Ok who's up for a
big long juicy controversial post? I am! (This post is not for the very young or very restless, no pun intended. Children, or women who may be pregnant with children should consult a doctor before before absorbing this information. Reader discretion is advised.) Ya'll wanna sum it up in 2 sentences. Well here's a whole lot more than two. It's probably real complicated for some of you so take a breath and don't even bother if you aren't a philosophical type. {If you really don't want to read this much skip to the bottom where I ask the questions}
Ok, everybody here seems to be stuck on choice. That's basic human nature, nobody can hold human nature against anybody else (although we often do anyway). Humans don't like to be trapped, closed in, or powerless, and so that makes us biased on philosophical issues. I believe in fate and to a degree that does entail believing that I am powerless to make a difference, but since I've accepted that whatever difference I am going to make in the world has already been decided I don't feel real uncomfortable about it. I have some reasons I want to skim over, I'm not going to write a novel, but maybe a novella. I'm open to criticism but not people totally ignoring 3/4 of my post and focusing on one line or one paragraph when it's been explained in a different paragraph. That said, let's begin our journey!
I believe everybody lives on their own timeline. That timeline is a straight line with infinite points between the beginning and the end but all of the points are already made. "Time" is relative to the perception of the individual and so I don't like the argument that "We're living now, breathing now, making choices now, and the future hasn't happened yet." The future is inevitable, that's not science fiction, that's reality, though my interpretation is that we're just watching what's already happened. Now when I say the timeline is a straight line that basically sums up my viewpoint on fate, following a path of predetermined events that would add up to a straight line. That line is not supposed to represent history, just each individual's life.
Time to get my philosophocality on.
I'll start off with a basic model and then explain how it works. Here's the model:
| - - 1 - - - - - - - - - -2- - - - - - - |
That's not vague at all. The beginning of that line represents "before," the stuff that came before 1 and 2 happened. The end of the line us "after" and whatever comes after that. 1 represents a "choice" where 2 represents what some people would call a "freak occurance," an anomoly, something that "shouldn't" have happened. I'ma' start with 1.
1. Somebody drags you up to some creepy apartment, convinces you that you're living in a computer and offers you candy. "Red pill or Blue pill?" Whaddaya gonna do? You're going to take both because you're retarded. Now, what made you take both? Did you just up and choose to take both because it was your decision and nobody else could make it for you? Did he choose to make them both look like yummy candy to trick you into eating both? Most of the people that posted so far in this thread would assume it was the first one and be done with it. What made you choose it? You did, right? Well that's where it gets complicated.
Now I think of "choice" as a philosophically theoretical concept, an illusion, but the literal definition is something closer to "how an individual solves a conflict" or somesuch. That's just what it is... you're presented with more than one solution and you select one. Not many people stop to think of just what all goes into that. Every 'choice,' every 'decision' you come to every day is the work of your brain firing off neurons and making chains of electrical impulses that inact logic and reason and all of that good stuff that makes us human. Some of the decisions are obvious to decode. "Is 1+2 equal to 3 or to 4?" Nobody argues that the response there is mechanical because it only uses the part of your brain that handles mathematics and logic. You didn't "choose" that the answer was 3 it simply was. You could have lied, but that would have been upper tiers of reasoning interfering with logic. Well, my view is that every decision and every choice at every point in time is made just like we answer a math problem, except that sometimes it uses other parts of the brain too, but just like a math problem has an answer before your brain may logically equate it (1+2 equals 3 before you say that it does, even if you take an hour to figure it out), every other decision you make throughout the day is answered before you come to it. "Should I wear brown or black shoes?" You're going to wear black shoes, but you don't know it yet. Well what's going to make you choose black over brown? I mean, you haven't even started reasoning yet, right? Here's what is going to make you choose:
Your personality and your experiences are what your brain is going to use to figure out which shoe is going to better suit your circumstances for the day. Personality and experiences are umbrella terms, so let me break them down.
Your personality is the culmination of your genes (how your brain was designed), how you were raised (how it was influenced while it was being formed causing it to change), and the your experiences. Your experiences are defined as "everything that has happened to you up to this point." Anything and everything that has ever happened to influence you in any way is a factor in your experiences. You cannot alter your experiences at all, but you can
interpret them differently tomorrow than you did today. "Experiences up to now" are nothing you can control because they're restricted to what already happened, not what you plan to have happen to you in the future. All right, so personality is your genetics mixed with how you were raised mixed with everything that has influenced you up to now, including all of the knowledge you've attained (for example, you heard once when you were 7 from some random guy on the street that brown shoes look ugly. You may not remember the old man, or where you heard it, but that is still somewhere in your head and it plays small role). All right so you do some hard thinking. We as the readers already know that in my example you're going to take the black shoe, the person in my example doesn't know yet. All he knows is that he has a decision to make and live with for the rest of his day. So what else in his head is going to make him accept black shoes or reject brown shoes? He has worn both on and off before, but each day he's had different experiences and so he finds a different preference. Even the act of wearing a shoe two days in a row when he has an alternate pair is a factor of his experiences that will factor into the equation going on in his head. Let's say yesterday he wore brown shoes and stumbled at the office. He didn't blame the shoes, but it flickers while he's quickly (within a few seconds) racing through all of the green and red flags associated with wearing a brown or a black shoe today. But wait, what about other people? If he chooses the black shoe because he happened to remember something some old guy when he was 7 then isn't he being influenced by somebody else? If somebody else changes his mind for him does that still count as a decision he was destined to make? Yeah. Here's why.
