What comes next?
Allll Right!
Good to be back.
Here's a little philosophical conundrum for everybody.
Are fate & free will mutually exclusive concepts?
Disscuss.
posted by The Grumbler @ 3:36 AM
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Good to be back.
Here's a little philosophical conundrum for everybody.
Are fate & free will mutually exclusive concepts?
Disscuss.
About Me
- Name: The Grumbler
- Location: Australia
I am an artist/engineer, like Leaonardo, only not nearly as good. I am characterised by my consumption of various media and artforms as well as my generally grumpiness. More info avaliable by demand.
Previous Posts
- A Question of Faith
- Clarification
- It's a state of mind, Stupid.
- Soooo, now i have a blog of my own. Hmmm, this sho...
7 Comments:
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If every choice has a contigency, where in lies the point of choice?
I love this question!
Fate: Basically, the idea that everything is already planned out, and in some beliefs can be known before hand.
Free Will: Basically, we get to pick what happens.
So, say we train an animal to respond to something (for example, classic Pavlov's Dog response: sound connected to food, dog salivates at sound). Now, we play the sound, knowing the dog will respond with salivation.. Was that fate? Did the dog have any free will in it?
Now let's take a hungry lion, throw in a tasty looking deer.. Can you know what will happen? Does the lion still have free will?
How about people.. If you know enough about someone, and their current situation, can you predict how they will respond to certain event? If you can predict it, did they still have free will?
Ok, I'll get to the point now :p
I believe in both Fate and Free Will to the full extent, at the same time. Here's why: Every time we excercise our "Free Will", our choice is entirely based on everything we've experienced in our lives, even (perhaps especially) at the unconcious level. We are entirely free to choose exactly what we do, but our choice can be predicted, given enough information and understanding of the exact situation. No person can ever know and understand another to the extent of doing this to any major or truely significant degree, but if you know someone well enough to guess how they'll react to certain things, then you can start to see where I'm coming from with this.
Now, let's consider for a moment the possibility of an Omniscient God. Some great being who can see/know everything that has ever happened to everyone. From that, he can know exactly what each person is going to do next, and from that, everyone elses reactions, and so on.. So from the very first moment, he can 'see' exactly how it will all end, even if it hasn't played out yet. So while at our level, we are totally free to make choices, something above us with a better understanding of the situation can see exactly what we will choose.
Life, the Universe and Everything isn't random, isn't chaotic, isn't illogical. It's a perfectly ordered, structured, pattern. It's way too much for anyone of us to recognise the pattern, so it looks like a random chaotic mess, but it's all connected and related. Everything we do, everything we are, is the sum of all that we have done and experienced before, and everything that has effected us such is equally a sum of their lives to that point, and somewhere, far enough back, we reach a ground zero of these interactions.
So.. I believe that at our own level, we are entirely free to make the choices we do, and were we someone else, or had things gone slightly differently for us somewhere along the line, we may have made a different one.. But we wont, we are what we are, and exactly that. Just because we will make the choices we do, doesn't make it any less significant that we got to make the choice. We are beings of Free Will, but it can all be know in advance, so at the same time, it's all Fate. It will happen a certain way, there is no denying it, but the way it will happen will have been our choice.
Well, I was going to express an opinion but then there was Psi and now there is no point. So: what he said. ;)
I also agree with psi. (Not that surprising really, since we had a few LONG conversations about this in the past... )
However just playing devils advocate... Given that god created everything in the world, and pushed it into motion, and given that everything can be determined by the things that came before, does that not also deny us free will again, since everything is basically defined as a result of the initial state of creation.. a state that god created in full knowledge of how it would turn out.
Thanks Psi, you've inspired me to create a new D&D metaphor, Troll Cake. (It regenerates, so you can eat it and have it too).
On a more serious note, you have done well taking Fate to it's logical extreem, well done. It gives us a nice definition of Fate(something i deliberatly left out of my origional post) to work with.
It would seem you also have a very solid idea of just what Free Will is, but have not fully defined it in the post. Please do.
Chindogu - If you agree with Psi, please also put foward the trump to your 'Devil's advocacy' arguement. (since it wouldn't be Devil's Advocacy if you didn't have it)
just for the record I'm still not totaly happy with this thread... prehapes we shall revisit it in the future...maybe it's fated...maybe not.
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