I just finished watching this week’s Grey’s Anatomy. In case you don’t watch that show, here’s the general gist of it: Meredith Grey (main character, get it?) is a resident at Seattle Grace Hospital. Lots of people dip their pen in the office ink and have other assorted issues. In most episodes (if not all, but I can’t remember them off the top of my head…) someone makes a decision based on an event that happens that day, an event that is similar to their circumstances. For instance, in today’s episode, Alex’s sort-of love interest shows up and announces she’s pregnant. He doesn’t want anything to do with the baby – until the case he has that day plays out: a baby that needs immediate surgery and may have lots of other issues turns out to be okay. The last scene is he and Rebecca, looking happy about a baby.
So what if the baby in the hospital had died instead? Or had a horrible deformity? Is the whole point of the show that one person’s life really hangs in the balance of whether a chance encounter goes one way or the other? Or is it just a show that lacks subtlety? Hmm, philosophical question or theatrical… It could elevate Grey’s Anatomy from a trashy soap opera to modern day thinking man’s philosophy.
Is that how there really is no free will – that we don’t have control over what we are exposed to, and thus our knee-jerk reactions to life are wholly determined by what goes on around us?
In his On the Freedom of the Will, Schopenhauer stated, “You can do what you will, but in any given moment of your life you can will only one definite thing and absolutely nothing other than that one thing.” You will do what you want, but what you want to do is determined by everything else that has happened.
I don’t know what conspired to make me want wine and chocolate, but that’s what I’m off to do. Form your own theories!
