Does Life Really Have Meaning: The Illusion Of Free Will?

Rubin Caco
Professor Joshua Lott
Psychology 103
7 December, 2016
Does Life Really Have Meaning: The Illusion of Free Will
Choice is defined by the oxford dictionary as “the ability to choose between two or more possibilities.” It also defines free will as, “The power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion.” Choice and free will are arguably of the most important aspects of the human experience. Our ability to choose between right or wrong, selfish or selfless acts, and the notion that we did it all of our own accord is one of the basic parameters of complex beings such as ourselves. Yet, in our wake, humans have discovered systems in the universe that are inherent to existence: the
Anyone who has seen “The Terminator” knows that the resistance also sends back a man by the name of Kyle Reese to stop this robot assassin; it is this man from the future that ends up fathering John Connor. So here, it is obvious that time works in a loop. In trying to alter the past, the cyborg unknowingly cause the events that lead to their known future. The reason why this is relevant is because it exemplifies that it’s impossible to change the past. If the cyborgs were successful, then it would have have meant that they would have easily won the war in the future. Therefore they would have never sent a Terminator in the past to kill John Connor; then John Connor would have been born and then the cycle continues over and over and over again. This is called the Grandfather Paradox and it is one of the reasons scientist hypothesis that time travel is
In the second Terminator movie, the now adolescent John Connor postponed the cyborg uprising by destroying the technology that would have lead to that uprising. By postponing the uprising, John actively changes the events of the future by creating an entirely separate timeline; this is called the multiverse theory, where every possible event that could happen splits the universe into two separate realities. So surely this is an example of free will, right? Well, not necessarily. Again, if it is impossible to change the past, and impossible to alter physics, then the present is a result of physic acting on the past. This means that one doesn’t really have a say in the matter of which possible universe/ timeline will be chosen. So to wrap up the Terminator comparison, the cyborgs from future “A” send a Terminator back in time, which causes John to be born and leads to the split of the universe in “Terminator 2” into two universes/ timelines; timeline “A” and timeline “B”, in which timeline “B” is followed in Terminator 3 and so on. However, no focus will be given to the other Terminator movies as those were cinematic abortions that break their own rules and deserve to die in historic