What does it mean to be human?

Our memories, our thoughts, our minds – none of that really matters if we are not more than the sum of our biological parts. If we cannot go beyond those tools, if we cannot transcend what nature gave us, we are only chain reactions waiting to happen.

On the physiological level, we are but machines, following a single impulse to put ourselves at ease with the world. Everything we do, every act of love, caring, seeming selflessness but also selfishness and malice, can at the end be attributed to a purely egoistical wish: minimizing pain, and maximizing pleasure. We do not care for the pain of others, unless it touches us and causes us pain, and once that line is crossed our apathy turns into empathy. Not for their sake, but for our own, because we cannot bear to watch them suffer.

It is a consequence of the evolution of a mind: we cannot experience another's pain, we can only feel our own. Given this constraint, we evolved in a way that benefitted cooperation (by a small margin) over competition, but the price of individuality is a high one. As a species, we have lost the urge to prevail as a whole. We lost that instinct that a colony of ants will show when their nest is flooded, and they form a raft, clinging together so that as many as possible can survive. The day the first human began to grasp his self, he began to shut out the other.

So all things considered, did we ever have a choice? A choice to be better than this?

It is easy and comfortable to think that we cannot hope to transcend what nature gave us, because we are nothing but products of the laws that govern the cosmos. And perhaps we are nothing but cogwheels in a gigantic cosmic machine, where any sense of randomness is only a result of the incomprehensibly complex interactions of the molecular, atomic and subatomic world around us. And even if Laplace's demon knew all these laws of the universe and sat on our shoulder and whispered in our ears, revealing truths before they came to pass, what kind of choice would that leave us with?

Who are we to say if the outcome of the collapsing probability function of a quantum process was not just predetermined by some force that exceeds our comprehension? Time flows in one direction only, and once we pick a path, we have no way of knowing what would have waited at the end of the other road.

But in an infinite universe, the road branches into infinite paths, at each moment in time, on an infinitesimal small scale. In another universe, that is exactly the same except for one particle, displaced by an infinitesimally small distance, the quantum process may have had a different outcome, and we may have picked the other path and walked another way, opening up another infinity of paths beyond.

The ultimate question is not: Do we have a choice? It is: Does it matter?

Because at the end of it all, time flows in one direction only, and we cannot know what would wait at the end of the other road – so why worry? But that question already holds the answer in itself.

We are afraid of making the tiniest mistakes in our lives, making the wrong choice, taking the wrong path, and we fear some terrible impact waiting for us at the end of the road. But we never consider that each and any of the tiniest things that we do every day can have an impact beyond anything we could ever imagine: a butterfly beating its wings and causing a storm at the other end of the world.

And Laplace's Demon may have known it before, or in another universe, the storm might not have come to pass. But in our universe, in our here and now, it did. Either way, the outcome is beyond our comprehension and beyond our control. But whether choice is an illusion or not, what matters is that at the decisive moment, it feels like we have that power in our hands. The power to cause a storm, to change the world, to shape the future. It can be terrifying to believe that our actions might cause a disaster. But such is life, and because time flows in one direction only, regret is obsolete, unless we use it to learn from our mistakes. Truly, the only real mistake we could make in life would be to avoid making any choices at all, just because we are afraid of the consequences.

In the end, I have only two beliefs in life.

There is always a way.
And there is always a choice.