Fate, who believes.

[Carl_S]

As has been previously implied, God, fate, and predeterminism go hand in hand. Either you believe it or you don't or you don't know/care.

 

If God existed he would know the outcome of truely random events, as even randomness is within his power, control and foresight.

[RedM]

As has been previously implied, God, fate, and predeterminism go hand in hand. Either you believe it or you don't or you don't know/care.

 

If God existed he would know the outcome of truely random events, as even randomness is within his power, control and foresight.

 

That then raises the whole 'why doesn't God stop bad things from happening?' debate which usually means either God isn't all-powerful or God allows them to happen and is therefore an evil sonofabitch.*

 

FWIW the best debate on Fate/Determinism was in The Matrix Reloaded. Fact.

 

 

 

*This argument has been simplified in order to create the maximum knee-jerk offence.

[martini]

Stevie was saying if everything was predetermined though, so you couldn't change

A-B-C-D-E-F-G -H- I- J

into

A-B-C-D-E-F -G1 -H1 -I1- J1

because

A-B-C-D-E-F-G -H- I- J

will always result as it's been predetermined. His argument was that no matter what decision you make you will ALWAYS end up at J and you'll never be able to decide to arrive at J1.

My point was: Why would that change your choice at G?

There could be 2 people (say me and Stevie), who both find out that everything is predetermined by fate and there's no way to change your future. He would stay home at G because he thinks there's no point in trying to make choices, and his J would be predetermined as being a bum living in a box, my G would be to go to work the next day because I think it's irrelevant, so my J would be living in my nice paid for house with a comfy chair. Both were predetermined before we were even born, the fact we were both told that fate is real was predetermined to happen at G, and our J markers were predetermined too.

 

Is it predetermined though, or are infinite possibilities played out across infinite timelines, meaning that every eventuality happens in other universes?

[Tannhauser]

When you say we can't access the subconsiuos mind, how true is that? Cannot hypnosis access it. Or other therapies?

 

Well, the word 'subconscious' or 'unconscious', implies that it is a part of us that is inaccessible to our conscious thoughts. Psychodynamic therapists would indeed say that it can be made accessible or that it reveals itself in various ways e.g. in jokes, dreams, Freudian slips and so on.

 

Personally, although I think there is certainly a lot of stuff going on in the brain that we aren't normally aware of, I don't think that there is an unconscious in the Freudian sense.

 

Yes you put forward that reductionist argument taking it to a chemical level, but at what point do chemicals contain our consiousness?

 

Man, that's a question. Brain scientists wold have you believe that the project is well advanced, and that we get closer and closer to understanding consciousness interms of brain processes. But there are some very vigorous opponents to the reductionists. One idea is that of 'emergent properties' which says that you actually can't reduce a system below a certain level of complexity.

 

For example, you can try to analyse a cake in terms of its separate ingredients, but you can't gain a complete understanding of it, because as soon as you combine those ingredients, something new emerges that is more than the sum of its parts. Its essential 'cakeness' only appears when the whole is considered. Similarly, if you analyse a cake simply in terms of its components, you miss out whole levels of significance: it has cultural meaning and meaning to an individual that is not revealed in an analysis of its components.

 

Here's another objection to reductionism: it's been accused of missing the point. For example, you can take a game of football and reduce it into the motions of the players and the ball, and reduce these to the forces exerted by the muscles, then of the cells, then of the chemicals in the cells, then the behaviour of the atoms in these chenicals and so on. But this won;t tell you anything useful about a game of football. So while it's theoretically feasible, it's an irrelevant level of analysis.

[j_jza80]

or you may start talking nonsense.

 

It's a bit late for that

[Carl_S]

The bad things argument is simple yet telling.

 

Old testament God, assuming his existence, lets bad things happen

because we offended him greatly in the garden of eden, by eating that apple. We lost our innocence, and sin entered the world. We were banished from eden, and forced to live in an imperfect world, which contained disease and nasty mutations.

 

It's the price we paid for disobeying God, we were cursed as such. So the bad things yes God allows them, even though they do not please him, it is his will. He gave us free will, we f**ked it up, we got the bad things happen. But we can come back to God's favour, learn to please him and get to heaven when we die.

[Tannhauser]

As has been previously implied, God, fate, and predeterminism go hand in hand. Either you believe it or you don't or you don't know/care.

 

Easy, tiger. I wouldn't say they go hand in hand at all. To sum up where I am with this:

 

I don't really know what is meant by 'predeterminism', but it sounds perilously close to 'determinism', which is what I've been banging on about.

