Let’s say the entire biography of the universe has already been written. An unending, near infinitely granular chain of cause and effect, extending forward in a single direction: time. For a model of this, you could use boxes representing choices (we’ll get to that later) and potentially multiple (again, later) arrows between boxes in such a way that an arrow from A to B means A is the cause of B, plus an axiom that there is no way to go back, meaning if there is a path from A to B there is not a path from B to A. (This is pretty much the definition of a branch in a directed tree).
If you, from any given branch, trace human life, your grandmas 20-25 years, Saturn from 1720 to 1963, etc… you should get roughly the same thing: A to B to C to D.....… to wherever you choose to stop counting. A single one width arrow in which every cause has a single effect, and viceversa, and everything that happened was originally intended to.
You can definitely see it that way, but its not very interesting.
A good idea might be to consider the fact that, with the intuition and evidences we have, there is not really a way to tell whether the branch we’re living in, in which every event has either 0 or 1 (this is a huge abuse of the term, but I’m speaking to intuition) probability, since it will either happen or not (again, this is not true but bear with me), is unique, or determined, if you know the whole structure of the tree.
With that in mind, things improve a bit. Sure, you are always going to live a single A to B to C succession of events, but you don’t know which. Seems trivial, and it is. And yet, it solves a lot of problems. See asimetric information and incomplete information games if you are interested in that idea.
My point is that, while choice is problematic when everything is said and done, it might very well be useful when you are still in the thick of it. Say that you are in a branch which opens alternatives B and C. The B-you , when laying in their deathbed surrounded by their B-grandchildren might say “everything was predetermined, B was written all along, etc”. But there is an equally compelling argument from the C-you, with their C-Grandchildren in their C-deathbed. Both are right in this model, in the sense that everything was written beforehand, but you could loosely define choice between B and C as deciding which do you want to live in. The fact that you are inhabiting C, for instance, doesn’t negate the existence of B.
The main takeaway here is that, if the deterministic model is huge enough, the concept of choice lies in the uncertainty of the position you ocupy within it. This is not a perfect explanation, but it served me to soothe the existential dreads.
Yeah, that might be me not factoring my own environment out of it as much as I thought. In my case, there has been a lot of recrimination about failure of character, about taking something from everyone else without enough consideration as to how it would cause them harm, implicitly stating that an offense has been incurred. Its not the main reaction, but definitely more common than I would have expected. As to
it might very well be the case, but sufficient context and trust has been reached to meaningfully engage other taboo topics already. I’m not sure It can be reached here, but cant confidently discard it either.
Lastly, the murder-victim approach I used is just a possible explanation for something I consider a discrepancy. I’m not all that in love with the idea myself, but I didn’t mean it as literal arguments people will explicitly consider but rather as hidden euristics that might explain it. I’ve seen very few cases where it is explicitly talked about in that lense, and only after starting to read into the subject in more depth, so those are more academic/philosophic digestions than actual world observations