For Nalyd.

[Slawbug]

Oh, who am I kidding? Mostly for me.

 

Speaking of which... I believe there may be a doorway of destiny somewhere around here!

[Lilith]

is this going to turn into another chrono cross reference

[Randomizer]

Free will is the illusion you have a choice.

 

Fate is the realization that it is true.

[Alorael at Large]

I believe in fixed four dimensional spacetime. Mostly. Actually I'm pretty okay with the idea that spacetime is probabilistic but not predetermined, exactly.

 

—Alorael, who mostly envisions this as stepwise time being predictable on a macro level and unpredictable on a very fine level, which means it's also unpredictable at more than planck increments of time. Roughly. Which is all very fuzzy but works if you squint at it.

[adc.]

I... believe... in... ******

 

No, I'm not going to start another Warring Threads of Spiderweb.

 

Sticking to the topic, yes I do believe in fate, and your actions are those that bend fate little remarkably, a little only or not at all.

 

So I believe in both fate and the outcomes of our actions.

 

EDIT: Forgot to post this as it was on the tip of my tongue

 

Fate to me is the outcome of your actions set in a far future where you can barely twist it to your will, or something that's predetermined with relations to your actions or not

 

btw, why bring up this topic? Mere curiosity?

[keira]

There's always a choice, its just that sometimes it doesn't seem like it because the other options are all horribly stupid.

 

I mean if you want to say everything is predetermined and that you'll make whatever choice then ok. If I'm predetermined to get hit by a bus then that really sucks, but if I didn't try to not get hit by a bus then why should I even bother doing anything

[Slawbug]

is this going to turn into another chrono cross reference

no. at least I don't think so. so far as I know, this one will stay entirely within the realm of chrono trigger

 

EDIT: whoops, I just realized there's already a cross reference in the title. oh well

[Callie]

I believe in predetermination in the sense that the movements of particles constituting our being are hypothetically predictable. Of course, I'm not educated enough in physics to know if that's a sensible conclusion.

[Sudanna]

cool sure fine

[Mistah Q]

I do not believe in fate exactly, but I will vouch for probabilities.

[Edgwyn]

I agree with Sylae. If every major and minor event in your life is predestined, then are you really a thinking creature? Of course predestination is one of those theories that is impossible to prove wrong.

[Sudanna]

Of course you're a thinking creature. Just all of your thoughts are predetermined too.

[Balladeer]

I believe that every life has a purpose (kind of fate) but that choices you make can change whether you achieve it or not (kind of not). Or at least that there are multiple ways to achieve your purpose. Ultimately I think that life is a journey not only to find your purpose but also to accept it. The more you struggle against your purpose (if it is something you think you don't want or cannot find because there are some places you refuse to look) the more you will wander through your life without truly being content.

[Xaiya]

It depends on the existence or lack there-of of true randomness.

[Aran]

If the universe is deterministic, then I was predestined to not believe in a deterministic universe.

[keira]

here's another thing

 

does it really matter

 

i mean lets just say im predetermined to get axe murdered. does that change the fact that i am going to try and not be axe murdered? if presented with a situation and you say "WELL THIS IS MY FATE I AM DONE", then IMO you are a blithering idiot.

 

there is no evidence showing that there's a "server seed" for the universe, but of course there's not really any evidence there's not. (aside: hey that sounds exactly like another argument that gets thrown about a lot)

 

personally i think that there's enough randomness and entropy in things that it makes things, uh, random, which kind of throws a spanner in the cog of things. i mean if you want to track atoms and photons and all that other stuff making "pseudo-random" things that supposedly we could track and tell the future with (or whatever) then ok, you go ahead and do that, meanwhile in the land of more useful things we could be wasting our time on.

[Callie]

here's another thing

 

does it really matter

No, but does anything else really matter? Meaning is just another one of our constructs.

 

/nihilism

[keira]

are you actually nalyd's alt account

 

I mean you can go around screaming EVERYTHING IS ARBITRARY AND THAT IS SIGNIFICANT SOMEHOW but when worse comes to worse everyone in the world will try to fight "fate". in this case you have literally zero way of knowing if you are fighting or going along with said "fate". you might be, you might not be, does that change the fact that you'll continue doing things?

[Cairo Jim]

 

personally i think that there's enough randomness and entropy in things that it makes things, uh, random, which kind of throws a spanner in the cog of things. i mean if you want to track atoms and photons and all that other stuff making "pseudo-random" things that supposedly we could track and tell the future with (or whatever)

 

Does it matter how it is done, as long as it is done? The ends justify the means, right?

