Do you guys belive in fate or free will?

[S@tanicoaldo]

Do you guys believe in fate or free will?

I have always believed in free will but now I have been thinking and I came to a conclusion that if an omniscient being exists there is no free will.

And I wanted to know what you guys think? Free will or fate?

[Potato_Priest]

In general I try to avoid thinking about this stuff. For me it always comes back to neuroscience, and I really hate hearing that I'm defined by chemical reactions and a slough of hormones, rather than some sort of divine spirit.

For me and my limited understanding of the subject, there are 2 options for how people work and who they are
chemicals=fate
divine spirit/soul=free will (this is the way that I prefer to think)

In the end, I almost consciously choose to believe in limited free will. The way that we look at a problem, and the choices that we think of as options to solve it, are defined by our prior experiences, our moods, and the fundamental quirks of our brains and beings, but I like to believe that what we end up choosing is on us, and thinking anything else would drive me mad. Even pondering this question is making me annoyed, doubtful, and afraid at the prospect that I might be wrong.

[lunaticfringe]

I have a strong Internal Locus of Control. That generally does not mesh well with predestiny, fate, luck, and organized religion. Free will all the way baby, Chaos is comforting. I will have some choice words for the Great Fractal if I find out Fate was a thing posthumously.

[tyckspoon]

I don't believe there's any practical difference, absent incontrovertible proof of 'fate' acting to change somebody or something's behavior to the 'correct' state. As a subject of fate, we wouldn't be able to identify whether we were always going to do something or if we had the ability to choose differently - the illusion of free will would be identical to actual free will (again, unless an outside actor reveals itself to us to actively enforce fate in defiance of what would otherwise have been a free choice.)

That said, I prefer to act as if free will is a thing, because that permits for the hope that things can be better than they are. Denying free will gets rather pessimistically nihilistic for me.

[2D8HP]

All you zombies sure do have free will!

Me?

Not so much.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/1489592592-20170315%20(1).png

http://smbc-comics.com/comic/free-will

[Aliquid]

I don't believe in either of them.

[S@tanicoaldo]

I don't believe in either of them.

So? What you belive?

[danzibr]

Both!

Sort of.

I do believe in an omniscient being, but also free will.

Imagine this scenario. You're at a pool party and a friend of yours has a young child. You know this friend of yours has great equanimity. This young child falls into the pool. You're absolutely certain the parent will jump into the pool to save their child. The parent proceeds to jump into the pool to save the child.

But instead of you knowing your friend well enough to know what they'd do in this particular situation, there's a being with intimate knowledge of absolutely everything. Absolute knowledge, perfect knowledge. This being knows everything so well, the being can predict everything that'll happen next, every action everything will take, and so and so forth.

Yeah, I believe all my actions are known, but it's still me doing the choosing.

[druid91]

Are the two contradictory? Personally I'm a determinist, I believe that the logical extension of the laws of physics means that our neurology necessarily runs on physical laws which means our thoughts are more or less pre-determined. The only uncertainty is the appearance of uncertainty due to our lack of information.

And yet. I still make decisions. That I was always going to make that decision in that situation doesn't change the fact that I still made it. I freely chose. The fact that the person who I am would always make that decision rather that absolving me of guilt instead condemns me all the harsher because I can't fall back on the refrain of "I made a mistake." Yes I did. So? Another in my place might not have. That's a problem integral to me that I must address.

So in short. I believe in both.

[Rynjin]

Both!

Sort of.

I do believe in an omniscient being, but also free will.

Imagine this scenario. You're at a pool party and a friend of yours has a young child. You know this friend of yours has great equanimity. This young child falls into the pool. You're absolutely certain the parent will jump into the pool to save their child. The parent proceeds to jump into the pool to save the child.

But instead of you knowing your friend well enough to know what they'd do in this particular situation, there's a being with intimate knowledge of absolutely everything. Absolute knowledge, perfect knowledge. This being knows everything so well, the being can predict everything that'll happen next, every action everything will take, and so and so forth.