 

I believe that all events are 'determined', in the sense of 'resulting from a set of previous events'. Another way of saying the same thing is that all events are, in theory, explicable in terms of physical causes.

 

I don't believe that God is pulling the strings.

 

I don't believe that the actions that you take in life have no bearing on what happens next (because what happens next is determined by powers 'beyond you')

 

I do believe that those choices and actions you make can ultimately be explained in terms of events that stretch back into the mists of time.

 

I don't believe I'm still bloody typing this at 1:15am when I have work tomorrow.

[Carl_S]

I don't disagree with what you say. Sleep well, I should be too, but this thread wins. I should be up at five am by the latest.

[Gaz6002]

I don't believe I'm still bloody typing this at 1:15am when I have work tomorrow.

 

And thus, the magic of mkivsupra.net

[Carl_S]

Or fate at work?

[Gaz6002]

Or fate at work?

 

It can't be!

[trinitom]

I believe in fate.

I had a few occasions in my life that make me believe we all have or won destiny traced!

Last year I was with a couple of friends and decided go to Spar to get a coke, one of my friends asked me to bring him tow of those lottery scratch tickets and I decided to get one for myself, on the end I let him 1st choose the tickets and guess what my ticket had £200 and him nothing!

the interesting thing is, that was the 1st ticket i bought that year and since there i never bought another one until now!

I don’t believe in Gods or spirits, I'm more see to believe.

[bignum]

who give's a $#@!e, what happens happens, you have to live with what ever mistake's you make in life whether it be fate or not.

Live's are lost daily cause people decide to do things different to how they would normaly or drive there car down a different road that they would'nt normaly take.

There is a machine that will read your body and tell you what you will die from, now this is changing fate cause id rather die from a car accident then brain cancer.

When i die i hope its quick and if other people die at the same time then fate has taken over.

 

We`re not just discussing death here, i think you`ve missed the point, its ok saying "what happens, happens", by taking choices/chances you make it happen, which equates to you are in control of your own destiny!!

[bignum]

I believe in fate.

I had a few occasions in my life that make me believe we all have or won destiny traced!

Last year I was with a couple of friends and decided go to Spar to get a coke, one of my friends asked me to bring him tow of those lottery scratch tickets and I decided to get one for myself, on the end I let him 1st choose the tickets and guess what my ticket had £200 and him nothing!

the interesting thing is, that was the 1st ticket i bought that year and since there i never bought another one until now!

I don’t believe in Gods or spirits, I'm more see to believe.

 

You were just lucky that day:)

[stevie_b]

Stevie was saying if everything was predetermined though, so you couldn't change

A-B-C-D-E-F-G -H- I- J

into

A-B-C-D-E-F -G1 -H1 -I1- J1

because

A-B-C-D-E-F-G -H- I- J

will always result as it's been predetermined. His argument was that no matter what decision you make you will ALWAYS end up at J and you'll never be able to decide to arrive at J1.

That's right Trev, that was the point I was trying to make.

 

My point was: Why would that change your choice at G?

There could be 2 people (say me and Stevie), who both find out that everything is predetermined by fate and there's no way to change your future. He would stay home at G because he thinks there's no point in trying to make choices, and his J would be predetermined as being a bum living in a box, my G would be to go to work the next day because I think it's irrelevant, so my J would be living in my nice paid for house with a comfy chair. Both were predetermined before we were even born, the fact we were both told that fate is real was predetermined to happen at G, and our J markers were predetermined too.

I don't think it would change my choice at G. If everything is pre-determined from aeons ago, I would always have made the choice to be a bum. I would never have made the choice to have a conventional, comfy life. I would be under the illusion that I've made a choice, but in fact I hadn't. It would have been decided at the start of time.

 

This is the bit about predeterminism that I find slightly paradoxical. You think you're making a choice, but you're not. Under predeterminism, God/nature/etc always knew that you were going to be faced with a "choice" that day, and "decide" that way. You could never try to pull a fast one over the pre-decided events: that would break predeterminism completely.

 

As has been previously implied, God, fate, and predeterminism go hand in hand. Either you believe it or you don't or you don't know/care.

I think that (pre)determinism can be in conflict with religion: a hard-line determinist could say that all future events are decided a micro-second after the Big Bang. All the particles in our universe are created by that point, and they are given their respective energies (kinetic, chemical, rotational, etc). In such a scenario, there would be no need for a god. What's the point? Everything you will ever do will have been decided before you were even a twinkle in your dad's eye.

