Who's in Charge?

Okay, so today's post is sorta, kinda, about faith, belief, and all that stuff. Go ahead and admit it, this is something we cancer people do think about at times.

I consider myself an agnostic. Put simply that means I can’t prove there is a God and I can’t prove there isn’t. So in my mind, it is simply not possible to know.

Still, there is a very real event that makes one wonder. It takes place every day in our bodies.

Why do we decide to do what we do?

Let’s say you decide to go bowling. Hey, it’s hypothetical. Why in the world you’d actually go bowling is a whole other subject.

Risking toe fungus, fleas, and other horrid stuff, you jam your feet into shoes previously worn by hundreds of other people.

You step up to the alley, fighting back thoughts of last week when you threw three gutter balls in a row, enduring the laughs of some self-described bowling genius.

The 16 pound orb flies out of your hand sailing much too high in the air and crashing thunderously on what, until now, used to be a smooth, undented floor. At the far end, those damn white pins stand in defiance as your ball tries its best to miss every one of them.

Thinking about cause and effect

For our illustration, it doesn’t matter if you hit the pins. Let’s instead take a look at what happened in your body, working backwards.

1. Effect: you threw the ball. Cause: muscles in your shoulder, arm, and hand flexed and contracted.
2. Effect: your muscles and joints did their thing. Cause: your brain sent a message telling your body how to throw the ball.
3. Effect: your brain sent the necessary message. Cause: you decided to throw the ball.
4. Effect: you decided to throw the ball. Cause: ?

So there’s the rub. Where did the decision to throw the ball come from in the first place?

Effects and Causes 1 through 3 can all be explained by the action of neurons traveling through synapses in your brain. But what about number 4? Where did the decision to throw the ball come from? I mean, if our thoughts are only the result of electro-chemical actions in our grey matter then they should be random, not controlled by anything.

Where do our thoughts come from?

It kinda makes you wonder. How do we have original, organized thought? When we decide to do something, where does that decision come from?

How can an organ in our heads make decisions? What tells it to fire up those thoughts?

Could they come from something outside of ourselves? What is the source of our decisions?

These are the things that keep this agnostic up at night thinking about… Wait, how is it I’m thinking? What about right now? Where do the ideas I’m typing come from?

My brain is making my fingers fly across the keyboard. But what controls my brain? Could it be my soul?

I’m just sayin’.