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.