I love this topic. If karma is the result of will, what we're asking here is "When did the first willful creature come into existence?" (Or, if karma is simpl

I love this topic. If karma is the result of will, what we're asking here is "When did the first willful creature come into existence?" (Or, if karma is simply synonymous with cause and effect, then we can probably say the first karmic act was the big bang, the effects of which we are living with even now. But I think that's a less useful view, so let's abandon it.) > Karma is a human-only dimension of the universe we inhabit. We alone have free will Some say only homo sapiens is willful, but that seems unlikely given what we've learned about other now-extinct members of our genus. Did they have free will and/or karma? Do elephants, great apes, dolphins, house pets truly have no free will? At this point it becomes imperative that we define "free will,"[0] and we just might get stuck there. It's a toughie. We are apparently physical systems, constrained by the laws of the universe just as every other system. Perhaps we are simply acting out our biological programming, another domino falling in a long deterministic line back to the universe's beginning[1]; perhaps we are endowed with the ability to modify reality itself through observation, that our "will" acts in concert with physical law to create reality; perhaps all things have a measure of "will" proportional to their internal systems' complexity[2]... maybe some version of all of these[3] or none of them. In my opinion, karma is a useful framework for recognizing that we are, indeed, all connected to Kevin Bacon, and whatever we do will ultimately effect that poor man. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism