Quote:
Originally Posted by Howard Beale
Without free will I am being created, not creating. Without free will we are all just portraits.
That is what you believe. I think you have no way of knowing that that's true. It's a common mental flaw/delusion to believe that if the word if programmed, we're just robots, with all that entails emotionally.
The truth is that you can't comprehend what's really going on, so you're using crude mental and emotional models of being trapped without choice, and then finding that horribly despairing. But it's only the crude models that are despairing. The reality is what it is, and it's not something you can grasp, ever - either in how it works, or in what it means.
Perhaps you have pre-chosen all of what you do, and now you are living it in slow motion, feeling and experiences the consequences of your choice. Why would that be any less meaningful than real time, forward looking choice? Perhaps it is your lot in life to be a passenger, believing you're not, and experiencing the life of your character. Which is meaningful. Imagine there's a vast
Akashic Record, and you've tapped into it, and are living through the record of someone else's (determined, because it's already happened) experience as if you are them. When you step out that experience, do the feelings become meaningless? Does the insight and wisdom?
Feeling despairing if all decisions are pre-made is
a) silly and contradictory and
b) really just a projection of total loss of power and identity, caused by a fundamental misunderstanding of reality and a crude projection of what the above would actually mean.
None of which has to do with reality itself. Existential deterministic angst is just the mind reaching the limits of its competence in a spot where the projected meaning is awful. It's not something real.