Concepts of fate

[-(aaK)- Nav]

Just wondering how everyone else feels on the subhject of how life pans out, wether you beleive it is fate an things are destined to happen, or wether everything around us is a random act or such.

Personally I find myself veering towards a mix of the both. I beleive life is on the rails in a way. We have set peices. Things are meant to occur, not everything, just integral peices of our existance. We for the most part have power to decide our fates, but in a manner who we are defines our ultimate end. Its a mix of psycology meets a threads of fate concept. Our personality can define our reactions, meaning if we analyze on a deep level we could determine a reaction to an event and most likely almost define our fate in a way. But then life is met with so many variables we cannot truly have a fate in that manner. But some things are certain to happen in life, death of someone, lose of something valuable, meeting of a love interest, you know what I mean. Our responces are almost pre programmed in a manner I beleive, hence we in a manner have a fate. Although this is just a cynic's veiw on this, im asking what others beleive.

So please, reply.

[Rik-[FD]]

Way too early to be thinking about that sort of thing.....thanks for that Nav

But seriously, I think you're right but you do have to remember if your theory is right that every decision made will effect decisions that follow depending on whether the original choice turned out to be right or wrong (someone who decides to lean on a cooker without realising its on will probably not decide to do that again and will probably shy away from leaning on any item that is potentially hot).

So, you can't just analyse a personality, you also have to analyse the decisions they have made and are going to make and their outcomes before you can start mapping someone's life.

[WarGod]

Fate.....a better phrase would be fortune telling, or perhaps mere co-incidence.

The idea of fate means that life is pointless.

If there is no choice in life then why do we live it knowing that we have no control over how it ends?

And, when you think about it, you do have control over your actions. You might be someone that allways does the right thing, but, if you wanted to, you could do the exact opposite. No matter what a desicion is, or what pressures there are to make that desicion, you could allways do somthing different. It's all about the choices you make.

We have a little somthing called free will. Fact.

[Icarion]

Fate... no way. Fate logically implies a higher power who determines what fates are supposed to exist, and I dont believe in any kind of higher power. Its a lovely romantic notion, and I like the idea of fate in stories sometimes, but stories are where the idea should stay, in my opinion. Although on a similar vein, the idea of time travel and whether its possible to change the future are more intriguing questions to me

[Rik-[FD]]

Interesting....2 rebuttles of Nav and my theories while both actually avoid rebutting our arguments and skip onto a higher power or the lack of choice. That isn't what either of us said. We were discussing how you can or can't decide what choices a person is going to make if you know enough about them.

WarGod said that everyone has a choice and that's true but at the same time if someone is a "good" person, they are generally going to make "good" decisions. Yes, you would have to know a lot about the person and as I said, the choices they'd already made and also probably map into that everyone else's choices and random acts of nature which makes it impracticle but if you could factor all that stuff in then yes, I believe you could map out someone's life.

Nothing to do with a "higher power" or even "fate" just scientific analysis of action and reaction on an immense scale.

[Icarion]

But you COULDN'T account for random events. The number of possibilities would be so immense you could never even begin to predict exactly what would happen. And you cant really say "Ok bob, this is is your fate if you catch cold on wednesday 30th, but this is your fate if you dont catch cold, but alice trips over and gets hit by a car on the 1st..."

So although you can predict people's reaction up to a point, it would be like weather forcasting- useless once you go beyond a few weeks in the future. So if you're talking about proper fate- You are destined to meet this person, yadda yadda yadda, you have to fall back on the higher power argument, which I reject.

[Rik-[FD]]

But how many events are actually random? With a complete understanding of the universe, we would see that no events are random. Not even random numbers on a computer are really random. Bare with me because I'm kinda thinking this through as I'm typing it so it might come out as rubbish and it might be so bad, I don't even post it lol.

Let's have a look at your 2 examples:

1. Catching a cold. Cold is a virus and is passed from person to person. There are certain conditions in which you can't catch a cold (such as the artic as its too cold for the cold virus to live - irony at its best). So, if you're predicitng everyone's lives at the same time then you can also predict the ebbs and flows of the cold virus and thus, it would be factored into your equations.

