m going with this is – you can’t watch a movie that hasn’t been made, you can’t take a drug which hasn’t been made. Society always makes new things to consume but in order to get a resource – you have to contribute to society in some way. Every citizen expects that other people have done something to contribute to society.
Capitalism hasn’t a choice for people who don’t want to work, so in order to survive you have to contribute. For example, if you’re born in a city you most likely don’t have some land to grow your food and etc.
When being born you have no choice where you’re going to be born. Your birth place is somewhat determined. Your health is also determined – you can be born healthy or unhealthy.
When making choices – you should realize that you can’t make two choices at once, so life becomes a game of steps. You can’t both drink and not drink alcohol, you can’t both smoke and not smoke cigarettes.
There’s a big question if we have free will.
If you’re a creative person, you can make a vlog and it could go viral, therefore it’s not about you – the creator, but instead about the people you have no control over.
When you send your CV to some employer – he can accept you into his team or he can deny you. Therefore the outside world shapes the reality we have.
You can’t choose to be popular. There are many things you can’t choose. You can’t breathe underwater without special equipment. Sure people have influence on the world.
You can’t sell a book if there is no demand for it, even if you have the most genius thoughts about the topic. This shapes your finances.
There’s a long told tail about successful and unsuccessful people – successful will tell you that you can be successful and unsuccessful people will tell you it depends.
Sure there’s a lot of abundance but people in poor countries have to go a long way to bring water to their house [if they have one].
A person is born without a house or clothes or any skills. Some have talent to be musicians and some have not. Some are mentally ill and some are not – persons life itself depends on many factors he cannot change.
I was surfing the web and found that many people like to make an example of steve jobs or any other person who had major success. But that’s less of a chance than winning a lottery.
If people could choose how they want to live – everybody would be more or less equal. If everybody would be a millionaire then there were no workers.
Nobody knows what life is. Life itself is so unfair and hard that people can’t become who they wished they were. Some people just don’t have the attributes to be successful.
If nobody wants to be friends with you then you won’t have friends.
Life itself is dynamic and has no rules of success. You can’t rewrite Harry Potter and expect same fame as the first author of the book.
Let’s assume we have free will to create whatever we want, but why can’t everybody create inventions or best selling books?
I say there’s no free will just because you don’t know what thoughts you will have after 5 minutes. You can’t predict how’s life going to be in some years.
If there are people who can predict the future, why they don’t play in betting shops? To make money – you have to be smarter than some people.
If you weren’t smart you couldn’t create microsoft or any other firm. There are many things you can’t teach yourself. To survive, people have to have variety of specializations, but if everyone was just smart enough to lift a rock? Well, we all would be like monkeys.