What's an "influence?" In this example it's another person, who factors into your memory's log of experiences with a new piece of information or an example that you store for future reference. Any time you come into contact with any person you both exchange something, from anything as small as a few lose electrons to language to flying fists. It's possible for one person to drastically change another person while he remains visibly unaffected, but in reality both parties take *something* out of it in that it is an experience, however negligeable it is. If you never remember the guy's face or name, or the subject of conversation, you will take some shadow of something from that conversation, a combonation of words, a term he coined, something that will influence you in a noticeable or invisible way. Now, if you're apathetic and just avoid everyone and don't care one way or the other that's a different story, but you still get influenced, just maybe not in a way that would make you choose black over brown shoes. The point is interaction with others interferes with your brain because it borrows another person's perspective for use in making decisions. Doesn't that throw my system off though? Isn't that an act of 'chance' screwing with your experiences? No way. It's just another experience that your brain factors in and copes with. What they decide to tell you depends on what their brain equates as reasonable or appropriate for the subject, timing, or yadda yadda. Conversations are very mathematical when people are really trying to figure something out with one another. "Do you think Sally likes me?" ::brain needs more information, send signal to request additional input from individual:: "Well what do you think? Think she likes you?" ::tries to equate variables and solve complex issue involving multiple glances, touches, conversations, words, sounds, opinions, references TV, movies, friends, books for relationship info, becomes muddled, returns question with clarification:: "I think so, but... I really don't know. If I did, why would I be asking you?" Etc. What you as a person get
out of a conversation with somebody else is determined by your personality and experiences, just like how you make your thinking decisions throughout the day. If something somebody said lines up with other things you've heard you log it in that part of your brain and it bulsters that argument for you. If it goes against everything you're learned up to that point and your brain is built in such a way that you are "stubborn" and don't except radical extremes you'll discard the information, but if you're brain is built in such a way that you are "gullible" or open to new information you'll log it and it'll factor into the next time you make a decision directly or loosely related to that piece of info.
Now I'm going to wrap up because I've gone waaay long and people on this forum don't have that kind of attention span. Questions I anticipate:
"So what determines how two people run into one another? What if it's an accident?"
Daily life determines if you'll run into each other. You were somewhere when he was somewhere and so you interacted. How you got there is pretty irrelevant unless you bring it up in conversation or it influences you. Maybe you forgot a book in a classroom so you ran into a friend you hadn't seen in 11 years. Great, that's how you ran into each other and he was able to influence you. That doesn't make it any less mechanical, that just makes it unlikely from a statistical likelyhood point of view.
"What happened to number 2, freak occurances?"
Nobody would want to hear it if I dragged it out. It's partially answered in the last question. If decisions are decided before you inact them then you were going to be doing whatever you were doing whenever you were doing it and whatever you saw or whatever happened was going to happen before you were doing whatever it was you were doing wherever it was you were before it happened. The only reason you interpret it as freak chance is because you've learned through experience that it is the kind of thing that either isn't supposed to happen or happens very rarely. How your brain and previous experiences allows you to interpret that data determines how it changes you. In all circumstances according to my model it was going to happen anyway.
"What was that about how you were raised and genes and stuff again?"
How you were raised and what genes you got are totally out of your control, and are a major factor in my argument. Your genes and how you are raised have an incredibly gargantuan effect on how you handle your entire life, and they are completely out of your control even if you believe that your parents are choosing for themselves what to do for you. Those two factors determine how you accept and use early experiences and influences which determine how you accept and handle later experiences and influences and so on and so forth until you are raising children of your own and eventually die (if you have children).
"So why didn't he choose the brown shoes?"
In the end, it doesn't really matter, does it? He took the black shoes. He was going to take the black shoes, and he took the black shoes.
"Could you summarize real fast?"
Your brain determines what you do. Your genes, how you're raised, and what you experience determine how your brain has developed at any given time. I'm basically just arguing that everyone is a part of a huge logical mathematical equation created by God or space or w/e you choose to believe in, but totally regardless, that everything is determined on some level, usually an incredibly complicated level, using math/logic.
"But Sonic, didn't the matrix trillogy say something about an "anomoly" that could save Zion?"
The matrix trillogy was a bunch of hollywood movies... While it's theoretically possible that a mathematical "anomoly" could happen if something was manually adding us up like a god or something it would still be mathematical and legitimate, unless "something" just forgot to carry our one.
So that is the end of my huge rant. Anybody actually survive that? I'm not finished but I'll end it. Obviously destiny vs. free will is a hobby of mine, and I didn't just think this stuff up for an internet forum
I'll clarify anything that didn't make any sense at all, since I rushed through this.