 

I don't believe I'm still bloody typing this at 1:15am when I have work tomorrow.

Don't go to work: join me on the sofa, Jeremy Kyle's on in a minute! I'll get the Stella and fags!

[stevie_b]

Not really. There's something screwy with your logic here and it's not what I see as being implied by determinism at all.

 

Determinism says that there is a chain of events that leads to you paying off the mortgage:

 

A-B-C-D-E-F-G -H- I- J ->Mortgage paid.

 

G was your decision to continue going to work in 2009. If we had complete knowledge of A-J, we could absolutely predict that your mortgage would be paid off. And the mortgage being paid off is an inevitable consequence of A-J.

 

However, there is another possibility:

 

A-B-C-D-E-F1 -G1 -H1 -I1- J1 -> Mortgage not paid

 

Here G1 was your decision to stay home and watch Jeremy Kyle instead of going to work, which leads to an alteration of the events that follow. This decision resulted from some different event at F1 - maybe it was thinking that the future was predetermined and then not bothering to try to change it .

 

Whether your decision is G or G1 does make a difference. Your decision today does determine the future, each one being a link in a different possible causal decision. Whether you choose G or G1 is ultimately determined by the events before it. As it happens, events A-E have meant that you turned out to be this bright, rational, stable guy that is not going to experience F1 and therefore going to choose G rather than G1. You can think that your decision of G was determined by A-F, but as I said in an earlier post, perhaps a less headf**king way to reframe it is to think of your decision to be explained by A-F.

 

But under predeterminism, G1 would never ever occur. The predetermined sequence of events layed out at the beginning of time would forbid it.

If G1 were possible, then events aren't all pre-determined, and free will does play a part in what happens. Fingers crossed predeterminism doesn't hold true.

[tbourner]

I have been trying to reply to this, and my head has just melted. I hope you're happy, Trev. I think I need to lie down in a cupboard for a few years to think this over.

My work here is done!

 

You were just lucky that day:)

 

I don't think it would change my choice at G. If everything is pre-determined from aeons ago, I would always have made the choice to be a bum. I would never have made the choice to have a conventional, comfy life. I would be under the illusion that I've made a choice, but in fact I hadn't. It would have been decided at the start of time.

 

This is the bit about predeterminism that I find slightly paradoxical. You think you're making a choice, but you're not. Under predeterminism, God/nature/etc always knew that you were going to be faced with a "choice" that day, and "decide" that way. You could never try to pull a fast one over the pre-decided events: that would break predeterminism completely.

 

I think that (pre)determinism can be in conflict with religion: a hard-line determinist could say that all future events are decided a micro-second after the Big Bang. All the particles in our universe are created by that point, and they are given their respective energies (kinetic, chemical, rotational, etc). In such a scenario, there would be no need for a god. What's the point? Everything you will ever do will have been decided before you were even a twinkle in your dad's eye.

True, and yes it's an illusion of choice (Matrix again), but I still don't see why that would make you suddenly think it doesn't matter any more and change your decision making process!

 

But under predeterminism, G1 would never ever occur. The predetermined sequence of events layed out at the beginning of time would forbid it.

If G1 were possible, then events aren't all pre-determined, and free will does play a part in what happens. Fingers crossed predeterminism doesn't hold true.

I can see what you mean that if it was already predetermined at the big bang that in 2010 everyone would be told that fate exists and everything is predetermined, then half the people would have a predetermined path to go mad and hide in the corner until they died. But to me it seems like only the stupid people would do that, it's still the same life you're living, the choices that have been made for you are still your choices, for them to have been predetermined to be the same kind of choice as you've always made means you were predetermined to be a strong person who can cope with paradoxical lifelines!!

No?

[Carl_S]

Then I don't get determinism. I thought it was the same as fate.

 

Anyway, it doesn't really matter too much. It's about as important as whether you prefer a chocolate or a strawberry milkshake.

[tbourner]

Then I don't get determinism. I thought it was the same as fate.

 

I think it is the same, except fate implies in our subconcious some entity controlling and deciding for us, whereas determinism is more of a scientific basis where things are decided by the rules of physics and chemistry.

[hogmaw]

Could you give an example of what you mean by a random event? I think a determinist would argue that there no random events, only events about which we have an incomplete understanding.

 

At a quantum level, there might be genuinely random events, as but whether this builds unpredictability into nature at a macro scale is another question.

