Diminishing Marginal Utility

So, it seems that the novelty factor involved in everything runs out eventually. The more you see of something, the less you pine for it. Like, for example. Chocolate. If you have a ton of chocolate that you eat all the time, you're going to start hating it. You may even never want to see it ever again. Release it from your daily regimen, as it were.

Kind of like Dmitri Young and the Tigers. (Yeah, he got released after Wednesday's loss. Boo hoo.)

Back to my point. The more pizza you have, the less value one particular piece of pizza has. This is called diminishing marginal utility, and it's a term most high school students learn in Econ. The more money you have, the less value a dollar has. Or a million dollars. Or a billion (if your last name is Gates).

This is true for everything. The more time you spend on a particular project, the more other projects become more appealing to you than what you're currently working on. The more blog posts you do, the less value you see in actually putting the time in to do another one. The more classes you attend, the more tempting it becomes to miss just one...if it means you can sleep just another hour or so.

There's like three exceptions to this rule. One is sleep. Another is showering. And a third rhymes with Ibby.

And onto the second point of the day. Philosophy. It's a class I'm in right now. We're discussing free will (almost - we didn't quite get to it.)

One of the questions on the board was: In what case does determinism (the idea that everything we do is predetermined) actually have merit?* And you know, it shouldn't. Why should we care whether everything we do is predetermined, as long as it's what we believe we want to do at the time? As long as it's not some "hand of fate" forcing us to, say, shoot a baby. And, in some way, I can see that our lives are predetermined. The way a hand in poker is predetermined, but still somehow seems immediately dynamic.

Because let's say that we take this moment. You're reading these words. This moment, as it stands, is the only possible outcome of billions of years of causes and effects. All those years, and this is the moment they created (barring the idea that each moment, an infinite amount of alternate universes based off this one are created, and a moment after that and infinite amount of alternate universes is created based off of each of the infinite previously created alternate universes...a causal chain that makes this moment just one possible outcome of many.)

Therefore, the moment a hundred years, a thousand years, a million years, from now will be the same. The only possible outcome of billions of years of causes and effects. And if there's only one possible outcome (x, since we don't know what it is - perhaps nothing knows what it is, but it's a constant.) then our future is really predetermined. Our lives can only end one way. Each event in our lives can only end one way.

That's pretty cool. I thought of that myself, but I'm sure hundreds of other people have thought it as well, and have written it down, and therefore my thinking of it and writing it down was unproductive and repetitious.

*(The answer I came up with for the question, was, by the way "During Time Travel, when the Traveller visits himself in the future and then returns to his own present. Is he determined to become exactly the man he has visited?")