How I Rationalise Determinism

In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian is initially portrayed as a naive, innocent, and easily impressionable young man. Early on, the novel depicts an important conversation between Dorian and another character, Henry, in which Henry seems to shatter Dorian’s worldview, instil in him the anxiety of aging, and dramatically affect his stance on morality. And while this conversation creates an instability in Dorian’s personality, a further traumatic development leads to its crystallisation in his identity. Voyeuristically watching the tragic events of the novel take place as a result of Henry’s so-called “bad influence” and the subsequent traumatic event is the appeal that drives the story, and while I was reading it, I felt the looming presence of the “bad influence” throughout the entire book.

This depiction of “an important influence” which leads to dramatic personal change rings true to me, because it’s happened to me personally many times. I’ve had conversations with people that have made me question my own core beliefs and develop new beliefs, and I’m sure I’m not unique in this. The “bad influence” in The Picture of Dorian Gray is a particularly scary concept because it’s true. One important conversation can change a life deeply, for the better or for the worse. But more than just “important” conversations, this happens even more subtly in mundane, trivial interactions. I feel this in everything I do — I feel like I’m only the way that I am because of all the various ideas and people that I have interacted with over my life. It feels like all I am is a product of my influences.

A cryptographic hash function is what’s used to keep your password safe in databases. It’s super unsafe to store passwords in plain text, so the password is put through a hash function, which turns it into a random-looking string of letters and numbers.

I believe that influences work much like a cryptographic hash function. Some input goes into the brain, and the brain processes and then integrates this input into its cognitive function and identity. Like a password being processed into a complex hash, an experience is processed into a complex set of thoughts and beliefs, and these compound into an identity. However, there has to be a little more going on than that, or else two different kids with the exact same upbringing would produce exactly the same personality (and even though no such thing has happened or is even possible, intuitively it seems like such a scenario would lead to two different personalities). For this metaphor to be complete, we must add salt.

A salt is random data (unique to each user) fed to the hash function in addition to the main input, which generates a unique result. This is used in password storage to prevent the same passwords from generating the same random string of letters, to further increase security.

We can think of all humans as having a unique salt in their brain — a slightly different brain sturcture, a slightly different starting point — which changes the results of a given input. In two near-identical parallel universes, the exact same overbearing parent might produce anxiety and docility in their child, while they might produce rebellion and independence in a child born from a different sperm cell, due to the children having different salts.

In Avgi Saketopolou and Ann Pellegrini’s Gender Without Identity, they suggest that identity, all identity, is borne from trauma (perhaps a better description would be “pivotal influences” or “earth-shattering input”). Under this view, transgender identities would be formed and then crystallised in early childhood as a result of influences and experiences, but cisgender identities would be as well. This may lead you to imagine a particular set of influences or experiences that one can subject a child to that would deterministically bring about a trans or cis identity. Intuitively, this seems wrong.

However, this can be explained using the hash-salt metaphor. Experiences do bring about identities, maybe even deterministically in a given child. But because each child has a unique salt, we can’t know what kind of identity will be elaborated from any given influence. In two near identical parallel universes, the exact same influences that bring about a trans identity in one child may bring about a cis identity in another, or in fact may not even be the cause of any identity-elaboration at all.

Influences are powerful, and may even fully determine our behaviour when combined with our unique salt-like neural state (which would imply a world without free will). But while they are powerful, we cannot say for sure what they will do. An influence’s badness or goodness depends entirely on the resulting identity and belief system that a given brain outputs when fed such input.