Am I Really Thinking? An Analysis of Determinism and Human/Nature Interconnectedness

The school of philosophy known as determinism posits that humans are devoid of free will and that our lives are merely the consequences of greater actors, be they nature, our own biology, a deity of some sort, or any complex system that is too great for any individual to have an impact on. Nature and place, in this case referring to the geography and culture of a region, do fall into the deterministic paradigm by influencing how people’s lives unfold. I often ask myself to what extent these initial conditions set by nature can be challenged or modified by the exercise of our own will, that is, I challenge the determinist maxim, but in an almost absurd, meta fashion, I wonder if in that very questioning I am falling prey to a determinist trap I had no clue was there. That is, is my questioning of determinism a necessary part of my life path, and expected move in the chess game of my life that some greater force could easily foresee, and by me thinking that what I thought was my free will to now be a deterministic action, am I, in a logical sense, contradicting or confirming my own deterministic path? To be honest, one can easily see how a series of logical negations can translate into an infinite loop of “what if I think that I think that I think…” that gets one nowhere, so in this sense, determining determinism is logically unsolvable. I can’t know whether what I think and do are objectively the products of my own desires, or actions resulting from a set of initial conditions, so I have resolved to not attempt to answer this question and instead approach it from a non-logical framework. That is, whether it is true or not, what do I feel to be true about my own actions and thinking? How do I think that my environment has impacted the way I think, if at all? By addressing these topics through the lens of subjective feelings rather than objective logic, I am able to get some answers because the logical route will only lead me to the conclusion that my problems are unsolvable or at the very least that the solutions are indeterminate, neither of which are satisfying in a logical framework. Feeling-oriented problem solving does not necessarily promise “correct” answers, but at the very least can help me, personally, wrestle with these thoughts, which is the most that can be done with them. So from a logical standpoint of optimizing my approach to solving this problem of determinism vs indeterminism in my life, the most logical solution is to take a feeling-based (ugh, I know, me too) approach.

My first emotion regarding the way that my thoughts and actions are influenced by my environment is the topic of scarcity. In New Mexico, and a smaller town (people who disagree have clearly never been to a real city) like Santa Fe, everything is smaller, the population, the diversity of cultures, the types of jobs available, the facilities, events, etc, and I think this has made me have to question things on a larger scale. I fear being trapped in thinking in terms of localities, that is, knowledge by anecdote and not by a method. “I know this because so and so said it”, or “I know this because my cousin did this” are common examples of scarce knowledge that I have tried to avoid. Universality is what I seek, as a smaller environment is what surrounds me. For instance, when thinking of economics, I try not to think of what economic paradigms afflict Santa Fe, but instead how the city itself is a case study of a broader economic phenomenon, for instance, it is not that Santa Fe has a housing crisis, it is that as a small town with a net amount of people leaving every year is a victim of a manufacturing decline since 2005 and a 7.5 percent inflation rate that outpaces 1.6 percent wage inflation rates. I believe the notion of scarcity has also affected me personally in the sense that having access to only a few perspectives (be it certain age groups, ethnicities, professions, or whatever else is limited in a small town) has made me want to seek out more perspectives through the written word. I often enjoy reading reference materials because they provide a sense of greater connection between different areas of knowledge, people, etc, which is not something you achieve anecdotally by living in a small town.

Another major emotion that I believe my environment has influenced is my admiration for nature. Santa Fe has more mountains punctuated by homes rather than the opposite. I mean, several roads are unpaved, and it is not uncommon to be run into by a deer. The point being made is that it is hard to grow up in an environment so immersed in the outdoors and not at least develop a modicum of appreciation for nature’s inexorable connection in the life and development of man, which leads to another question in need of pondering. Is the fate of nature and humanity inseparable? I will attack this in two ways, firstly through personal, subjective exploration, and second through a broader, objective, and more expansive lens. I have always found that every time I try to delude myself into thinking that nature and man are separate, something always seems to contradict that conclusion. For instance, just a few years ago I remember thinking that the tornadoes in Texas did not matter much because it was, well, a land I had no connection to, and nature could ravage it for all I cared. However, at the same time, I simultaneously, myopically enjoyed a steak. Only a few weeks later, I remember going to the grocery store and seeing that steak prices had risen by a sizable portion, and so my parents adjusted to the economic shift by buying less steak. So, a seemingly “foreign” nature event had affected my life as an industrialized consumer. I never made the same mistake again in assuming that what happens anywhere in the world, especially a natural disaster of some sort, has no bearing on my urbanized (though I live in a rural state) lifestyle. Nature is our resource bank, and as humans, we have merely taken loans from that bank to finance our ventures of metropolises, technology, industrialization, agriculture, etc, but at the end of the day, just like any entrepreneur who borrows from private equity, we have bills to pay. They usually come in the form of some natural disaster that undermines our ability to proceed as usual, because we have been asymmetrical in our dealings with nature. Climate change is the most prominent example of this cause-and-effect relationship. You don’t lower greenhouse gas emissions, ok, well then more hurricanes happen in the Caribean region and power lines and infrastructure goes down and billions of dollars are needed in reconstruction. Nature may not be able to voice her concerns through words as we humans do, but through actions, she speaks plenty, and I think as humans we lose sight of this. So considering the effects of not paying attention to the demands of mother nature are now coming back to bite us, now more than ever we should come to the conclusion, that no, in fact, nature and man’s fate are not inseparable, they are united. Whether we humans can learn to live with that and adjust our habits and intellectual modalities accordingly is another question. It is a question that will be answered depending on how we live our lives. If we embrace the indeterministic take that our environment has no bearing on our futures, then how can we ever respect nature, but if we recognize that our lifespan is a minute fraction of the Earth’s lifespan, how can we possibly be so arrogant as to think that our very being does not serve some sort of functional purpose for mother nature. I still do not know what my functional purpose is in this world as per the desire of mother nature, but I guess that is for me to find out with time. And I guess that search is and was the whole purpose of this little rambling of mine.