What if . . . ?

Sometimes I wonder at myself, blogging on request? Ah well, here goes.

Ever wonder about possibilities? What ifs? Sure you have. Everybody has, at one point or another, wondered what might have been. It seems the only logical thing to do. Taking one path in life leads you to a particular destination, with a particular route, and it is only natural to wonder if the other routes might have been more scenic, less bumpy, more direct. We make innumerable decisions in every moment of our lives. Every decision affects the events that follow, and subsequently the nature and details of the decisions to follow. So the web of possibilities is near-infinite, and to ponder it seems somewhat pointless. Yet it is the obsession of humanity to attempt to simulate and theorise as to the alternatives. This would actually be pretty much impossible, as each decision affects the following choices in such minute and subtle ways that it would be futile to predict the outcome of pretty much anything with any degree of accuracy.

Let us use a simple example to illustrate. Say, if we were to go to a buffet and start selecting food. Afterward, we try to figure out how the individual selection of food might have differed if the initial choice of the first item on the plate had been different. Not such a ridiculously complicated task, it seems, certainly not as convoluted as an entire life. Ok, so the first item on the plate, instead of a chunk of beef, becomes a bowl of soup. Ignore the grammar. Simple, you say. So the rest of the food is simply pushed back by the capacity of the soup in the stomach. Not quite. What if the taste of the soup altered your appetite for the rest of the food. If it is a rich cream soup, you might not want such strong-tasting foods after, or conversely you might want to follow it up with equally strong flavours. if either is the case, how much is the change going to be? These are such nebulous and poorly defined ideas that they are essentially impossible to forecast with any accuracy. Imagine the web of changes as each item is added. Life is infinitely more complex and subject to external, uncontrolled shocks than a buffet, so if we cannot even handle the concept of predicting the course of a meal, what makes us think we can handle alternate lives?

Even if it were possible to project a rough simulacrum of an alternate life based on a changed decision, what would be the point? Every decision made in our lives is not truly a decision, for the choice made is the only possible choice. Allow me to explain. Each individual has a unique, or at least particular method of dealing with the world. This method, assuming nothing else changes, will never vary. So the exact same individual, with the exact same history, personality, physical presence, and so on, given a particular set of data, will always make the same choice without variation. It's a classic system. Keeping everything else constant, with one variable, how will the individual react to a change? It will never ever vary. Certainly we are all making choices and assessing the benefits and costs and all that in every decision we are called upon to make, but our reaction and final decision will always be the same. If it were different, we would not be the same people. Even apparently random things are not. The rolling of a die. A person rolls it in a particular way, and it interacts with all the external factors to produce a particular result. Now, if we could place this person back in time, with no memory of the displacement, and have him roll the die again, he or she would do it exactly the same way, since there is no reason for this person to do it any other way. Even the apparently random pauses, the tremble in the hand, the adjustment to the wind blowing, would all be exactly the same. So given the exact same external factors, the exact same person will produce the exact same result every single time.

So what does this mean for the individual? Well, quite a lot, actually. But I'm going to stop here. Been running low on sleep recently, and really need to stock up. I'll pick up again soon.

Enough for you, dear?