[Goldengirl]

To believe in predetermination, there are three necessary conditions in my opinion. 1, believing in some form of higher power that has determined what everything should do, 2, believing that that power can act on any determination, and 3, believing that this higher power wants to do it. I don't believe in any such power, so I'm out right there. Predermination implies intentionality, and there's nothing to have such an intention in my view.

 

The philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in his explication of Friedrich Nietzsche, describes fate as our life. Our lives are infinitely more complicated and complex than we can every control. This, I think, is a thought that many who favor predetermination favor. The response of the humanists is epitomized in the poem "Invictus," by Walter Henley, "I am the master of my fate / I am the captain of my soul." Nietzsche responds with "Amor Fati," the love of fate, that says that we must love our life and fate. The forces that construct our lives are infinitely minute and massive, from the spin of electrons and the minute interactions in childhood to the political actions of empires and the shifting of ideologies over time. I like to think of it as being akin to gravity; the attraction between too bodies is directly proportional to their mass and inversely proportional to their distance. Some events occurred a long time ago and have negligible effects on you, some materials you interact with are too small to influence you, but some events are big and pressing and can do nothing but alter you. In this sense of the word fate, then yes, I do believe. I do not hold life to blame, do not put it on trial, do not hold it responsible for ills. What I do is live with what this fate has given me.

[keira]

i dont see how what you are saying is relevant but 'how' is kind of important

 

i mean if you cure aids by killing everyone who has aids, that's going to have a different effect than, uh, making a cure and/or vaccine.

 

i mean yeah there's some variable scope to the "result" in question. i guess you are saying from a global scope, if fate's result equals free will's result then yeah i guess it doesn't matter how.

 

i mean i'm sure there are plenty of philosophy majors looking to ponder that and i'm sure i'm too stupid to understand the ramifications of such a discussion but from a standpoint of practicality it doesn't make a difference in how the universe operates at the scope of reality

 

edit because i'm an ass:

 

w/r/t "Our lives are infinitely more complicated and complex than we can [ever] control". Just because you can't control something doesn't mean it is being controlled by someone else

 

there's no engineer on the freight train of life. i guess there's some pretty deep implications there

Edited April 27, 2014 by sylae
aaaa goldenking was prefetermined to snipe me

[Sudanna]

The fantasy novel idea of "fate" is not really relevant to determinism. Determinism is just the idea that everything has a cause and an effect, and that cause and effect express themselves in at least theoretically predictable ways. Everything you think or do has a cause, and what results was the only possible effect. Intentionality is not required.

[Goldengirl]

re:sylae

 

Agreed. But just because I can do something 99 times and get the same result doesn't mean that the 100th time will as well. I can make predictions and guess at probability, but ultimately it's a guess.

 

The fantasy novel idea of "fate" is not really relevant to determinism. Determinism is just the idea that everything has a cause and an effect, and that cause and effect express themselves in at least theoretically predictable ways. Everything you think or do has a cause, and what results was the only possible effect.

 

I assume this is aimed at me. If so, I'm not sure why you're calling my conception of "fate" something akin to fantasy novels. What I'm saying is that it's a direct opposition to determinism. The universe is essentially random and chaotic. This isn't exactly true to my belief, but it's a clear delineation between you and me. Everything is really complicated. When you say "everything you think or do has a cause," you are wrong because there are actually infinitely many causes that aren't even necessarily related in clear and obvious ways, like the flight of a butterfly causing a hurricane. In the same way, there is not an effect but an instead an infinitely reproduced echo of influence and nuanced results that play into the future. That's not determinism, it's an admission that nothing can be determined.

[Callie]

are you actually nalyd's alt account

 

I mean you can go around screaming EVERYTHING IS ARBITRARY AND THAT IS SIGNIFICANT SOMEHOW but when worse comes to worse everyone in the world will try to fight "fate". in this case you have literally zero way of knowing if you are fighting or going along with said "fate". you might be, you might not be, does that change the fact that you'll continue doing things?

I don't scream philosophical musings, even in the figurative sense, I think… I hope; that would be like George Carlin yelling "TOPOGRAPHY!" in a crowded theater. I enjoy board games, this forum and all of its follies, bike riding, 4x strategy, engineering, etc. All of those activities involve neurotransmitters that elicit some sort of emotion that I interpret as happiness. I'm not a paranoid android, so I've willed to live to the point of writing this paragraph. Just because I think life is without inherent meaning does not mean I don't enjoy life. I just believe that my will to live is not inherently different from that of a diatom floating around in a sewage treatment plant. There is no way to prove or disprove that belief; that's what's so fun about metaphysics.

