MAKE ME

Is free will an illusion? You decide.

- NIKHIL KRISHNAN

You’re walking fast, late for work. The line into the subway is barely moving. A man is walking very slowly, holding up everyone behind him. You’re annoyed. And then you catch a glimpse of him. He’s walking with the shuffle of the very old. You’re inclined to be a little more tolerant; after all, he can’t walk any faster. You look again—no, he’s not old, just drunk. It’s too late for him to sober up, but, it occurs to you, it was once up to him not to be drunk. And now you’re annoyed again.

But why stop there? There are bars everywhere, and billboards advertising the pleasures of spirits. The days are getting colder, and you live in a cold country—a cold country and a decadent one. Everyone drinks; how could he do otherwise? But, again, why stop there? Generous soul that you are, you wonder if he had a bad day, or week, or year, or life— one marked by the kind of suffering from which the bottle promises respite. Can you be sure that he doesn’t come from a long line of alcoholics, helpless in the grip of their compulsion?

You might go further. Perhaps all this was simply meant to be. Recall that old French polymath Pierre-Simon Laplace and his omniscient “demon.” If the demon knew where every particle in the universe was at a given moment, he could predict with perfect accuracy every moment in the future—which is another way of saying that the future is wholly “determined” by the past. The demon, of course, merely illustrates a thesis that can be stated in more sombre terms: everything that happens is the inevitable consequence of the laws of nature and what the universe was like once upon a time. We’re bound to do what we in fact do.