I just finished my first Sam Harris book. There was some buzz about this on RfM several months ago when the Infants on Thrones did an episode about agency.

Harris advocates determinism, the belief that if we knew where all the particles of the universe were at any one point in the universe's history we would be able to predict where they would be and what they would be doing at any other point in time. He views human beings as a natural phenomenon, made of the same star-stuff as everything else and with no extra supernatural dimension to their agency.

So, if we understood completely how the human brain works, there would be no mystery to human behavior. Every individual is completely at the mercy of the genes they inherit and their physical and psychological development. We have no control over the majority of things that happen to us, so the thoughts we have about it are mostly reactionary. In fact, ALL our thoughts are reactions to internal and external background processes over which we have no control.

If you were to exchange places with another person, molecule for molecule, you would be that person. You would be that person utterly and completely, and you would have no extra advantage or ulterior motive than to think and behave exactly as that person would.

People do weigh choices and make decisions, but who is to say where the final swaying thought comes from? We don't decide in advance what we will decide. Our thoughts just arise in our heads from the parts of our brains that we aren't conscious about. We are slaves to our genomes and our life experience. If we had slightly different genes or another experience, of course that could make all the difference about the choices we make.

This sounds bleak, but I like it. It resonates with me. Mormonism had me hating myself over things as petty as masturbating as a teenager, among other things. I was a believer––staunch, devout, committed––but I hated myself. Post-mission, the bishop sent me to ARP and I began to learn about cognitive-behavioral concepts––childhood traumas, black and white thinking, self-defeating attitudes, addiction as a coping adaptation of the brain, etc.

I was kicking myself to death trying to do what the church told me to do, and the answer from the people the church defers to for their 'difficult' cases was that it wasn't me. I, the conscious agent that is me, they taught, did not choose to keep messing up. It was beyond my agency to conquer whatever addictive behavior I was battling until I understood how I worked as an emotional creature who was a victim of his hyper-senstitive make-up and emotional history.

Any comment about sexual normalcy aside, I began to recover from a long childhood of feeling like an abomination. Perhaps I was only broken, not deviant. Perhaps I had been doing "all I could do," and the Atonement made up for the rest.

With this new understanding of things, I felt cheated at first, like... I had spent all this anguish trying to prove to God I was truly penitent, only to find out that I didn't need to do all of that to myself after all. My suffering was specious and good for nothing.

But then I started to realize that if I could rewind my life to any point that I wanted and press play –– with any different outcome being possible –– I would have thought and felt and behaved the exact same way again. So it was specious to wish that my past self had had more perspective and context than I had had at whatever age. What matters is that I felt so bad and tortured my psyche so much with guilt and shame because I had desired to be good in my own limited way. Given the background and context that I had, I couldn't have behaved any differently.

Determinism speaks to me in yet another way. As a side hobby, I'm studying religious fundamentalism and the cult mentality. For the most part, these aren't bad people. They are doing the best they know how given their background and context and yada yada. Perhaps we can't blame them for the way they think and behave, not entirely. They are victims of the savage way a cult completely takes over the human psyche. It takes us all years to learn a different way of seeing the world and accumulate enough doubts until the shelf collapses and the spell is broken. Until that time, none of us could have been expected to think or behave any differently. Within the believing frame of mind, it would have seemed stupid and malevolent to question the church.

When I listened to the Infants' episode on agency and read the board posts a few months ago, I was in favor of agency, even if it was subject to human limitations. Since then, I've read Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. In it, he says that determinism is true and free will is an illusion, but human beings are so complex there is no predicting what they will do. He also says that because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle –– the principle that the more precisely we try to measure something at the quantum level, the more we will never know what it is naturally –– it is not humanly possible to ever know exactly where all the particles of the universe are and what they are doing at a given moment in time. Hypothetically, though, if we could have a precise measurement of how the universe is at any one moment in time, we would know what it's placement would be at any other time from its beginning to its end according to the law of cause and effect.

Humans are no exception to this natural system. Life is made of cells that are comprised of the same star-stuff as everything else. We are a complex organization of cells that have evolved as a single organism the abilities to create a mental simulation of its environment in its brain for the purposes of navigating, acquiring food, avoiding danger, et cetera. If we knew how all the molecules were arranged, the genome, if we understood exactly how the brain works and all the background forces acting upon a person, we could probably predict exactly what they will think or how they will behave in the immediate future. And if we had a present God's-awareness of every sparrow that falls to the earth, every hair on every head, and the placement of every atom in the cosmos, we would know the future to end of time. There is no free will, or rather, any free will we feel we have is an illusion. Our agency is in servitude to the internal and external background forces as they act upon our minds. "Acting without being acted upon" is not possible.

Wouldn't this determinism entail that the notions of praise and criticism, reward and punishment are ultimately without meaning, while at the same time entailing that they are ultimately meaningful, since they are necessary effects of matter/energy, which is ultimate and therefore the ground of meaning?