The (un)arbitrary choices.

[elfs]

I fell today upon a choice rant, in the Christian philosophy magazine Touchstone, about anti-choice. And it's not about abortion: it is about the power to choose things at all. The author goes through a great deal of effort to point out how, awash in a sea of decisions to be made every second, we nonetheless float in the warm waters of ennui, listlessly choosing to visit this website or that, watch this movie or that, knowing that we will probably accomplish very little. He then goes on to extoll a life with fewer choices: adhere to the catechisms of faith, he says, and you'll have guidelines rather than choices. If all you ever do is choose, then the next twists and turns in life are not surprises, because you limited your possibilities with your choices.

What I find unconvincing is that, underlying all of this there is the core choice: the choice to adhere or not. The choice to throw away a set of choices in favor of his guidelines.

And, as always, I come back to the question Greg Egan asks again, and again, and again: Why do you choose? What mechanisms, what physical processes within our minds and bodies, lead to decisions and conclusions? Because either there is something, some set of rules, by which we make choices and decisions and conclusions, some regular, stochastic mechanism that can be studied, discerned, and rereified in a form other than our actions-- or there is not, and we are wholly random creature jittering in a brownian ocean, bumping up against each other.

And I know we are not that.

Comments

[solarbird]

lol, freedom is slavery

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

even if you've done nothing but follow what your cult leader tells you to do, you are still making the same number of choices.

[sirfox.livejournal.com]

I guess choosing to abdicate the responsibility of deciding right or wrong in favor of a pre-defined set of guidelines appeals to some people.

It's not like everybody doesn't already have some set of guidelines in their head, and the Faithless must formulate a set of moral guidelines from first principles every time a dilemma comes up. Is it better to have an immutable set that never changes, or something flexible that grows and evolves over time with experience? I guess the author of the rant thinks so. I'm not sure i'd like a world where everybody had exactly the same set. Considering the hundreds of folks in Saudi Arabia who just got arrested by the morality police for the crime of celebrating valentine's day, it seems like something that could go seriously wrong.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

and the Faithless must formulate a set of moral guidelines from first principles every time a dilemma comes up.

Aaaaaaactually, there's some pretty good evidence that "morality" is a pretty early feature of Homo SapiensPrimates. Grab the Radiolab episode on "Morality" and listen for the parts about the "'inner chimp' part of the brain."

Heck, I've even heard about a study that discovered that dogs have a sense of fairness.

It would appear that, "moral guidelines," aren't things learned from a book, but come from something more deep in our makeup.