Concepts of fate

[WarGod]

I'll repeat this lil bit cos the font messed up:


The point I'm making is that fate is that predicting "fate" is ridiculous because a) there is no way of doing it and b) Because as soon as you predicted it, the "fate" would change. Even if it still happened it may be changed by a tiny tiny factor such as TEXT the "fate" happened.

[-(aaK)- Neil Faz]

All good arguaments by all invloved... lets just agree that know one can know for certain.

Now let this topic die (slowly and painfully)

[Rik-[FD]]

-(aaK)- said:

I'll repeat this lil bit cos the font messed up:


The point I'm making is that fate is that predicting "fate" is ridiculous because a) there is no way of doing it and b) Because as soon as you predicted it, the "fate" would change. Even if it still happened it may be changed by a tiny tiny factor such as TEXT the "fate" happened.

Have you seen Paycheck? Not the best film ever (to say the least) but it answers your point b there...by predicting things, you tend to cause them to happen....predict a war and you go to war to prevent it....predict a disease and you heard people together to stop it and end up causing it.

[WarGod]

Good point Rik but if your "fate" was predicted and it was to die in a road accident, all you would have to do to avoid that was to stay inside your house, away from where the accident was to take place.

[Buzz]

[glow=red,2,300]Ah but what would stop the 44ton truck coming down the hill with burnt out brakes, crashing through the side of his house, splattering him like a pancake, which ice would come along and then consume mmmmmmm roadkill
Would still be a road traffic accident [/glow]

[WarGod]

If your fate was that you would kill yourself through solvent abuse because you were criminally insane you wouldnt be able to if men in white coats put u in a padded room would u?

[WarGod]

Any way prdicting fate is nonsense because fate itself is non existant.

It may dead certain that a person is going to undertake an action resulting in death. However, because we are able to make choices (no matter how ridiculous a choice may be) there is nothing stopping that person from not undertaking that action.

eg, A criminals fate is to get shot by a policeman and die in a shootout, however the policeman may decide (for wotever reason) NOT to shoot him.

It is the fact that no matter what happens we still have the ability to make choices. It's these choices that make the idea of fate, and therefore predicting fate, an ideal brought up by people looking for an excuse of death

[testa]

Fate is a simple human invention to try and explain things that our tiny little minds cannot comprehend. Fate is the excuse used by both lovers and mourners, the rich and the poor.

Our mere existence is based on the chance occurrence of the right element meeting the other right element, all those years ago in that evolutionary soup from which we sprung forth – as it where.

It is chance that dictates how, what, where and when things happen. Before any idea of the prediction “fate” can be entertained we must first understand the complexity of chance itself.

Indeed, there is a good chance that a person would burn them self on a hot stove if they where to touch it, a very good chance, however there is still the chance they may not.

It is a certainty that if a banana is left in a room, with no outside interference, for an infinite amount of time, it will go mouldy and start to smell. The important thing is that it is certain to also turn into a car, a house and a person with 27 fingers.

Fate is no more than the result of consecutive chances played out over time. It’s like rolling large dice with many sides.

The outcome of some chance occurrences can be easily predicted, some less so. However we can control “fate” by increasing the chances of a favourable outcome if indeed we see the chance in the first place.…

P.S. nice thred innit

[WarGod]

The point about burning yourself on a stove isnt fate, it is simply somthing that happens when you touch a stove. It is an outcome, not fate.

Fate is just somthing to emphasise poetry or romance, as testa mentioned above.

[Rik-[FD]]

Think you all need to go back and read the whole thread properly if you're intent on restarting it because all your points have been covered and a blanket "its nonesense" doesn't really add to the debate much.

[WarGod]

All I'm saying is that I don't believe in fate. Also, the points that I brought up, in my opinion, are sufficient enough to proove fate doesn't exist.

And if you come back with an argument based on religion and prooving that then YOU will be repeating what has already been said.

[Rik-[FD]]

Erm....religion only ever entered the conversation as a side point, it was never in as a hard case....there's no need for it when I have scientific fact to back up what I'm saying.

What you said about burning your hand totally missed the point of the example....my guess is you've been skim reading.

Also, if you read and UNDERSTAND the points (particularly the burning hand one) you will see that part of what I've been saying is that there is no such thing as choice. Our choices are made based on experience, knowledge and stimuli. If you know all those factors, you know what choice that person will make. Chaos theory. Nothing happens by accident. There is no such thing as random. Just things that are so small we can't see them or so abstract that we can't relate them to things (if a butterfly flaps its wings in Africa, does it cause a tornado in the states - Not word perfect but the main jist of the most well known example of chaos theory).

As I've also already stated, knowing all those things to the degree you would have to know them in order to make a 100% acurate prediction is unimaginable at the moment because of the amount of information you would need to gather, store and process. However, it isn't impossible and given a hundred, a thousand or a million years of computer evolution, I would even go so far as to predict that it will be done at some point in our future although I doubt it will catch on because what is the point of life if we know what is going to happen?

[WarGod]

I understand what you are saying and that we make choices by experience and learning and what is going on around us etc...

But my point is no matter how much information we know about a person, what previous experiences they've been through, and what is happening around them, you still can't guarantee the choices a person makes.

And if you still don't think I've understood what you have said, it's because I think humans are so random at times, undertaking uncharacteristic actions that the idea of fate is simply immpossible to have.

Please don't think I've misunderstood you, I partially agree with you (I wouldn't touch a stove knowing from experience it's hot) however, there is still the obvious fact that I COULD touch it purposefully. Pointless as it may be, that outcome is still there.

[Rik-[FD]]

The fact that you could touch the stove is irrelevent. You wouldn't touch it and anyone who knows enough about you (mainly the fact that you're not masochistic) would be able to acurately predict that.

Again, you bring in the "random" word but I still contest that there is no such thing as random. Your brain works using chemicals and electrical pulses. These chemical reactions and electrical pulses are set off by the various stimuli around you (and inside you - such as being off your head on TCP). There isn't any randomness in that. Your decisions are made by your brain (excluding those relating to the fairer sex which tend to take place in your trousers). Once we discover enough about the brain and how it works, we will be able to see those reactions taking place. Couple that with in depth (and I mean deeper than we could possibley have at the moment) knowledge of a person's experiences and memories (which we should even be able to extract from a person's brain if we understand it to this degree), then it will be possible to KNOW what chemical and electrical reactions are going to be sparked at any particular time.

I don't think that anyone who really knows anything about physics, chemistry or biology would disagree with anything I've said a part from the fact that we will be able to do this in the future. But once you've agreed with the principles of how the brain works, it is pure conjecture or short-sightedness to think that we will never get to the point where we can do this.

[WarGod]

What you've just said makes sense, and I accept that it could be possible (later down the line) to predict, to a degree, how a person will act.

But, taking that into account I still don't believe that this could ever be 100% accurate.

As you said, and I agree, we react in response to our surroundings (as well as past experience and knowledge). Knowing this, you can't fully compensate for every stimuli around the person you are predicting. There could be an unpredictable stimuli (a bee sting for example) causing a different reaction then the prediction.

But, you could argue that you can still predict how the person would react to the new event. So, my response summarised is this:

I agree with you on that it may be possible (with further understanding of the brain) predicting how someone will act, to a degree. But, that's all you are doing, predicting how they will act to situations presented them. You are not predicting what situations will befall them, and that is "fate" what will happen to you, not how you react to things.

Ultimately you can't predict what someone will do the next day, soley because you cannot control or predict EVERY stimuli that they experience. This would only be possible if you had complete control of their environment.

If that isn't a decent arguement trying to disprove the prediction of "fate" i don't know what is.