In an otherwise quiet suburban neighbourhood, a house, like many others, boomed with the sounds of music, laughter, and alcohol.
The new year was rolling in and the house was full of people who didn’t have a reason not to be there, and had managed to fill themselves with enough drink to forget they’d rather be at home, sleeping.
On the back door steps, two kids, a girl named Risa and a boy named Alim sat and watched the stars. Their parents had brought them along and neither had any interest in adult conversations, so they retired to the back yard, content to sit and watch the stars.
Risa twirled her long black hair through her fingers as she stared off into space. Alim stared too, but it was a vacant stare. He was lost inside the world behind his eyes.
Risa turned to him and said, “Hey Alim.”
Alim shook his head slightly as he came out of his reverie and returned Risa’s look. “Yeah?”
“I was thinking... we all go around doing whatever we want, right? Like, if we break the law, obviously we get in trouble but still, we can do whatever we want.”
“Like free will?” asked Alim.
“Yeah. But,” she said, pausing slightly, “if I throw a ball, I know where it’s going to go. I made it go there. It has no free will.”
“Yeah?” said Alim, tilting his head slightly.
“Well, isn’t that like what happens to us?” she asked. “Like, if I throw the ball at a wall, it bounces off. Same as if Josie from Mr. Collins’ class calls me something stupid, it makes me mad. I didn’t make it happen, it happened to me and I got mad because of it. Same as the ball. I happened to it.” She was staring off into the yard, brows furrowed and hands held as if trying to catch something invisible in front of her.
Alim put his elbow on his knee and propped his chin on his hand. “Yeah, but you’re alive. A ball isn’t.”
“Still,” said Risa, closing her eyes tight and shaking her head as if to loosen some stubborn idea in her mind, “I wasn’t always here. I’m only here because my parents screwed. And their parents screwed, and theirs, all the way back until there was no life... And before that, I guess, just things floating around in space until something crashed into something else? And before that, the big bang. So the big bang gave the ultimate shove and everything else has just been bouncing off the proverbial wall ever since.”
It was Alim’s brows turn to furrow. “So you think we don’t have free will because things happen to us?”
Risa shook her head again. “No. Sort of. Hang on, listen. So, cause and effect, right? The big bang happens, and from then out, it’s just cause and effect. Things fly out at a trajectory they were originally forced into, and they in turn gravitate around each other, obeying precise mathematical equations, then eventually, things happen to bump into each other in such a way that they start to move around each other like clockwork, and we call that life, but it’s just ones and zeroes. Mr. Reiman said that with a big enough computer and enough information, you can accurately predict anything. So if we’re all just one big pre-determined calculation,
“What about consciousness?” countered Alim.
“What about it?
- unfinished.
