is an idea I agree with. In essence it is: What happened could not have have happened in any other way than it did. I first encountered it in a personality theory class. Raymond B. Cattell, an English/American Psychologist (1905-1998)) devised a theory, a formula, for why individuals do what they do. He was a determinist. Meaning that every event (behavior) has something that caused it.
What About Free Will?
Well, it’s a necessary deception. Without it, how could we hold people responsible for their actions? What happens to law and order? Without the concept of Free Will how could we punish? Justify it? We would become simply an order where all that mattered was triumph, or, “The Last Man (or women) Standing” gets to do what he wants.
And So
what transpires is brutal. Or, we humans resort to animal behaviors, or, “tooth and claw” – survival of the fittest. Jungle rules.
Cattell was right
and so was Freud. Freud was also a determinist, but of different sort.
Personality
is one of the mysterious ingredients as to why we can’t accurately predict what a person will do. Cattell’s theory was if all was known of certain factors, to include the environmental/external, then behavior (specifically) could be predicted. Thus, Free Will was not true. Or as Sam Harris says, an illusion. I agree.
For Example
take my recent book about the election of 2016, which made Donald Trump the president of the United States of America. No one else could have written that book. To prove that point I submit this illustration:
Or, Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s novel of addiction, tennis, and entertainment. Here’s another triangle demonstrating that:
In Other Words
that which happens, happens because it could not have. If we knew of all the factors, or ingredients. In other words, the recipe.
The Proof is the pie.
If you follow a recipe for apple pie, precisely, you’ll get an apple pie. However, depending of course on the apples, flour, etc. and so on? Yours might be better than mine.
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