 

The throw of a dice is random as is the flip of a coin. It's impossible to guage the forces that are exerted upon the dice or coin to predict what comes up next, so the outcome is random.

 

There are events in nature where there is a choice of two or more outcomes, each of which has equal probability. Only one outcome can occur ie the dice is 3 or a 6 etc. Which outcome arises is impossible to predict, and depending on which outcome does arise could lead to a variety of further outcomes, and so on. Predeterminism and fate? No 'chance'!

[tbourner]

The throw of a dice is random as is the flip of a coin. It's impossible to guage the forces that are exerted upon the dice or coin to predict what comes up next, so the outcome is random.

 

There are events in nature where there is a choice of two or more outcomes, each of which has equal probability. Only one outcome can occur ie the dice is 3 or a 6 etc. Which outcome arises is impossible to predict, and depending on which outcome does arise could lead to a variety of further outcomes, and so on. Predeterminism and fate? No 'chance'!

Well actually it's not random, if you knew at the point of release the forces acting on the dice, the distances involved and the strength and hardness of the surfaces it will hit you could predict precisely what number it will land on! We could do the maths now even, you don't need to be god. Trouble is by the time you've measured all those things the dice has landed, that only makes it random to us though, to fate it's perfectly predictable.

[Carl_S]

in that case determinism sucks as a way to predict future actions of humans at the very least only because it doesn't take into account the true reasons for human choices which are more than plain physics and chemistry.

 

Maybe it does not even take into account chaos theory, but I don't know for sure.

 

And I thought random in it's non-pejorative definition was just a strict mathmatical expression.

[stevie_b]

I can see what you mean that if it was already predetermined at the big bang that in 2010 everyone would be told that fate exists and everything is predetermined, then half the people would have a predetermined path to go mad and hide in the corner until they died. But to me it seems like only the stupid people would do that, it's still the same life you're living, the choices that have been made for you are still your choices, for them to have been predetermined to be the same kind of choice as you've always made means you were predetermined to be a strong person who can cope with paradoxical lifelines!!

No?

This is kind of why I find predeterminism to be a paradox.

Let's assume predeterminism is true (I don't think it is, but let's assume it is). In that case, it is already predetermined at what date (if at all) humans realise that it's true, and some go mad and hide in the corner, whilst others carry on as normal, and probably quite a few in between. From our viewpoint, I agree with you that going into a corner and going mad is not a sensible option, but who goes mad and who doesn't has already been decided, all the way down to individual people. Anything that anyone does won't make a difference to anything or anyone else, and doesn't change any future events, otherwise predeterminism would break down.

 

Predeterminism would mean that nothing you do will have any bearing on what will happen. Put another way, nothing you do will change the future. Your destiny is set in stone, and nothing you can do will change it, not even by a bit. Predeterminism sets out a future path for everyone from which they absolutely cannot deviate. I may think I've deviated from the path by choosing to go mad, but that was always my predestined path. Nothing I could have done would have either prevented it or made it worse.

 

Now if people knew what their chosen path would involve before it happened, that would really bake my noodle! You'd probably get people trying to deviate from the path, but they wouldn't be able to!

 

The throw of a dice is random as is the flip of a coin. It's impossible to guage the forces that are exerted upon the dice or coin to predict what comes up next, so the outcome is random.

 

There are events in nature where there is a choice of two or more outcomes, each of which has equal probability. Only one outcome can occur ie the dice is 3 or a 6 etc. Which outcome arises is impossible to predict, and depending on which outcome does arise could lead to a variety of further outcomes, and so on. Predeterminism and fate? No 'chance'!

 

As tbourner said. Just because it appears to be random, doesn't mean that it is. In the dice example, there must be a bias for one of the faces to land face-up as opposed to the other faces. That bias could be measured. If there was literally no bias, the dice would land balanced on one of the corners (and even then, it would need a bias to determine which corner).

[stevie_b]

And I thought random in it's non-pejorative definition was just a strict mathmatical expression.

 

It's extremely difficult (impossible?) to build a system that is truly random. Someone coming up with numbers is far from random. Random number functions in computers are far from random. A dice is far from random: to predict its outcome with full certainty is complex and time-consuing, but it could be done.

 

All these things are pseudo-random. You might need use quantum mechanics to experience true randomness, but even that might not be enough. (just guessing this last bit).

[Carl_S]

in layman's terms, or not if you want, just that I won't get it, why cannot a simple computer give a true random function?