Yeah, I believe all my actions are known, but it's still me doing the choosing.

I'm not sure the two are really equivalent. You can extrapolate with a reasonable certainty, but true omniscience is perfect, absolute, infallible knowledge of everything past, present, or future.

If something is KNOWN rather than strongly suspected, and that known thing happens in the future, then free will is incompatible with that. You only have the illusion of choice since what you chose already happened from the perspective of something that has the whole picture. You are essentially playing out a scene in a movie that this cosmic being has already seen from beginning to end; You have no more TRUE choice in the matter than a character in a movie or book, even though were not the outcome already known you would almost certainly act the same way.

At least as far as my amateur theology will take me, I'm by no means an expert on the subject.

As far as what I believe, I certainly don't believe in fate, but I'm open to the concept of luck, which I guess is a more small-scale version of the same. Some people do seem to be luckier than others, but that's a "weaker" effect than fate to my eyes. Luck gives you a leg up, but you still need to make the most of the opportunities afforded to you.

I'm more inclined to believe in luck as the premier cosmic force of the universe than any god or similar distinct, sentient/sapient divine spirit.

[Donnadogsoth]

Both!

Sort of.

I do believe in an omniscient being, but also free will.

Imagine this scenario. You're at a pool party and a friend of yours has a young child. You know this friend of yours has great equanimity. This young child falls into the pool. You're absolutely certain the parent will jump into the pool to save their child. The parent proceeds to jump into the pool to save the child.

But instead of you knowing your friend well enough to know what they'd do in this particular situation, there's a being with intimate knowledge of absolutely everything. Absolute knowledge, perfect knowledge. This being knows everything so well, the being can predict everything that'll happen next, every action everything will take, and so and so forth.

Yeah, I believe all my actions are known, but it's still me doing the choosing.

This.

The omniscient being faces an array of freely-willed potentially-existing beings in its laboratory. The omniscient being sees what each will choose should it be made actual. The choice is the individual beings' is made in aeternity, not in temporality. Caesar freely crosses the Rubicon, but his free choice itself was made before he temporally existed, in aeternity. We are the puppets of ourselves.

[WorldAdventurer]

Do you guys believe in fate or free will?

I have always believed in free will but now I have been thinking and I came to a conclusion that if an omniscient being exists there is no free will.

And I wanted to know what you guys think? Free will or fate?

Neither.

I believe in a mechanistic reality.

[druid91]

Neither.

I believe in a mechanistic reality.

A Mechanistic reality precludes neither fate nor free will.

[danzibr]

I'm not sure the two are really equivalent. You can extrapolate with a reasonable certainty, but true omniscience is perfect, absolute, infallible knowledge of everything past, present, or future.

If something is KNOWN rather than strongly suspected, and that known thing happens in the future, then free will is incompatible with that. You only have the illusion of choice since what you chose already happened from the perspective of something that has the whole picture. You are essentially playing out a scene in a movie that this cosmic being has already seen from beginning to end; You have no more TRUE choice in the matter than a character in a movie or book, even though were not the outcome already known you would almost certainly act the same way.

At least as far as my amateur theology will take me, I'm by no means an expert on the subject.
I don't see how they're incompatible, especially if this omniscient being only exists in our time (whether or not I believe that...).

You can also imagine knowing yourself. You can think "I *know* how I respond in this certain situation." And you do so every single time. Like, I dunno, putting creamer in your coffee if it's available.

Knowing you'll always choose creamer, does that take away your free will when it comes to choosing creamer?

Then take that knowledge of what you'll do in this particular situation, but apply it to all things in this very moment to the next, and the next to the next, and so on.

This.
:D


The omniscient being faces an array of freely-willed potentially-existing beings in its laboratory. The omniscient being sees what each will choose should it be made actual. The choice is the individual beings' is made in aeternity, not in temporality. Caesar freely crosses the Rubicon, but his free choice itself was made before he temporally existed, in aeternity. We are the puppets of ourselves.
I've read briefly of aeternity/aevum. Need to read more.