2. Tripping over. People don't just trip over. There is always several causes such as a loose paving slab and a lack-lustre walking movement. As we're predicting people's choices, you can predict where someone is going to be walking and if you know how someone's decision making process works then you'd also know how they would feel about those decisions and therefore, you'd be able to predict their mood. The loose paving slab could be predicted by looking at weather, earth tremors, traffic (based on drivers' decisions) etc. I agree this one would be very hard if not impossible to predict perfectly but you could work out a possibility for it - again, given enough computing power, a slightly better knowledge of the environment and a good understanding of everyone's decisions.

Predicting the weather is pretty acurate these days....what would we do if we could predict our fate with the same reliability as that?

Probably change a few decisions so the person who spent all that time predicting our fate had to go back and do it all again (for everyone as our fate effects everyone else's).

While we're at it, why do you blankly reject the higher power argument? As a scientist have you seen anything to conclusively disprove the existance of a higher power? If not, how can you reject it?

[Icarion]

Well to start with your last question first, As a scientist, I have to reject every hypothesis until I get some proof in FAVOUR of it. The idea of hypothesis is you come up with loads of barmy ones, test them, and when you get some evidence for one, thats the one you tentatively accept until a better one comes along. Just as in maths, you assume your hypothesis is a load of rubbish until you prove it. So far, no satisfactory proof of god, hence that hypothesis is still in the 'reject' pile.

As for the whole prediction idea, some things ARE random. the whole tripping over idea isnt something you can predict. People don't decide to accidentally pick their feet up less at certain moments, nor do they necessarily trip over anything in particular. You cant predict true accidents like that because they aren't a decision that is a product of their past experiences, and they often dont happen for any reason. You cant say 'oh look, this person always forgets to watch out for busses in the road on tuesday the 17ths' or say that the bus traffic density is higher than normal. Accidents are accidents and you cant predict them.

Besides, while i dont believe in life after death or god, I do believe in free will. Even though the brain does depend heavily on the past connections it's made, I do think there's room for the odd spark of genius and many accidents to occur.

[Icarion]

oh, and also...

if you were informed of your "fate" by the guy who predicted it, you'd almost certainly decide to change it, which means that the original prediction is only that, a prediction. By my standards, 'fate' is defined as something you couldn't change, even if you knew about it.

[-(aaK)- Neil Faz]

The only thing that can be "fate" in my opinion is death. Something that definately will happen no matter what, as i agree with Kat about not being able to change it if there is such a thing. Other than that, fate is just an easy way of explaining how you end up where you are.

[Rik-[FD]]

If an idea is rejected then surely no more work is done on it...the "rubbish" ideas must be tested and either proved or disproved before they get moved from the "ideas" pile to either the reject or accept. Belief (or non-belief) is different in my mind. But there again, it probably depends on your definition of "refect." To me, a reject (as far as ideas go) is one that's been disproved whereas to you it seems to be one you believe to be wrong.

And I must disagree with what you're saying about the tripping incident. I contest that if you know enough about the universe and people, you can predict that sort of thing. Everything happens for a reason...and I'm talking a scientific reason not a master plan. Given that knowledge and enough time and computing power to process it, I'm sure you could predict even the most random event. However, I do agree that it is highly unlikely that we'll ever get to that point...or at least that we'll get to it in the next 10000 years. Things are only random while we don't understand how they come to be.

Now, you brought up life after death. Although I leave my mind open about God (which means I'm as screwed as you are if he/she is up there looking down on us due to a reliance on evidence rather than faith), I do believe in life after death. Everything is made up of atoms (yeah, I know its a bit more complicated than that but I'm not going to go into any further detail than that here). So, if we live in an infinate reality then at some point in time, those atoms etc. will be in exactly the same place as they are now. Somewhere in millions of years' time, I'm probably sitting at a keyboard typing all this again....wonder if I'm suffering Deja-Vu. Its all about the bloody monkeys typing Shakespear.

I hear what you're saying and understand it but I think our perspectives are kind of different on the subjects...I'm looking what is probably a long way into the future to what is possible whereas you seem to be looking closer to the present.

