The things you do in life can be seen as decisions. Everything you’ve ever done could be interpreted as a chain of choices that lead back to the decisions your ancestors made. Choice, it seems, is a major cause of most effects in the world. But is choice freedom? Is portraying the way the world works as choice a correct method? The situations need to broken down further to see how well choice represents the world.
If choice comes about by electrical signals in the mind, then our decisions are influenced by the laws of electrostatic attraction. The coursing of ions through certain neurones could be said to offer us a limited freedom from these laws, but in order for those ions to be there in the first place, they had to have been affected by a host of preceding factors. Taking away just one of those factors would result in those ions being somewhere else within your mind, or possible not within your mind at all. In short, this world is bound strictly by the law of cause and effect. There is no choice you make that hasn’t been caused by something else, and there is no choice you make that won’t have rigged by precedent events.
But in a world of causeless effect, is it possible for choice, and perhaps even true freedom of expression, to exist? If a ball is placed on the ground, it will not move by the laws of our reality. In one where there are no laws to prevent it moving, it would spontaneously begin bouncing or soar into the air. There is nothing to prevent it from moving. But if the ball was now a human who decided he/she wanted to fly, there would be nothing to stop him/her, although as the reality is a spontaneous one without the need for cause to exact effect, he/she wouldn’t fly simply because he/she wished to. At another time when he/she didn’t wish to fly it could be that he/she did begin to fly, as the effect is spontaneous. A world without cause is an uncontrollable one, while a world of cause and effect is a rigid and set one.
Hence in the current models of world we have established, our own and one without cause, there is no such thing as choice. Everything we do is a product of some more complex machination of history, the effect of a chain of events that will continue on and on until the components of this world no longer interact with each other.
