When I was an undergrad at the University of Toronto, I had a meal plan for a year, so I often ate together with a bunch of people. John was one of them. We weren’t close, but I considered him a friend. John was studying engineering. He had been a star hockey player in high school. He was smart, funny, and a secular Buddhist. We talked about that once, a group of us, and he said something so peculiar that I still remember it. He said sometimes he thought he didn’t exist. 
 “Of course you exist,” I said, “We’re talking, aren’t we?” If he didn’t exist, then who were we talking to? But he thought most things weren’t real, including himself. He wasn’t sure, but he was just being honest, he said. I saw this as a Buddhist thing, but his telling us he didn’t exist struck me as absurd. Someone said cogito ergo sum. Another said if John was right, none of us needed to study anymore. We all laughed. It was hard for us to take him seriously because, if we didn’t exist, what was the point of living my life or anyone’s life? Or life?
 “I don’t know about that,” he replied patiently. “But don’t you wonder sometimes, why is it that I’m here and you’re there?” Now,
strangely enough, I understood the meaning of that. I didn’t have the intellectual toolkit back then to properly label it, but I knew what he was asking.
Why am I me and not you? Why are you not me? What is this subjective experience that separates everyone? On the one hand, our sense of self and our experience of self are most important to us. We could describe it as having a soul, but nowadays, philosophers call it the hard problem of consciousness, or qualia. In Disney’s Pinocchio , we see Pinocchio with other puppets on a stage and singing, “There are no strings on me.” We feel for him, but not for the puppets because they are stringed things. Objects have no sense of self.
Only Pinocchio, who’s been gifted by the Blue Fairy with a soul and come alive, draws our interest. Centuries ago, Descartes cut the world
into two by saying only humans think and have free will. Animals are mere automatons, he claimed, and part of the deterministic universe. Society has evolved much since then, and now we speak of animal rights and see them as sentient beings like us. But are there no strings on them?
 A non-dualistic view of reality says “I-You” distinction is false. This world of multiplicity is maya, an illusion, behind which is only brahman , the ultimate reality (Hinduism), or anatta , non-self (Buddhism). The Stoics believed in something similar: Marcus Aurelius saw the universe as one living being with one soul and that we all act with one movement. But perhaps the most rational expression of the “Oneness of existence” was given by Parmenides, who said nothing comes from nothing, from which he reasoned that all of Being is one, changeless, infinite, eternal. We could say pantheism or monism or physical reductionism, but underneath such view of reality flows an intuition we all share and hold self-evident: causality.
 Nothing can come from nothing. Leibniz called it the principle of sufficient reason. Something cannot just happen for no reason. Nothing escapes causality. From the moment of the Big Bang to the end of time, the chain of causation is unbreakable. But if that is the case, everything is determined. We do what we do because we are all part of the causal chain that connects all things. Life itself is a part of that. “Whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity,” Darwin said, “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” There is no room in such a world for free will, at least not the “I could have done otherwise” kind. But then there is no self either. We may be wonderfully intricate biological entities, but we would essentially be puppets pulled along by the strings of causality. Perhaps John, being a Buddhist, had been more cognizant of the absolute reach of causality than the rest of us at that table, of our deterministic reality, and thus of the illusory nature of self and agency. Determinism leaves no room for you and me. We are all but fragments of the movement of the stars and galaxies. Yet, for all that, humans cannot live by determinism alone. As irresistible as determinism is, we simply cannot live with its consequences, not if it robs us of free will. We say the cost of said determinism is too high. So next time, I’ll talk about free will.

Peter Lee 
Assistant Professor
School of English Language and Literature