[WorldAdventurer]

A Mechanistic reality precludes neither fate nor free will.

I am a determinist.

[Friv]

Don't believe in fate or free will.

I mean, we've done studies showing that our thoughts and moods are affected by things ranging from how hot the drink we're holding is to the state of our gut bacteria. Lobotomies can change a person's personality, our language changes what colours we can recognize, and we routinely poison ourselves in dozens of ways designed to mess up our thought processes in entertaining ways.

Whether we have free will is ultimately meaningless, because we aren't really capable of rational decision-making. We're barely capable of rational thought in the hypotheticals.

With all of that said - we are capable of doing our best to account for our biases and to practice critical self-consideration. That's as close to free will as you're going to get, and it's good enough for horseshoes.

[Misereor]

Do you guys believe in fate or free will?

I have always believed in free will but now I have been thinking and I came to a conclusion that if an omniscient being exists there is no free will.

And I wanted to know what you guys think? Free will or fate?

Two things.

One, If you are feeling religious you can take comfor in that if said omniscient being was also omnipotent, the rules of logic would no longer apply, thereby allowing free will (or it wouldn't be omnipotent).
Example: Chuck Norris counted to infinity. Twice.

Second, if you are not, you can take comfort in that absolute determinism (https://able2know.org/topic/15508-1) depends on absolutes. Absolutes have never been observed in nature. They are an abstraction.
Example: Achilles and the Tortoise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes#Achilles_and_the_tortoise). If the distance is absolute, Achilles can never catch up with the tortoise.

Besides, if you end up in a discussion with someone about this and find yourself on the losing side, you can always punch them in the face and declare it determinism.

[Kaytara]

We have free will partially. Unfortunatelly, philosophical questions like that tend to demand a yes or no answer. But I don't think there's a yes or no answer to be had here.

I don't believe in God, so I don't consider an omniscient being or fate or whatever to be relevant here. However, science isn't very comforting there either. If you subscribe to the scientific view, then we are all essentially biological machines. Our consiousness is an emergent quality, but it does not exist separately from us. We do, objectively, have freedom of will - I can choose to scratch my nose or not scratch my nose right at this second, but I'm restricted in my freedom by internal parameters that are determined by my "hardware" and the inner workings of my brain (such as the fact that thinking about scratching my nose made the urge to scratch my nose irresistible for some reason...) There are other factors influencing my behaviour both from within and without. From within, it's all my thought processes running in the background, I can choose what information to act on or to pursue further but my control over what thoughts occur to me is limited. My decision-making is determined by my personality, my character flaws, my personal history, all of which take the form of synapses connected in a specific way, certain areas of the brain developed in this way or that. From outside the brain, everything and anything ranging from eating the right or wrong thing or drinking the wrong thing, to being sick or being exposed to fumes or pollutants, to having chronic pain, all influence how the hardware of my brain functions. You don't choose to become irritable because you're sleep-deprived any more than you choose to get hungry when you haven't eaten anything in a while. You can try to control what you say or do, but your control of that only goes to an extent, and once again, you don't CHOOSE how well you can weather certain stimuli.

In short: yes, there's free will, but that's not the end of it. Asking if there's free will is like asking if a car, which is at once being steered by the driver AND by autopilot while simultaneously slowly breaking down, can truly control where it's going.

[Frozen_Feet]

Can you name the drug you're under and explain how it is making you do the thing you're doing right now? Or can you name the person who is physically stopping you from doign whatever it is you want to be doing?

If answer to both is "no", then as far as anyone in the material world can be arsed to care about, you are free.

As for fate - in any causal system, any prediction of effect based on sufficiently accurate knowledge of causes is indistinquishable from prophecy. All notions of fate are really just reflections of this basic fact. When and where fate takes on a more mystic or religious quality, it is simply due the causes being obscure to humans, so we fill the gaps with our imagination.

Fate and free will only appear opposed if you presume that causality is singular and immutable. Do away with one or both of those axioms, and you'll see that the concepts can sit quite nicely together.

