So where do I start the real work that is to be done here? I think I will start with Determinism in Denial, since that was the start of the path I've followed since. I sat in my room at one point in Sophomore Year of college. I had just gotten off the phone with my mom. My grandma, who had been suffering from Alzheimer's for almost a decade at that point, had gotten hurt and was taken to the hospital. So I was feeling mortal and strange, and maybe a little fatalistic, thinking about the passage of time, the inevitability of death, and so forth. I hadn't thought much about philosophy, in concrete terms, before then. At that time I still considered myself an atheist, I'm pretty sure, and didn't put much stock into the idea of a soul or an immortal self, but didn't honestly think about it much at all. I had been taking some formal math classes, though, and at that moment I thought that I should take a stab at a more rigorous framework for the way I was thinking about life and the world, to get my mind off my worries if nothing else. The theory I settled on, which I still believe more or less at the time of writing this, I called Determinism in Denial. I'll detail it here as I thought of it then, which is a purer form compared to how I think of it now, and hopefully easier to communicate. I think all evidence points to the conclusion that the material world is a closed system. That's to say, whether other dimensions exist, I don't know - but it seems like every thing that happens in our universe can trace its causes completely to other events in our universe. If an object falls off a table, it must have been pushed; if a person is born, they must have a mother and father. This is causality: everything, absolutely everything, can be conceptualized in terms of cause and effect. For physical systems (not involving people), I don't think many would disagree. If a marble is placed on a track, it will roll down the path until the end; as long as the track does not break, and the marble doesn't get damaged, and nothing else really changes, this will always happen the exact same way. Physics is numbers in, numbers out, without any room for randomness. As long as you know all the inputs to a system you would theoretically know the exact output. Obviously, it should be mentioned that, in real life, we can rarely if ever know all the inputs to a system. In the real world, I could run a marble down a track ten thousand times and see the exact same thing happen on each, but it's entirely conceivable that on the ten thousand and first time an earthquake would hit my house, shaking my table and flinging the marble off the track and onto the floor. The key thing here is that the earthquake wouldn't have been truly random - if I had the ability to see and understand the precise trajectories of all tectonic plates on earth an hour before, I could have predicted the earthquake with perfect accuracy. The "randomness" of the earthquake would be apparent randomness - due to my incomplete knowledge of tectonic plates - but not true randomness, which cannot be predicted even with all the knowledge in the world. So I think we can safely say that physics is deterministic. For any situation that doesn't involve people, if you were to turn back the clock and play it again, the same outcome would happen every time. But what about people? We're the important ones, anyway. Those of the free will camp would surely take issue with extending this deterministic worldview to people. If you reduce us to inputs and outputs, that just feels cold, and obviously wrong. I'm me, they would say, I'm my brain, making decisions, walking my body around like a marionette. When I'm asked to pick A or B, I make a true choice. Even if you knew everything about me up until that moment, even if you knew every neuron in my brain and every memory in my head, you would still not be able to say for sure what I would do. True randomness, not just the apparent kind. I agree with the sentiment - thinking of myself in terms of pure physics does feel wrong. I'll talk about that a bit more later. But if we say, okay, maybe we're not deterministic, maybe our choices are truly random, we start to run into some issues. Because if we say physics is truly deterministic, and our decisions aren't, that implies that our decisions aren't governed by physics! There must be some point in our decision-making process where physics stops applying so strictly. Well, I think most would say that our nerves are governed by physics: when your hand touches something hot, your nerves don't decide whether to send your brain a signal telling you that, they just do. Similarly, your eyes and ears don't make decisions about what information they send to the brain - that's all physics, and deterministic as anything. So the nondeterminism must happen after signals hit your brain. Your senses perceive the world, physics tells them they must send a signal to your brain, and then your brain makes a decision. Given input A, it can produce decision B or decision C, and no one, no matter how smart, could say for sure which it'll be. But as far as we can tell, brains, or at least neurons, are physical objects. They're incredibly complex, and able to move, grow, and change as they need to, but they're ultimately just incredibly powerful conduits for electrical signals. As far as we can tell, these seem to be deterministic. So maybe there's the God Neuron somewhere we haven't looked yet - a special type of neuron that doesn't obey physics so strictly. It's impossible to say for sure. But, lacking certainty, I think it helps to employ a bit of common sense here. If there were such a God Neuron, capable of violating physics, it would really be quite a thing. In all the universe, we see no signs of any material violating physics, and we are surely composed of the same materials as everything else. How could this physics-breaking behavior just happen into existence? A rigorous proof is impossible, due to the maybe-we-just-haven't-found-it-yet line of reasoning, but I hope you agree with me that it seems doubtful. So then why would considering ourselves in deterministic terms feels so fundamentally wrong? I think the most likely reason is evolutionary pressure: throughout the course of human development, there were likely some that thought of themselves as free agents, capable of making true choices, and some that didn't, instead believing themselves ruled by the same physical laws as everything. Considering yourself capable of true choice is an incredible motivator. To feel doomed, fated to a certain end, knocks the wind out of your sails like nothing else. I think those with a sense of agency would have been heavily favored in natural competition, and likely the ancestors of all of us today. This is purely speculative pseudoscience, I know, but again, certainty is sadly elusive in this area. So this is the theory, then. I am a deterministic being: everything I think, say, and do is purely a function of my circumstances and the chemicals in my brain. But at the same time, my brain is designed to reject this understanding. Although I can reason out that I am probably deterministically ruled, I simply cannot go about my day acting like this. When I pick what I eat for breakfast, or what I watch on tv, my brain automatically considers that a true decision with no room for debate. I cannot trick myself into actually thinking about decisions as preprogrammed events. It just doesn't work. The only way to accept determinism in theory and continue to go about my life is to live in a constant state of denial. That's why I call it Determinism in Denial. Because of the determinism, and also because of the denial. You see. So then what's the Golden Path business in the title? I'll now exit my long-winded explanation of Sophomore Year musings and talk about what this actually means for me these days. Thinking about Determinism in Denial leads to a conceptualization of life as less chaotic, I think. It answers a lot of "why"s. The only reason anything happens is because it happens; this is the perpetual because. The fun thing this philosophy gets you is that life is not about plotting a new course, but about discovering the way you were always on. Each new day you get to witness the next phase of your path. Each change in yourself is a discovery of what your entire life until that moment had been building up to. As I go about my day, I believe I'm making choices, because I must believe that, but when I reflect on the choices I've made, I realize that I was always going to become who I am. The work to better oneself, then, isn't really about change. It's about proving that the path you've always been on was the right one. The Golden Path, that leads to the best possible ending, the inevitable and unsurpassable series of events that makes up your life. Consider the words of all those who would offer you aid and advice, but if they predict that you aren't going to end up in the right place, turn up your nose. Embrace your denial and put your energy where it's needed. It was all necessary for the way it is going to be; nothing could have ever been any different. Prove that it was all needed for the goodness of the future, or, even better, the perfection of the present. And continue on your journey.