My Third BruceTheme: Fate.

Do you believe in fate?

This begs the question of what fate is. Fate seems to imply an almost reverse determinism. Of course, I should probably explain what determinism is for those that don’t know common terminology.

Action, reaction. We accept that for any action, there is only one way for events to unfold. The easiest way to understand this is via physics. A car crashes into a train at 60 MPH. If all the circumstances are the same, the angle of the sun, the weight of the car, etc, then the event will happen exactly the same every single time.

This means that if you flip a coin, it was already determined whether it would be heads or tails, based on how you flipped it. Of course, there’s absolutely no way for us to “know” or try to skew the results, so it only seems random.

Get it? The opposing view is the doctrine of Free Will. Most people tend to be very afraid of giving up the doctrine of Free Will. It doesn’t bother me, because it doesn’t change a thing. In fact, in understanding determinism, you can cause things to happen. But, that’s another story.

In calling fate reverse determinism, I mean this. Determinism causal chains move from the past to the future. Fate seems to imply that future events caused prior events to occur – no matter what you do, all the casual chains will eventually lead to that final crux that you can not avoid.

On the one hand, it does seem to imply an iota of free will, but simply that we are not “free” enough to escape this force called “fate”. Some events are not fated, they simply are not important, or just links in the chain to another fated event.

In the face of determinism, fate seems to imply that the word was predetermined to cause these fated events, that if you tossed the dice a million times, there would be a million different ways the world could play out – but these few fated events would always occur, whether it be a specific event (Timmy peeing at 7:45 PM on a specific day in history, at a specific location), or a grand shift in historical history (a world war between nations, with one side guilty of mass genocide, nearly winning, but pushed back when another larger nation joined the war; nations are interchangable, but the themes are what matter).

..That last paragraph was one sentence. Oops?

Of course, the question was whether I believe in any of this hogwash.

*smirks*

Are you serious? Absolutely not! By Occam’s Razor, I do believe this is an unnecessary concept. I think the world just sort of happens, and that’s how it is. I feel much more comfortable with a version of determinism, even the compatibilist view, as it affirms the the past causes the future, rather than the other way around. A world where the future causes the past disturbs me greatly.