Determinism vs. Free Will

I've struggled with this topic most of my life.  It wasn't until much later in life and lots of self-reflection and going through some big lifestyle changes in an attempt to lose weight and affect my fitness level that I learned lot about myself.  It really gave a lot of substance to the 'All knowledge is self-knowledge' maxim.

There's a scene in 'The Matrix Reloaded' where the Merovingian is discussing philosophy with Morpheus, et. al.  He said the only real truth is Causality while Morpheus held the position that everything begins with Choice.  At the time it appeared that they took diametrically opposed perspectives but really they covered two sides of the same coin.  The reason is they're both right.  Everything does start with choice but like the Architect mentioned later in the movie, it happens at a near-unconscious level.  Everything else after that choice operates in a deterministic way.

So what are these "choices at a near-unconscious level" that I'm referring to?  We'll have to perform a thought experiment to understand what I'm talking about.

Imagine having a baby and raising it the first 2-3 years.  In the beginning, the baby has no means other than to cry to communicate with you.  But slowly, it learns language by association.  If you keep pointing to a cup and say 'Cup' enough times, it understands that the object has a name and that name is 'Cup.'  Now, there's nothing stopping you, as the caretaker, to say 'Fire' when you point to the cup and condition the child to think that word 'Fire' is the name for a cup.  The question is why does the child incorrectly associate the word 'fire' with the object cup?  I would argue that the child implicitly trusts its caretaker, you, that you know what you are doing.

Children are born to implicitly trust their parents.  Once they develop an aptitude to understand cause and effect, then they get to that stage where they ask 'Why?' to nearly everything.  But before that stage, which is pretty early on, children do not have the rational capacity to critically think and therefore must trust their parents.  They really have no choice in the matter.  Even right now, as a reader, you can exercise choice to accept or reject the content you are reading.  But that is a conscious choice.  The choice to trust their parent is what I would argue is the "unconscious choice."

I think it's anecdotally supported in that Indian children speak Indian.  Japanese children speak Japanese as well as children who grow up in Turkey are likely to be Muslim.  Language and religious beliefs anecdotally support this implicit trust that children have to their parents.

I threw in religious beliefs in there because as irrational as they may be, the stories are complex enough and employ large enough circular logic to diffuse even a curious child to the point of simply having to accept the parents' religious beliefs.

However, this provides an excellent segue to how determinism fits into all of this.  So imagine if a child grew up a Christian because that's how they were raised and therefore held the same beliefs and values as the parents.  These beliefs now act as safety barriers to their actions.  This might involve not engaging in pre-marital sex or taking drugs or not listening to certain types of music.  

Now I'm not arguing that everything is set in stone for this child for holding on to their beliefs but what I am saying is based on their beliefs, they now work with a different set of risk/reward and cost/benefit decision making trees.  Any devout determinist would also make the same argument that while the variables in determining action are too many to count, but those decision trees are more skewed to lead a person to make decisions in a certain way.

What the determinist ignores is the early childhood choices that, in many ways, couldn't be helped.  Too much of it was determined by the parents.

Not all is lost though.  It takes quite a bit of introspection to understand why you make the decisions you do and to change.  If you can't do it alone, seek professional help through a competent psychologist.  The only way to understand yourself is to be brutally honest with yourself and reflect back all that you are to yourself and accept it all - the good and the bad.  As they say in AA, the first step is getting past Denial.

There is a branch of psychology that deals with this kind of thinking.  It's called Rational-Emotive Therapy.  It focuses on 'core beliefs' and changing them.  The core beliefs is what drives our emotional responses.  Change the beliefs and the emotional responses change as a result.  This a simplified version of determinism working together with free will.  Beliefs are actually choices.  Reality, the things you experience through the senses, isn't a choice.  Two people both stuck in traffic can't choose not to be stuck in traffic but how is it that one person is getting angrier by the second while another one can remain calm?  Their experiences are quite different even though the stimuli is identical.

Most of life runs in automatic as our actions are directed by situational stimuli but there is an underlying belief structure, or better put, a set of choices that we've made to determine our responses to that stimuli.  

As Morpheus said, "Everything begins with Choice."