Fate, who believes.

[stevie_b]

I believe God has my life already planned... whether or not I follow it is my choice... but I choose to follow

 

Predeterminism says that it's not your choice at all: it's already known that you'll do exactly as God/nature/another higher power intends. All you're given is the illusion of choice.

[tbourner]

Fate must have something to do with it, or just damn bad luck.

I don't believe in luck either, just coincidence.

 

It's scary because it basically absolves everyone from any responsibility for any of their actions. I could do something really crazy, and it wouldn't matter because all consequences are predetermined, and nothing I could do would change any of those consequences.

It's still you though, you'd still go to prison for murder, so why would you change how you act now just because you found out it was predetermined?

[stevie_b]

It's still you though, you'd still go to prison for murder, so why would you change how you act now just because you found out it was predetermined?

 

Because none of my actions would make a difference. If I went to prison, it would have been determined from the beginning of time that I always was going to go to prison, and nothing I could do would make any difference to that.

 

I hasten to add that if society ever did break down in the way I described, I don't think I'd turn into a psycho madman. I wouldn't have it in me (at least I don't think I would: it would all be predetermined, after all). I'm a nice person really.

[martini]

It's irrelevant.

 

Higher dimension dwelling beings who are omnipotent/omnipresent/omniscient can see all of what we know as time, so to them it would already be written, ie: fate.

 

We unfortunately cannot see all of time, we can only see the present and can record what we believe happened in the past, so our actions do change our own future because of how we live within a timeline.

 

But it's irrelevant whether we can change it or not, because to us it hasn't happened so we don't know if we changed it or if it was set out before us.

 

Nicely said.

[AndrewOW]

Yes, mostly.

[tbourner]

Because none of my actions would make a difference. If I went to prison, it would have been determined from the beginning of time that I always was going to go to prison, and nothing I could do would make any difference to that.

 

But whether it's all predetermined or not, you are who you are, why would you suddenly make a different decision just because someone tells you it's already been decided? It sounds like you'd be trying to prove them wrong or something. Like I said in my original post there may be beings in the universe who can see all of time; past present and future, so they can see what we are 'going to' have done, so to them it's predetermined, but to us we haven't made the decisions yet. I really don't understand why your decision making process in your head would change because somebody else knows what you're going to do - other than you were trying to trick them.

[Carl_S]

My brain is quite small, so I am really struggling with all this talk.

 

I do partly agree with the notion of no fate is a crutch as it gives the master of your own destiny illusion, but....

 

In religion there is free will too. It's just God knows the choice that you have made before you make it. So there is another layer of complexity/ ludicracy.

 

As for science of what you write here on the forum being explained totally in a molecular/ electrical way, I think is horse cack. Remember the power of the unconcious mind in all our decisions...

 

I believe that humans are not capable of doing something truely random.

[stevie_b]

But whether it's all predetermined or not, you are who you are, why would you suddenly make a different decision just because someone tells you it's already been decided? It sounds like you'd be trying to prove them wrong or something. Like I said in my original post there may be beings in the universe who can see all of time; past present and future, so they can see what we are 'going to' have done, so to them it's predetermined, but to us we haven't made the decisions yet. I really don't understand why your decision making process in your head would change because somebody else knows what you're going to do - other than you were trying to trick them.

 

I wouldn't be trying to trick the system: I'd be using it to what I percieve to be my best advantage. Maybe the crime example is misleading. I'll respond by asking you why you do what you do every day.

 

For example, why do you go to work? If it's to earn enough money to pay a mortgage, there's no need because it's already been predetermined whether or not you'll be able to pay off the mortgage (and when). If it's to earn money to buy food, there's no need because it'll be predetermined whether or not you'll have money to buy food. Unless you go to work because there's literally nothing else in the world you'd rather be doing, there's no point in going to work. Maybe take a nice holiday instead, or spend some quality time with the children.

 

I think the concept of absolute predetermination is bordering on the paradoxical. It raises some incredibly deep questions. I also think that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (it's impossible to know the exact state of something at the quantum level) coupled with divergent systems (where a quantum difference could make a large difference in the outcome) might mean that predetermination can't happen (assuming we're just considering physics, biology and chemistry, and not God).

[AndrewOW]

I believe that humans are not capable of doing something truely random.

 

 

Except maybe you.

[Tannhauser]

Some good points here. Are fate and predetermination (where God or nature has predetermined every single event that will ever occur, from the beginning of time onwards) the same thing? As colsoop pointed out, causality is pretty much certain to hold true.

