The Schrödinger Imperative

I will be including outlines of the ideas covered at the end of every (philosophical) post in order to make review of the core ideas presented quick, and to remove some of the bias I could create with rhetorical [self-]deception by presenting it in a bare bones, skeleton form.

It's official: I'm trapped. We all are.

For some reason, I am here. I exist, I think, I have awareness, I make choices. I did not decide to be here. How could I? I didn't choose to have choice. But I do. The fact that I think gives my agency. This is also not a choice. It's there, and I use it all the time. To stop having agency would require killing myself (unless I'm missing something), but doing so requires agency too. It would be an act of agency. I cannot simply "turn agency off."

All choices that I make are done on the basis of some justification. If I do something "random," I've really just chosen to do something unexpected. There is no random. I am a machine. The gears and cogs all turn and chug away, and I do things on a basis no different from a wind-up toy. Okay, I'm a pretty complex wind-up toy, but a machine never the less. I agree with Laplace when he said:

"We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of the past and the cause of the future. An intellect which at any given moment knew all of the forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that compose it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit the data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom; for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes"

Perhaps this is what some people mean by "fate." You cannot escape it. With enough understanding of the parts involved, you could predict every little action. I've held for some time that free will is an illusion. Granted, it's an illusion that is necessary for the way we function... but it is still an illusion.

Part of this machinery that constitutes us is (in a virtual sense) the act of evaluation. We take input, evaluate it, and output an action (thought, idea, motion, belief, and so on). But we have this little problem. On what basis do we evaluate? It's quite simple to evaluate things as being bigger or smaller than each other. On a more complex level, it is just as easy to compare things to a prototypical "image" of something, or to say that something is closer or further away from an ideal. But to say that something is better than another, such as that it is better to live or better to get out of bed in the morning (or their inverses), you need to evaluate them on the basis of a personal beliefs called values.

In some sense, you are still comparing things to some "image", it is just an image of value. Where did you get this image? On what basis do you evaluate these images against each other? There needs to be an underlying image, and an image for that image, and so as you spin out ad infinitum (and really: ad absurdum.) You need a basis that is justified somehow. We have a priori truths. These seem to be the only way to go as far as I can tell.

So in order for a person to evaluate any input, they need a set of beliefs called values. Without values, you cannot evaluate, you cannot make decisions, you in effect cannot think (as thinking requires constant choice and evaluation), and then the major premise "I think therefore I am" falls apart. And then what are you? You are inert matter, devoid of thought and life.

But you do not have a choice about that. You do think. Anything that you do now requires choice, and everything that goes with it. If you do, or do not do, anything, you are still in the same trap. It does not require judgement to discern then that resolving this crisis is nothing short of imperative.

Outline:

1. I exist
• I think therefore I am 
2. Thinking is an action
• This is agency
• I cannot "turn off" my agency
• If I did I would have no justification for #1
• The only conceivable way is suicide
• It takes agency to "turn off" agency
• It is a choice (see #3 and #4)
3. Actions all involve choice (do this or not to do this), despite how conscious of a process this is
4. Choices require evaluation
• Evaluation is dependent on values
• One must resolve value nihilism in order to make choices
5. It is imperative that my existential crisis be resolved
• I cannot change #1 without resolving this crisis
• There is no way out
• It is an imperative in order for #1 to hold true