Chapter 5: Probablistic Determinism
The worst thing about the world is that we’ll never get to see all of it.
The best thing about the world is that we’ll never get to see all of it.
(Or words to that general effect).
Bill Bryson
I’m going to start here from the assumption that life is not fully predetermined. Maybe it really is, but it certainly doesn’t feel that way to me. Given this collection of thoughts is mostly about the choices we make, it seems pretty useless to then say “oh well, none of it matters anyway”. The universe would also have to be pretty weird for you to have been predetermined to read this treatise on choice management when you didn’t actually have any choices, so I’m comfortable this is a worthwhile assumption on so many levels.
However, I also think it’s important to recognise that things are very rarely black and white, and just because life probably isn’t predetermined does not mean that we therefore have total free will. Much as we might prefer it to be otherwise, not every choice is available to us, or at least they’re not equally and mutually available.
By this I don’t mean things that are prevented by norms or taboos or even laws, we can always choose to challenge or break these. What I mean is that every time we make a choice (deliberate or otherwise), the view we have of the obstacle course we play the game of our life in changes. Critically, we change both the range of available moves and their various probabilities. Even if we go back a move, while we might now see the same (or at least very similar) moves available, their probabilities will have changed – because we now have the additional experience of having tried one.
The big effect of this can be hard to see at the time and even harder to project too far into the future, but is very easy to spot in retrospect. Our path through the obstacle course is mostly sequential. Each of our moves has been influenced by the ones that came before it. And because of the choices we make, the moves we make, some things will become more likely in our future, some will become less likely, and some will become impossible.
This is “probabilistic determinism”.
It’s not that we are predetermined by some cosmic force to do something or reach some outcome. Rather, the choices we make simply change the probabilities of what can happen next, and so over time that impacts what does happen. Seemingly distant choices have flow on effects that can make the probability of a given outcome far, far more or less likely. Over time, this could certainly feel like predetermination, that our path was somehow inevitable. In fact, it is just a natural consequential progression of what came before.
The ‘survivor bias’ is based on this principle. Survivor bias says something like “The Earth is perfect for humans, so it must have been made for humans”. Probabilistic determination says “whatever lifeform happens to evolve on Earth will be almost perfectly suited to the conditions here”. What happens can often seem almost inevitable, but it is only inevitable given the particular set of inputs, and with slightly different circumstances the outcome would be radically different (but still look just as inevitable!). The survivor bias is really just an example of confusing the effect and the cause.
This is also related to Chaos Theory – which at one level just says that standing at one point and projecting out into the future, the number of possible pathways is more or less infinite and all possible combinations of consequences not easily discerned. However, probabilistic determination says we don’t stand in that one point forever. Instead we start from that point, but then we go down one particular pathway. As we do that most of those possibilities quickly disappear, and we are left with a much smaller range of available (probable) outcomes. [See footnote 1]
Much as it might not feel like it, this basic mechanism of probabilistic determination is pretty fair and consistent for everyone. It is the board and the game that are not so egalitarian. For often very poor reasons, not everyone will have the same choices available, nor the same probabilities. Everyone’s game starts at a different point and covers a unique version of the board. The choices we make don’t just affect our own probabilities either, they also affect the probabilities for other people. The women who progressed the suffrage movement had limited choices and poor probabilities, but through their collective efforts they have made things at least somewhat easier for the women who came after them. On the other hand, people who commit acts of violence in the name of some cause will make things harder for those who come after them, because there are broader effects of those sorts of actions on the way the game works for everyone else.
That’s deterministic probability. Not everything is equally available, and every choice we make changes the likelihood of what comes next, and again and again into the distance.
What’s the key thought here? Mostly, just be aware of how the game works, and make sure you occasionally stick your head up and see where your snaking path is headed. If there are places you want to get, you need to work out if there is a plausible path from where you are to where you want to be – but also what the consequences of that path is. What other places do you not go to if you take that path? No one’s path can take in everything, but with some understanding of how probabilistic determination shapes where we go, we can optimise our path a lot, and not just leave it to dumb chance the impact our choices now have on where we can choose to go in the future.
Footnote 1: Chaos theory also recognises that even Probabilistic Determinism doesn’t account for 100% of the pathway that eventuates, but that there are small random factors at each point whose effect cannot be taken into account in advance.
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