 

I'm uncomfortable with predetermination (and, conveniently, I don't believe in it). Does it break down when you consider the divergent systems I mentioned in an earlier post? Possibly not, it would just require a vast (literally unimaginable, and impossible for any living thing to build) computing power to process them. But maybe nature (or the laws of physics, if you prefer that term) has already predetermined what will happen at every point in the future.

 

I hope that things aren't predetermined. I think/hope that highly divergent systems see to that.

 

For me, predetermination is scary: it says "whatever I do, it won't make a difference to what happens" (have I got that right?). So, I can walk in front of a bus: if I die, it was predetermined to happen at that time, so what I perceive as my "actions" are of zero consequence. Shall I get up today to go to work, or sit at home wathing Jeremy Kyle? It doesn't matter: all the consequences have already been determined and set in stone. Whatever I choose, I would always have chosen that way (it's been predetermined), so why sweat about any decision I ever make from this point onwards?

 

None of what I've written above disproves pretermination, it just demonstrates that if predetermination holds true, then the illusion of choice is indeed is a very, very deep one.

 

Steve: thanks for three very, very interesting posts on this subject. This free will vs determinism conundrum has been one of the central problems of Philosophy, so I think it's safe to say we aren't going to resolve it. I’m certainly struggling with it.

 

I have to have a gentle chuckle at your reluctance to accept the ramifications of determinism because it makes you feel uneasy about you want to be true (that we have choices). It’s usually – not necessarily at your hands – a criticism that’s levelled at religious people.

 

Let’s take your issue of ‘why bother to try to make choices, if what I will choose has already been mapped out for me?’ To take your bus example: if all choices and all events are determined by a complex series of antecedent events, then why not jump in front of it? Even making that decision has already been written by the laws of nature and whether you get hit has also been ‘decided’.

 

You should bother to choose, because you have to take a certain action if you want a certain set of consequences to ensue. If you don’t want to be hit by a bus, then don’t jump in front of it. It doesn’t matter that your desire not to be hit is a consequence of X, Y and Z. It doesn’t matter that whether you do actually get hit is determined by events A, B and C. It doesn’t matter that what decision you make is a consequence of D, E and F. The decision that you make will be explained by the antecedent causes, and could have been predicted from these (with perfect knowledge) but this doesn’t mean that jumping or not jumping will have a similar consequence.

[Tannhauser]

It's scary because it basically absolves everyone from any responsibility for any of their actions. I could do something really crazy, and it wouldn't matter because all consequences are predetermined, and nothing I could do would change any of those consequences.

 

If you could convince everyone that predetermination and its consequences were true, I think society as we know it would collapse in about a day. Unpredictable doesn't even come close to describing what it would be like: it could go to complete anarchy, or it could turn the human race into a mass love-in, or anything in between. People wouldn't need to obey the law: all their actions and the consequences of their actions have been predetermined, effectively taking what people perceive as their thought processes completely out of the equation. People could commit heinous crimes against each other: it would have been predetermined that it would happen, so they wouldn't have to feel any remorse. I would hope that, in such a scenario, people would still hang on to what they used to know as a conscience, and retain qualities like compassion and love. But who knows?

 

Predeterminism, crime and moral responsibility are truly headboggling stuff. Maybe, as you say, we have to maintain a fiction of personal responsibility to stop society from falling apart.

 

Hard line determinists would just bite the bullet and say: ‘there’s no such thing as personal responsibility’. Most people are going to shy away from this, because it is ingrained in us from our first days that we are responsible, and that if we do something wrong, this is a choice we actively make. We’re also told that we deserve the consequences when we make a bad choice.

 

In many ways, I’m with the determinists on this. The mugger chooses to mug the helpless old woman and the good man tries to stop him. But where does the mugger’s decision come from? Unless one believes in the Devil, his decision has come about through the sum total of his genetic influences and his life experiences. Nobody invents themselves out of nothingness.

 

This raises interesting questions about punishment. It doesn’t mean you can’t have punishment, because this still (a) discourages the mugging and (b) keeps the mugger out of circulation and © satisfies the needs of society and the victim. But I think it means that the idea of punishment for a retribution based on ‘natural justice’ is illogical. It also means that if you want to prevent people from choosing to mug old ladies, then you have to look at the causes of those decisions, which lie in changing cultural factors.

 

The biggest problem I have with this position is the one you raise about belief in determinism. i.e. if everyone believes that their choices (e.g. to mug someone) are not really their own, then chaos rules, because everyone absolves themselves from responsibility.

 

Perhaps an ‘is’ and ‘ought’ split has to apply. A general principle used in some ethical arguments is that what is the case should not dictate what ought to be the case. For example, it is the case that the poor and weak starve. But we don’t use this as a basis for our ethical decisions, which protect the poor and the weak. In the same way, even if it is the case that personal responsibility is a myth, we can still as a society have an ethical system that says that it ought to exist. Which is, in effect, what we have?

