People are bashing the tape recording thing for its face value. It's supposed to represent an individual in the past trying to make a decision and then making a decision. In this timeline if you were to go back in time and watch everything in live time you would see him struggle and then come to the same conclusion every time you were to rewind time, not just a tape. Anything in the past that ever happened only happened in one way. You can't go back in time and change your own decision, so once the decision is made it becomes what was the only possible solution to your initial dillemna. Why? Because you're still on the same timeline as you were, and you can't change it, so it was already marked on the timeline before you got to it.
Ok, let me put this into a different perspective. There is a small delay between when something happens and our brains interpret it. There's a fraction of a second delay between the time someone moves and the light refracting off of them reaches your eye, travels through your brain and registers. On that account, we never at any given time see things as they are happening, but rather as they have already occured. It's only a fraction of a second but it suits the point I'm making... we aren't conscious of the present, only of the almost-present, the "what just happened" side of things. We see things as they have already happened, not as they are happening. Why can't this concept be projected into the future? Everything that came behind us is written in time-space so what leads you to believe that everything in front of us isn't written in time-space too? We never see anything until it's already happened, though we might make predictions or presume mathamatically in our own way, so even as we "venture" into the future we're still only recording events and occurances that have already come to pass. We're all watching that tape from beginning to end now, we just can't rewind.
Alea I sorta get your point, but at the same time I only think it supports mine. Humans are like computers, that's true. Everything happens for a reason, some things just beyond our comprehension. The weather doesn't just happen because you get angry or sad. Your emotions *might* have an incredibly small impact on the weather and act as a variable, but realistically the weather is comprised of an incomprehensibly large number of variables consisting of everything from wind speeds to the cycle of the moon to which directions people are moving and all of that, anything and everything that affects the air. We can't measure it because it is beyond our comprehension, but we make our best estimates with what data we *do* know (which isn't nearly enough). In this same way I believe human interaction can be placed within a system of equations with an untold number of variables that are calculated and tallied every moment which we simply aren't consciously aware of because our minds aren't strong enough to take in and filter that kind of information. Just because we can't figure the equations out doesn't mean they aren't running. The feelings, genes, personality, experiences, body type, the way you speak, other people, the weather, your preferences, your predispositions, every living thing and everything that affects living things are all factored into the equation which will inevitably play itself out in a linear sequence of conflicts and mathamatical problem solving.
It's like your teacher giving you a calculus problem that takes you six hours to solve. Every time you tallied up a piece of the equation you arrived at either an incorrect answer, or assuming you have to get the problem right so you eventually do, a correct answer, which is the only correct answer, which is the only answer that part of the equation could have had from the moment the equation was created until eternity. You experienced each correct answer as you worked it out, but you didn't create them, they were the only possible solution from the beginning, you just couldn't see them until you worked out the logic behind it. Perhaps if humans were vastly stronger mentally we could work out the situations and equations behind every day life this way.
