MAGIC 8 BALL

#philosophy #answers #philosophers #determinism

The writing was clear across the sky, not in ink, but water. Each raindrop a letter, each splash a verse. I find myself below, eyes closed in solitude, embracing the moment, listening to each raindrop affectionately tapping on my shoulders, as if asking, “May I have this dance?“

Sunlight is often credited with giving life, but rain is where the magic happens. There’s something strangely hypnotic about the way rain droplets meander across the glass like people in art galleries, – full of purpose, yet utterly lost.

Imagine two drops falling from a cloud. One strikes a rooftop, slides into a gutter, and disappears down a drain. The other dances on a windscreen, flirts with the wipers, then drifts along the car’s smooth metallic side to the roadside, – vanishing at last into the golden warmth of the returning sun.

Their paths seem deliberate, but that’s just the poetry of chaos. Every twist and turn was a response to the conditions they met – angle, texture, and timing, – just collisions with context. They don’t decide, they react.

I suspect people are much the same. Flimsy meat-based weather droplets reacting to chains of previous responses. Our grandest decisions might be nothing more than elaborate twitches of causality.

Our thoughts, which we like to treat as proof of our uniqueness, may only be another layer of reaction. If you built a supercomputer that could track every factor, the angle of a die’s throw, the air resistance, the texture of the table. It would predict the outcome with perfect precision. Extend that idea to human beings, and you arrive at something close to my belief: that the future, like the past, has already happened. We are simply peering at different sections of the same thread.

This is, like all my original concepts, trapped in an episode of “Simpson’s Already Did It”. It is what philosophers call determinism: the claim that everything that happens is the inevitable outcome of what came before. As philosopher Chrysippus once put it, “Nothing happens without a cause; everything happens by fate.” The modern version of fate isn’t divine but mechanical. The supercomputer is my way of picturing Laplace’s Demon, a thought experiment from the 19th century in which a mind powerful enough to know all forces and positions in the universe could foresee the future as clearly as the past. Not divine, but just data, like a cosmic Excel spreadsheet with everything you have done, everything you will do. If you’re curious, why your ex left you is in column B row 207, currently using an SUMIF formula on how many times your mother ignored you, with that time someone said your nose looked big.

But then, as unwanted as predictive text, in comes quantum mechanics, and now the cat is dead and nothing makes sense anymore. The famous double-slit experiment tells us that at the smallest scales, particles flicker between possibilities, only collapsing into a definite state when measured. This is where “randomness” enters the story, and I confess it is the hardest part for me as I just can’t understand the logic behind it. My brain just says “no”. I can accept that I’m just a damp piece of biology reacting to stimuli like a nervous jellyfish in a bowl of tabasco. But randomness? That feels too… random.

Thankfully, some interpretations of quantum theory save me from the abyss of coin-flipping chaos. The many-worlds interpretation, for example, suggests that the particle doesn’t choose randomly – it does everything at once, but in branching realities. What looks like chance is simply us experiencing one path out of countless others. From that angle, determinism isn’t destroyed but multiplied. Reality is still written, it’s just written many times over.

So where does philosophy stand today? Broadly speaking, it divides into three camps. Hard determinists accept the raindrop view: free will is an illusion. Libertarians – proud of their will and not wanting to lose it, believe in free will. But the dominant view is compatibilism. – when presented with choices box A and B, just ticked both boxes. I admit, I ‘may’ hold some bias in summarising them three positions, and I perhaps shouldn’t, as this is where I must admit my limits. Quantum mechanics is a world I cannot pretend to understand. And I’m ok with that.

You see, – plot twist, this post isn’t about determinism at all, or rain, it’s about philosophy. And philosophy is not about answers, but about questions. I’ll never understand quantum mechanics, but I do have the free will to question free will, or I was always set up to question it? And question, I do, and that’s fine.

It’s like a magic eight ball: an “answer” is built up of that strange dark matter you find inside the eight ball, and it is scientists that dedicate their lives studying it, placing new theories on top of old, like a never-ending game of cards. Philosophy on the other hand, – that’s the art of shaking a magic eight ball.

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