God’s Plan, ‘Free Will’ and The Power of Understanding.

Pavi Singh

17 May 2025 — 7 min read

Fireworks in mind...

I was told as a child that everything that happens is God’s plan. Wait… let me correct, Waheguru’s Plan(I was born in a Sikh family so with all due respect to all other gods, Waheguru is the best). Going with this logic being born in a Sikh family was also a part of the same Waheguru’s plan.

As my inclination towards science and logic grew, I began to believe that if we could calculate the factors like cause and effect that influenced reality, we could somehow predict the future like weather forecasts. However, this thought unsettled me because it implied that the future and all events in life were preplanned, leaving us unable to create our own. Imagine how a 21-year-old me would have felt! I couldn’t bear the thought of it.

It wasn’t until recently that I came to a new understanding: there is such a thing as ‘free will’, and this free will is determined by the stories we create in our heads. Freedom of choice and free will gave me the feeling that I could create the future I wanted.

“Free will is real—but not in the mystical sense. It emerges through our ability to create explanations and knowledge.” - David Deutsch

To be honest, I don’t fully understand this chapter in his book, The Beginning of Infinity, but my gut feeling is that it’s true. Even if it isn’t, I believe it for two reasons. First, it gives me a sense of peace of mind. Second, if it isn’t true, then this belief was meant to happen anyway. And if it is true, then I’ll be on the right track. I know it sounds silly, but I feel like it.

So,

Knowledge = Power.

How do we create knowledge? Through conjecture and error correction.

In case you haven’t read or aren’t familiar with the nature of human knowledge and the knowledge creation process, you can read more about it here: https://www.pavisingh.com/the-quest-for-good-explanations/

Otherwise, let’s skip to the good part… music…

What are the skills required for creating new knowledge? Creativity! Of course, curiosity and testing the validity of knowledge are also important.

Why do we create knowledge? Because it’s in our DNA. We’re wired to seek understanding by creating knowledge. Before we move forward, I recommend reading another essay about human inclination towards knowledge creation.
https://www.pavisingh.com/the-human-framework-of-understanding/

By creating knowledge, we create the world and the future that we desire. And as humans, we’re wired for this. What could be more awesome than this…

Now, let’s talk about some free social media advice. One thing I wish I knew when I was 13: Seek Understanding!

Because by truly understanding human behaviour, I could have come up with a way to impress that girl I had a crush on in school. Anyway… enough of my misery.

In a 2019 interview on The Success Podcast, Robert Greene said:

“I’m trying to, as I said, beat you over the head with this idea that all of us are cut from the same cloth, all of our brains are remarkably similar in size and in configuration… For the most part, our brains are wired and are basically of the same size and we’re all have systems, ways that the brain function, that transcend us as individuals.”

We are all cut from the same cloth. The ones labeled genius are no different from us. When Sam Altman has a headache, he takes the same Advil pill that you do. There can be slight variations in IQ or other physical characteristics, but these seem slight when we consider all the similarities we share.

Despite our similarities, the difference in results and what we achieve with our actions is so significant. What is that slight difference, and why is it so important? The answer may lie in the nature and power of knowledge. Our free will is determined by the knowledge we create. Does this mean that visionaries or high-impact individuals create more or better knowledge? How do we create knowledge? By understanding. Does this mean that high-impact individuals are better at understanding?

You be the judge.

One thing these high-impact individuals do is that they take feedback from reality. And I don’t mean high-impact by the ones who make or have more money; I mean those who create impact with their actions. We are keeping the factor of luck out for now. You act out your beliefs and you find out. Reality reflects the truth. This is the process by which we accumulate knowledge. When we act out, we either fail or succeed. In both cases, we take feedback and improve.

Let me establish one more point here: failure is not bad. It’s the necessary process for improvement.

We often hold our friends and others accountable for their past beliefs and views, forgetting that people evolve and their understanding improves over time.

Elon Musk in a 2008 interview with Wired following SpaceX’s third unsuccessful Falcon 1 launch stated:

“We haven’t gotten into orbit, true, but we’ve made considerable progress. If it’s an all-or-nothing proposition then we’ve failed. But it’s not all or nothing. We must get to orbit eventually, and we will. It might take … .”

