"How did you come up with your Twitter handle? What does it
mean?"
My friend asked me that over halwa
puri one Saturday morning. I
tried to explain to her how I came up with "The Man Who Did
Nothing". I'll try to do the same here. ("The Man Who Did
Nothing" is also a song by the punk rock band Peter & the Test Tube Babies.
I am not inspired by them in any way.)
I believe we humans do not have what we call free will. What we call free will
is just another desire, like many other desires that live in our head. So there's the desire to smoke a cigarette and the
desire not to smoke a cigarette. The bigger
desire wins. Of course, we can't measure desires. Neither can we enumerate each
and every desire that constitutes our consciousness at any given moment. But we
can imagine a simple model - a binary one - that has two opposing desires: to
do something or not to do it. To have the ice cream or not to have it. The
stronger desire wins and you do what it dictates.
(In this model, the desire to smoke a cigarette can never be the
opposite of the desire to have ice cream. If the situation involves a choice
between ice cream and a cigarette, then it is a combination of two separate sets
of opposite desires: smoke vs. not smoke AND have ice cream vs. not have ice cream.)
But, of course, we like to imagine that we have power. How can we humans be powerless? How can I
not have a say, a choice!? Didn't they say we humans were awesome? We cannot but fathom ourselves as the
deciders of our destiny. The idea that we may not actually be in significant control of our
future is scary. It extremely unsettling.
So we confused 'good desires' with free will? No, we just labeled 'good desires' as free
will; as something we flex, like a muscle; as something we do; not something that's
already there and is not our doing. We proclaim the 'good guys' in the Universe
of Desires as 'our men'. And of course, the 'bad guys' in this universe are
employed by Satan or some other entity that is out there to destroy us. How can bad desires originate from
the human mind? We are awesome, remember!
Don't get me wrong. In my opinion, we are awesome. We are the
MacBook Pro surrounded by very primitive calculators, some of whom we eat for
lunch. Of course, we are awesome! (No, I'm not being sarcastic.) We have
evolved so much, compared to our many distant cousins, that we are bound to
feel awesome. But we shouldn't let it cloud our thinking.
Maybe, just maybe, we don't have a free will. At that given moment, whether or not you smoke
that cigarette may not be a choice. Maybe it's an automatic process, it just
happens. It happens through you, but you don't actually choose anything. And the outcome depends on
which desire is stronger, the desire to commit the act or the desire not to
commit the act.
Maybe the fact that someone you know has cancer pulls you away
from the act, but the fact that your buddies are lighting up your favorite
brand (after dinner!) pulls you towards it. It's one pull vs. another. Nothing extraordinary - just like good ol' physics.
So do we not do anything? Does everything just happen through us? Well, not exactly. I think we do
have control over our actions, but only indirectly. At any given single moment,
you don't have a choice. The opposite desires will compete between themselves
and determine what your act will be.
But, am I sure
that this is how the mind works? No, this is what I believe is most probably
the case, but I can never be sure. Nothing is set in stone. Nothing.
Suggested (Wikipedia) reading:
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