 

Also, me being Nalyd's alt account would have some frightening implications.

 

When you say "everything you think or do has a cause," you are wrong because there are actually infinitely many causes that aren't even necessarily related in clear and obvious ways, like the flight of a butterfly causing a hurricane. In the same way, there is not an effect but an instead an infinitely reproduced echo of influence and nuanced results that play into the future. That's not determinism, it's an admission that nothing can be determined.

"A cause" can be an abstract, collective noun that could encompass any number of causes or one singular cause. Events A, B, C can cause event D, but they can collectively be referred to as event X. What you interpret as an infinitely reproduced echo, I interpret as an multitudinous ordered set.

 

(I wonder if such differences in interpretation are key aspects of someone's personality. Maybe I'm thinking backwards with this parenthetical statement.)

 

Edit: Erroneous comma

[Sudanna]

I assume this is aimed at me. If so, I'm not sure why you're calling my conception of "fate" something akin to fantasy novels. What I'm saying is that it's a direct opposition to determinism. The universe is essentially random and chaotic. This isn't exactly true to my belief, but it's a clear delineation between you and me. Everything is really complicated. When you say "everything you think or do has a cause," you are wrong because there are actually infinitely many causes that aren't even necessarily related in clear and obvious ways, like the flight of a butterfly causing a hurricane. In the same way, there is not an effect but an instead an infinitely reproduced echo of influence and nuanced results that play into the future. That's not determinism, it's an admission that nothing can be determined.

 

"A cause" can be an abstract, collective noun that could encompass any number of causes or one singular cause. Events A, B, C, can cause event D, but they can collectively be referred to as event X.

 

It totes is determinism, bud. People determining things is not required.

[Alorael at Large]

Once again siding with Nalyd. Physical determinism just says that the universe can be thought of as a kind of state machine. At any given moment, everything has a bunch of set properties. Those properties determine the state of the universe one "tick" (Planck time, probably) forward into the next state. Think of it like a simple Newtonian physics situation: if you know the positions and velocities and masses of all your objects on your ideal plane you can predict their positions and velocities out infinitely. The universe is like that, but on a massively larger and more complicated scale. No one can ever hope to measure or calculate the current or next state, but it's at least theoretically possible. There's no teleological cause, just physical cause.

 

On the other hand, quantum mechanics and their probabilistic rather than fixed results may throw a wrench in that. And the uncertainty principle states that you can't actually know the position and velocity of all the particles; they can't actually have both properties to arbitrary precision. So maybe the universe is probabilistic rather than deterministic and there's some room for randomness.

 

I think randomness isn't any help at all for free will, though. Because if you're told that instead of getting to make a decision someone's going to roll dice to make it for you there's freedom but absolutely no will at all.

 

—Alorael, who will bring philosophies crashing into each other. From a utilitarian perspective it's better to believe in free will and act as though it exists than to believe in determinism and act as though you have no choices. Thus the debate is purely academic. Seize the opportunities that appear to be before you even though they are probably illusory!

[Lilith]

free willy is obviously compatible with determinism, nobody would have made or watched that movie if they had a choice in the matter

[Slawbug]

equitability demands that I point out that was awful and of tenuous relevance. also not nearly as funny as the one about me

[Harehunter]

Ya'll have fun with this one. I voted that I have no time for this, and that is .....well... that.

[Student of Trinity]

I work on stuff related to this, and I have to say I don't know.

 

Classical physics is deterministic in principle, but the prevalence of dynamical chaos means that everything is incredibly sensitive to small details. In particular, tiny details can remain without significant effect for arbitrarily long periods of time, and then suddenly make a dramatic difference. So I see no reason in principle why a certain tiny subset of the initial conditions of the universe might not effectively constitute my free will. This would still be determinism, but of the character-is-fate kind, where I decide what to do, but my decisions are inevitable, given my character.

 

Quantum mechanics is fully deterministic for the time evolution of quantum states, despite the (in English) so-called Uncertainty Principle, except when a measurement occurs. Then suddenly it's random. Quantum mechanics doesn't say at all clearly exactly what something has to be, to count as a measurement. My feeling, as one professional in the field, is that there's something huge about all this that we still don't understand at all.

 

Randomness isn't really free will, either. Rather than have important things decided for me by die rolls, I think I'd prefer to suffer the determinism of character-as-fate, where I determine what happens but my choices are all fixed by the kind of person I really am.