This is a dam good interview, you can read the conversation here: https://www.wired.com/2008/08/musk-qa/

Demonizing failure in our society is toxic for progress. We avoid embarrassment and criticism that drive from failure.

We’ve all heard the advice: embrace failure. Failure is a path towards progress. However, I have a problem with this advice. While it can be right, it fails to provide an explanation of why and how. Without explanations, we don’t truly understand it. Without understanding, this advice is useless. Explanations connect ideas and beliefs together in a comprehensive mechanism for decision-making that we can call a Framework of Understanding. Don’t like the name? Call it whatever you want. But the point is that individual scattered pieces of advice are a form of memorization that creates more noise than actual progress.

Since we are on this topic of memorization vs understanding, let me convey one more piece of advice: no matter what advice you read or receive, do not make it part of your belief system without understanding it. That means if my writings do not make logical sense, if they do not help you build or improve your understanding of the world, throw them in the garbage. Wait… that was too harsh… Don’t throw them please… just leave them out and maybe come back to them with a fresher perspective. Wait until they make logical sense before you accept them. This is the very method that worked wonders for me.

Don’t wanna trust my argument.?

“Better to master the basics than to know the more advanced concepts… Solid foundation of understanding beats memorization of advanced concepts.”
— Naval Ravikant

Here is a line to a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U_GlTgni4U

Still not happy? Here is one more…

“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”
— Albert Einstein

I kinda believe that 99% of people who have read the How to get rich tweeter thread by Naval do not fully understand it. Even I did not up until recently. There is compete web of explanations and logical arguments that lead to the creation of that strategy. Memorization cannot replace the power of understanding. Even Naval himself emphasizes the value of understanding. If you want to know my own logical explanation of this Tweeter thread, I will be posting them soon.

If something is created on top of a lie, it doesn’t matter if it’s logically consistent because being logically consistent with a lie is itself a lie. Reason and logical explanations must connect to the very root of logical arguments and fit into other verified theories or laws of physics. They must follow a trail of explanations that reach foundational knowledge and explain reality without contradictions.

When I was a kid, I was told that the rain was caused by God, ‘Rabb’. I used to imagine Rabb as an old man with white hair and a beard, just like all the old men I had seen. Of course, he wore a turban because that’s what old men wore. That was the peak of my imagination. This explanation certainly gave me a temporary cure to my childish curiosity, but it failed when new questions arose. What do you tell a child when you don’t have an answer? You tell them that it’s a sin to question the explanation of God. I don’t blame my parents; maybe they were given similar explanations. (You can be religious or an atheist; that’s your personal understanding. But we all can agree on the merit of reason and logic.)

One thing I couldn’t figure out was how God, who was supposed to be the cause of rain, managed to drop it in the form of droplets. He must have had a bucket to fill and throw, but when he threw water with a bucket, it fell in different ways, like a stream. Then there must have been a thin wire mesh to spit water into droplets.

I tried my best to explain it, but the problem was that the very foundational explanation was incorrect. Therefore, any other explanations I created were logically consistent with something that was wrong.

It wasn’t until later that I learned from school textbooks that rain is caused by water vapour.

Let me tell you something, I try to communicate facts with some artistic fun way. At least I think I am funny and my mom agrees with that. Not all jokes are funny. All right… I admit, majority of them are not funny. You are more than welcome to talk crap about me in the comment box. I wanted a career as a stand up comedian and this is how I am trying to live my dreams… so please… cut me some slack. Feel free to skip my jokes… I promise, I won’t mind. Because I wouldn’t even know.

In his lectures, Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman demonstrates the vastness of understanding and how seemingly disparate ideas can be connected logically without any inconsistencies.

“What I cannot create, I do not understand.”
— Richard Feynman

He was a physicist, so you think he was boring? During certain periods of his life, particularly while working at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, he used to visit strip clubs. This was because Feynman, ever the iconoclast, believed in living fully and thinking freely. His visits to such places weren’t about indulgence for its own sake; they were part of his relentless curiosity about human behaviour, his rejection of social conformity, and his playful, unfiltered engagement with the world.

See, being a scientist is cool. Being a truth seeker is cool.

In his own words from Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!: