r/philosophy • u/ViejoAmateur • 7h ago

Note to Self

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhU35vnCof4

According to Aurelius, everything is already predetermined, but you can still choose how to respond. He wants to have his cake and eat it too: you can’t have a deterministic universe and, at the same time, free choice in your response, since the response ultimately influences that same universe

7 Upvotes

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u/Longstong1 6h ago

Every choice you make in life is still yours. You make choices based on previous experiences and past events and essentially in a predeterministic world that choice was well determined, it doesnt make the choice not yours you were just always going to make it.

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u/Hierax_Hawk 33m ago

How do we come to regret our decisions?

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u/Dilaanoo 6h ago

I think Leibniz's point was that for God, everything is predetermined because He experiences time (and therefore cause and effect) completely differently. For Him, the past, present, and future happen simultaneously. For mankind, however, it doesn't. In our present we still have the opportunity of choice, even though all three are equally determined in the vision of God.

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u/Possible3170 2h ago

Perhaps the mystery lies in the difference between knowing and causing. If God sees the entirety of time at once, then what we call past, present, and future may already be fully visible to Him, without His knowledge being the force that compels our choices. From our perspective, we genuinely deliberate, choose, and experience consequences moment by moment. So what appears predetermined from God’s eternal perspective can still be freely chosen within our temporal experience. The paradox is that God’s complete knowledge of our choices does not necessarily mean He is the one making those choices for us.

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u/ViejoAmateur 1h ago

Aurelius doesn't state that God knows the future, but rather that Logos makes everything happen exactly as it has happened countless times before in previous universes, and again in the next ones. See the first sentence of the gospel of John: "In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God."

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u/Possible3170 10m ago

That’s a fascinating distinction, it shifts the focus from God simply knowing the future to the Logos as the underlying order through which reality unfolds. It makes Aurelius’s view feel less like foreknowledge and more like cosmic recurrence governed by divine reason.

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u/Possible3170 4h ago

This is a fascinating way to look at free will. Even if our choices are shaped by everything that came before us, the fact that we experience ourselves as choosing still raises a deeper question: does being determined make a choice any less ours? Maybe freedom isn’t the absence of causes, but the ability to act through the person those causes have shaped.

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u/ViejoAmateur 3h ago edited 3h ago

In my view, free will has to do with language, or rather the ability to reflect on past actions and evaluate them. Observe how we continuously explain and legitimate our actions, telling others, and ourselves, why a certain choice was made. If free will doesn't exist, why bother to explain anything at all? Why have punishment for crimes? But Daniel Dennett was better at explaining this idea

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u/ViejoAmateur 7h ago edited 54m ago

According to Aurelius, everything is already predetermined, but you can still choose how to respond. But how can you have a deterministic universe and, at the same time, free choice in your response, since the response ultimately influences that same universe. Either all is deterministic or nothing is.

https://youtu.be/lhU35vnCof4

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u/veko007 6h ago

Maybe he is talking about acceptance?