Do I get to choose?

You head home and get in the shower. The steam from the hot water fills up the bathroom and an idea for a photo instantly hits you. You run out, grab your camera and wait for the lens to fog up. You then take a photo of the lights in your bathroom. The image you get has been blurred, however unlike a traditional blur, which is done by purposely changing how the camera shoots, such as forcing an out of focus shot, the background of this image is in focus, but the image has been softened and given a “desolate” or “gloomy” look.

Meeting up with another set of friends the next day, you decided to try something new - turning on the flash while having a slow shutter speed. This creates an interesting effect where you see a ghost-like frame of your friend along with a sharp frame of them, both in the same image. You see that this photo helps capture the emotion as well as the movement of your friend, something you would not be able to obtain with a higher shutter speed. Although you have tried a lot of techniques to get good blurry or out-of-focus photos, you know there are so many more out there. You could even create some of your own, and remember, an out-of-focus photo isn’t meant to be a technical perfection. Instead, it’s meant to create an emotional impact.

At the end of the day, unless you are aiming to do it professionally, hobby photography is not meant to bring joy to anyone but you, so there is no such thing as a bad photograph, only different perspectives, especially when it comes to blur photography. Though an in-focus photo might be more pleasing to a wider audience, an out-of-focus photo might be more your style or help capture a moment or emotion that a sharp photo would never be able to. So remember to experiment, have fun and shoot with your heart and soul.

WRITTEN BY ILLUSTRATED BY

Krishna Shreeram Sauparnika Nair

Comps 2nd Year MSc Maths 2nd Year

Omkar Ojas Kanade

Mechanical 3rd Year

What did you have for breakfast this morning? Was it Dosa? Let’s say you had Dosa. Now, why do you think you decided to have Dosa and not something else? Your answer would be along the lines of “I just felt like it”. But was that it? Or was it a consequence of the actions of our forefathers who ruled the Palaeolithic era? This question is, believe it or not, at the heart of the contemporary philosophical debate. Well, not the Dosa one of course, but whether we are genuinely free and in charge of our actions or if we are merely puppets in the hands of fate.

But wait, isn’t there a way out of this? Couldn’t you just toss a dice or use rand() to decide what to have for breakfast? While randomness appears to be great for making undetermined choices, there is always a hint of a pattern, no matter how intricate or difficult to discern it is. Therefore nothing is truly random.

Even if perceived as truly random, randomization leaves the decision to chance, and you and your will have no involvement whatsoever. As a result, randomness has no essential connection to free will.

Wait a minute, what even is free will? It’s what lets you have pineapple on your pizza, it’s what allows you to have biscuits with ketchup. It’s the ability to choose between different possible actions unimpeded. We all believe we are free, and we have the right to feel that way, but is this objectively true? In a Gujarati comic by Dinker Mehta - A woman asks her husband what he would like to have for dinner. She presents him with a couple of options like handvo, khandvi, dhokla. He chooses handvo. What he doesn’t know is that she had already started preparing handvo. Although he believes he had a choice, there was only one possible outcome, and his free will was an illusion.

Imagine if you could know exactly what lies ahead in the future and what lay back in the past. And not through some magical superpower but with the help of actual axioms and theorems. If we could successfully predict the motion of an atom by knowing its exact location and velocity, we would actually be able to trace it back to the past and follow it ahead into the future. This conjecture is known as Laplace’s demon. Quite a shocker, isn’t it?

These ideas however obfuscate when we approach psychology. Our brains are made of the usual messy and slimy matter which is deterministic by nature, therefore our psychology is deterministic too. A general idea from this is that all of human history and the foreseeable future was already determined since the Big Bang as we all are made up of the particles that popped into existence.

So if our choices aren’t free, do they still matter? Since we have no free will, we might as well sit on our couches all day long without lifting a finger. However, this is not entirely true as it’s important not to mix determinism with fatalism- the notion that we are helpless in the face of “ultimate fate”. Our choices do matter. What we choose to do shapes the paths we pursue in life. The point is that we cannot decide what we will decide to do.

After reading this article you may feel a painful sensation in your inner subconscious as you drift into the vastness of existentialism but fear not as some of the leading neuroscientists are here to pull you out of that black hole. We humans inherently tend to have a profound sense of having free will and this is needed, because only then will we hold ourselves and others accountable. Only then will we feel in control and feel that we as an individual matter, and therefore be able to stay sane. If you think about it, even Laplace’s demon is only a theoretical monster.

It’s only fitting that we end with the beautiful words presented by the famous American journalist Norman Cousins – ‘Free will and determinism are like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt to you is determinism. The way you play your hand is free will.’