Good Will Hunting

The question has been lurking in my mind for some time now - occasionally it surfaces as an active thought and at other times it languishes in the shady recesses of my mind. This morning, this question once again had taken the form of the former and I decided that I have to blog this partly to articulate it and not let it slip away once again, and also to grant myself a respite from the drudgery of mugging for my damn psych test tomorrow. (partly also cos I'm confident of doing well.. haha not too cocky for my own good, I sincerely hope.)

Indeed, here's the perennial question: Do we have a right to be proud of what we are (achievements) and our attributes (physical, psychological, emotional, mental and intellectual)? To make it sound more familiar, am I good cos I'm good?

Really, my friends, what I'm trying to drive at is whether all the 'good' things about us are really things that we should be proud of, because from the way I perceive it, we may afterall be mere machines endowed with these natural attributes (for the sake of this discussion, all the good attributes), and predispositions to do certain things in certain ways (for the sake of this discussion, all the good things in all the good ways). In sheer indignance, some of you, especially those who believe in a god, may protest: no, we're all given freewill! - that makes all the difference! Well, allow me to retort: isn't freewill a subset of our predispositions? Let's imagine that I'm studying damn hard for a test while others aren't because I've a stronger will to study and excel while others don't. But is this really a pure matter of willpower - something that is determined by the individual himself? I think not, because I'm indeed more predisposed towards studying hard, which can be translated into me possessing a stronger predispostion to augment my will to compel me to study relatively harder than the rest. This last statement explicitly corroborates the fact that our will is determined by our predispositions, and the former is, thus, but a part of our natural endowment - something that was bestowed to us out of either grace (for the believers) or contingency (for the atheists), and definitely not something we deserve. A murderer who kills out of rage may not be that guilty afterall - he simply was born with a stronger predispostion to kill and born with less will to control himself. Let's look at some words and phrases we associate with proudly: innate, smart, skillful, righteous, tenacious, morally upright, I did it!, I thrashed the rest!, I worked freakin hard for this. If you're even the slightest bit convinced of my aforementioned argument, you should be questioning yourselves whether those words and phrases are really that glorious afterall. Freedom of choice - the most pertinent thing that distinguishes us from other organisms - and will - the most salient comparative innate ability that pries us away from homogeneity, ceteris paribus - may not be really that deserving of their elite stauses afterall.

We may well just be beings that have been pre-programmed with individual endowments and levels of endowment, and nothing to be really proud of. An analogy would be that of a computer with a design (physical attributes) and programmes loaded in (mental, emotional, psychological and intellectual attributes). Willpower would be the durability that was built-in, yes built-in, the computer. Hence, where is the missing link? - where's the mind that controls the hands that in turn controls the computer? It has to be a human being, I guess - yet another computer no different from the one it is controlling. However, I'd like to think otherwise.

Justin