Oh and just out of interest, what is it you're reading at uni?

[Rik-[FD]]

Sorry about all that...upon reflection, I think most of it was a repeat of what I said before. To put it all in a better and more susinct manner:

If you don't believe that everything (including us) is driven by the actions and reactions of the particles that everything is made of (which when you get down to the physics of it IS predictable - we just can't do it at the moment because we don't know enough about it) then what do you believe drives us? A soul perhaps? (I think you can probably see where I'm going here lol).

Man, I haven't had a debate like this for ages.

[-(aaK)- Deltz]

I'd just like to add a bit of science theory to the debate, that still scares me.
It shows that their is a form of communication going on that is faster than the speed of light.
Please bear with the boredom of it...

The most dramatic and ultimate proof of quantum theory is the Aspect experiment, named after the French quantum physicist Alain Aspect.
In 1982, he and his research team implemented successfully the test that had been long in the making, starting with a thought experiment suggested by Albert Einstein.
Very simplified, Aspect and his colleagues created two photons from the same quantum event and observed them as they speeded into opposite directions.
After they had travelled some distance with the speed of light, the researchers changed the polarization for only one of them.
(Polarization is the orientation of the wave that corresponds to each photon.)
As a result, the other photon instantaneously adopted the same polarization, even though the two were far apart.
Relativity theory tells us that nothing can travel faster than light.
So nothing could have caught up with the photons after they had departed.
Yet, there is this instantaneous mysterious communication between them.
They are somehow connected in a realm that is beyond our common sense, although they appear separated in our world.

Now i'm not saying this is fate, or any such bullshit, but just that our own concept of how the world works is so simplistic that it suits our needs.
What i take from it, is that if the very substance of the universe can communicate instantly, then what are we missing?

[Rik-[FD]]

OK ::rolls up sleaves:: now we're getting somewhere although I'm a bit worried about following the Aspect route because it opens up a whole bunch of conversations. Oh well, its Sunday morning, there's nothing else to do so here goes.

Physisist David Bohm theorises that Aspect's experiment proves that everything is a gigantic hologram. The thing with holograms is that if you cut one in half, the two parts contain the original picture NOT two halves of the picture as you might expect. This is because everything is interconnected to everything else.

He also theorises the existance of a Superhologram which contains everything that has been, is and could be. And that at some point in time, we may be able to reach into this superhologram and pluck out pictures of the past or even a possible future. This means that if you pick the right future, you are predicting someone's fate.

There are other scientists that believe the human brain stores memories in holographic format which would explain many things such as our huge memory capacity in such a small mass and also how we can instantaneously retrieve them because research already done has proved you can store around 10 billion bits of information on 1 cubic centimetre of photographic film by adjusting the angles of the lasers creating the image.

If you then put these 2 theories together (even without the superhologram theory), we can begin to explain all sorts of things. If the solidity of the world is a secondary reality to the holographic haze of frequencies and the brain only selects some of these frequencies then object reality ceases to exist. In short, the religions of the East are right....the world is "Maya" - an illusion.

To cut what is a long story short, when you look at various experiments that have been carried out and puzzled over for years with the holographic model, you get answers. This covers all sorts of things from telepathy (all things are connected) to past-life regression to the aparent collective memories shared by people being tested with LSD. Even the aparent miraculous self-healing of terminally ill patients is explained because as receivers in this holographic mess of frequencies, we can change those frequencies. Even things like Ghosts, out of body experiences and the like can be explained with these theories.

And, going back to the original point (well, the second point really):

Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become suspect, for in a holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out, even random events would have to be seen as based on holographic principles and therefore determined. Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makes sense, and everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor, for even the most haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry.

I've cut down the explanation of all this for you but if anyone wants to read about it in more detail, there's a good explanation of it all here: twm.co.nz/hologram.html

[Rik-[FD]]

Oh and 1 other thing I thought I ought to mention...Nav started this bloody conversation and hasn't been seen in it since. Something akin to lighting the blue touch-paper and standing well back I think lol