[Tannhauser]

 

For example, why do you go to work? If it's to earn enough money to pay a mortgage, there's no need because it's already been predetermined whether or not you'll be able to pay off the mortgage (and when). If it's to earn money to buy food, there's no need because it'll be predetermined whether or not you'll have money to buy food. Unless you go to work because there's literally nothing else in the world you'd rather be doing, there's no point in going to work. Maybe take a nice holiday instead, or spend some quality time with the children.

 

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.

[tbourner]

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-F-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 .

 

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.

[dangerous brain]

Ah see now we are all beggining to get into the idea that the future is an entity of some sort. Is the past an entity? No its simply the past and any event in that past cannot be altered. Now think about this. The past was at some point the future. At that point the future seemed to be alterable by personal choice. "If I'd of done that differently then X Y or Z would have happened" guess what though what happened indeed did happen and filed itself along with all the rest of the past. The future is to all intents and purposes is just the past waiting to happen.

 

To address the whole point of well if I choose to be an arse just because its obviously predetermined and doesn't make a difference, well actually it will make a difference, not to the world or the universe at large but on a local basis it will make a difference to your life. However as that course is pre-designated you'll either be an arse or you won't.

 

The problems with being a cognitive being is a requirement for an explanation for everything. Intelligence itself produces its own downfalls. Thought needs controlling, as uncontrolled its a dangerous and unpredictable beast. Hence religions in primitive cultures and government in more advanced ones. They both give their own feelings of safeness and control of destiny and both ultimately are run by corruption.

[Tannhauser]

As for science of what you write here on the forum being explained totally in a molecular/ electrical way, I think is horse cack. Remember the power of the unconcious mind in all our decisions...

 

The unconscious mind doesn't really affect this explanation. The unconscious mind is that part of our mental processes we can't access. Unless we introduce a mystical, non-physical aspect to it, this is also a product of the physical brain.

 

A traditional, reductionist scientific perspective would indeed explain thoughts in that way. The thoughts we have inhere in electrical impulses zapping through neurons and then in diffusions of neurotransmitters across synapses. Change the circuitry and you change perceptions, outlooks and thoughts.

 

For example, increase the D2 dopaminergic receptors in the attentional systems and you may believe yourself to be the King of Sweden, or that Martians are spying on your house, or you may start talking nonsense.

[hogmaw]

If what you say holds true then there will be no such thing as a RANDOM event. We all know that random events do occur, which puts paid to the deterministic theories.

[Tones]

I dont know what to believe to be honest

[hogmaw]

I dont know what to believe to be honest

 

If you believe in fate you might as well believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden.

[Tones]

If you believe in fate you might as well believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden.

 

ha yeah i hear ya, Im very open minded about everything, i find it hard to believe in something that ive never seen/heard/touched/witnessed if you get me, same goes for religion.

[bignum]

Very interesting reading, its good to see peoples opinions on this and obviously some strong ones.My view is very simple, we make hundred of decisions every day, some small, some big, as long as we try to make the best decision possible which will affect our life in the future thats all you can do, i don`t believe our lives are predetermined how can it be, its too complicated to be.

All the people i know who actually believe in fate are very negative minded , so when things go wrong they use the fate card instead of saying its my fault i made the wrong decision, they say it happens for a reason, maybe?

[little num]

who give's a shite, 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.

[Tannhauser]

If what you say holds true then there will be no such thing as a RANDOM event. We all know that random events do occur, which puts paid to the deterministic theories.

 

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.

[Carl_S]

wow tannhauser. Your replies are like a five course meal at a five star hotel. Each course designed to complement eachother, with intricacies of contrasting flavour and prepared with the love and care of cordon bleu chef.

 

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

 

Yes you put forward that reductionist argument taking it to a chemical level, but at what point do chemicals contain our consiousness? Our decisions are the product of the sum total of our psychology which is going to be determinded by how we have processed past experiences coupled with genetic predisposition, and you are right the current balance of chemicals in the brain.

 

Apologies if this does not make sense, I am not as succinct or lucid in my expression as you, but I hope you get the gist.

[martini]

Apologies if this does not make sense, I am not as succinct or lucid in my expression as you, but I hope you get the gist.

 

I swear you do some funky drugs.

 

If what you say holds true then there will be no such thing as a RANDOM event. We all know that random events do occur, which puts paid to the deterministic theories.

 

What do you mean by a "random" event though?

 

It's quite interesting to see two very separate discussions going on within this thread based on the same topic, but taken from different angles.

[Tannhauser]

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.

 

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.