Welcome,
I ask you: are our decisions actually our decisions? I suppose it may not be possible to answer this question, yet, it is a question that preoccupies my mind when I have nothing to do. The question of predetermined fate, that we all have a set destiny, if you will. I often chew on this question as it is of a great deal of consequence to literally everybody on Earth. The significance of this issue is profound in that if we do all have a predetermined fate and there is some sort of invisible hand guiding our thoughts and decision making, then does anything really matter? Is there any reason to ever stress about anything? Or to be proud of anything? As nothing that we achieve or are worried about is really under our own control. If this is true, who or what being is determining these fates? How? And why?
This is something I dwell on, something I fear. The prospect of effort being pointless or the weighing of decisions being useless is something that has consistently made me quite uneasy, especially being someone who is waiting on law school placement (i.e. someone with no fucking clue where in the country he will be in 5 months). This kind of circumstance and consideration is what has seemingly given me the desire to explore this topic.
The temptation to shrug off decisions and important turning points of our lives and to assign their circumstance to determinism is one that we all face and a lot of us welcome. This internal desire is one that makes us feel anxious as well. No matter what solution we discover to this problem, it creates another internal problem. If I am free, where do I go from here? I am anxious. If I am determined, none of this matters... and I am anxious.
My goal is to successfully open a dialogue about free will and determinism in everyday life by regular people who don’t necessarily have a reason to explore free will other than for the understanding of how their lives are affected by it. Almost all of the dialogue on this topic is by philosophers and researchers whose job it is to explore subjects like these. However, my interest is getting the common person involved, as this is something that affects us all. I am hoping that my readers / listeners explore this site and this podcast series with an open mind into how these concepts can change the way we view our lives and our decision making.
Within this podcast series I explore the general topics of free will and determinism but also dig into the way things such as socioeconomic and racial circumstances affect the way we visualize how much free will we believe we possess and how much society seems to limit our decision making based on societal consequences. All in all, I am simply hoping to begin a conversation. To motivate others to get involved and to explore these concepts in a way that allows them to see how they affect their lives and thought processes.
Thank you for taking the time to come out and visit my site, I hope this discussion changes the way you view the world, the way the research has done for me.
Sincerely,
Jacob Stropes