---

Now, as to the "omniscient observer" tangent, if you think such is incompatible with free will, you are probably making the same two assumptions as above: that cause and effect follow only a single, immutable path.

This need not be so.

To understand it, imagine a branching path. Each fork in the road represents a moment when you have a real decision. Some paths converge, others spread out, creating an expanding network of potential routes, further forks and ever-increasing number of potential destinations. To be omniscient, is to know all the forks in the road, all the potential destinations, and all combinations of potential routes.

But this knowledge is virtual. It is the blueprint for the world, where as you are the actual product. The same is true of your decisions. As long as time is linear and real, you can only move forward on the path, each decision excluding some outcomes from becoming reality. Only one route is actually explored, only one destination, reached. For the omniscient observer, this may border on meaningless, but to you, it means you both have choices and that those choices matter.

---

Back to "free will":

The concept suffers from a sort of "no limits" fallacy. Because while the negative, that is, what it means to NOT be free, is trivially defined and understood (there is no choice = there is only one possible course of action), people start to tie themselves into weird knots when they have to define the low limit of what it means to be free. One readily apparent version occurs regularly on the roleplaying subforums: if it is posited that, say, demons or orcs cannot perform good acts, someone will inevitably cry how they "do not like that, it means demons/orcs/whatever have no free will!". But, even excluding good actions, there is a massive number of choices to make between different evil and amoral actions. A demon might not be able to save a baby unless externally forced, but they are still free to decide whether to deep-fry the baby, throw the baby off a cliff, eat the baby raw, impale the baby on a stick, or raise it to be a remorseless murder hobo.

In short, it is odd that being barred from making one kind of choice, somehow negates entirety of free will, regardless of how many choices are left. This most often happens when discussing choices of moral nature, but it's not readily apparent why moral actions seem to be a category of their own. That is, there is no readily apparent reason why "unable to do good" negates my free will any more than "unable to fly, breathe water and see the infrared spectrum".

Personally, the minimum amount of choice you need to be "free" in the sense of possessing "free will", is one. That is, a single, binary decision where you have pick between two mutually exclusive things suffices. (If you think this seems too low a bar to pass, do share your method for proving how even that one choice is free.) Even if it is something trivial, like choosing whether to eat vanilla or chocolate flavored ice cream.

Related, it is my honest belief that people are most free when it comes to those choices we deem trivial, banal or unimportant. Like ice cream flavor above. Where as most people are least free when it comes to those things we dress as Big Damn Choices that everybody "should" make on their own.

[JeenLeen]

I'm not sure the two are really equivalent. You can extrapolate with a reasonable certainty, but true omniscience is perfect, absolute, infallible knowledge of everything past, present, or future.

If something is KNOWN rather than strongly suspected, and that known thing happens in the future, then free will is incompatible with that. You only have the illusion of choice since what you chose already happened from the perspective of something that has the whole picture. You are essentially playing out a scene in a movie that this cosmic being has already seen from beginning to end; You have no more TRUE choice in the matter than a character in a movie or book, even though were not the outcome already known you would almost certainly act the same way.

At least as far as my amateur theology will take me, I'm by no means an expert on the subject.


I believe that an omnipotent, omniscient deity that knows the future is not compatible with free will. The main reason I believe is the idea that god can exist outside time. Past, present, and future (while real concepts) are... I don't know, secondarily real?... from a divine perspective. That's why I believe it's possible to do something like pray for rain tomorrow, despite the forces that would need to cause rain would need to have been in effect for a time way before my prayer. From the divine perspective, it's not a big deal to do something in the past based on something in the present or future. So, while for all practical purposes cause comes before effect, in the divine 'time table' such is not necessarily the case.

On the other hand, I think how 'free' our will is is limited by ourselves. Our own emotions, passions, etc. effectively cause us to bind ourselves, making us less free. Any biological determinism also factors in here. True free will is possible, but I believe it requires participation in the truly free deity's energies. Otherwise I'm just going by relatively arbitrary whims of my own emotional, biological, or social self instead of acting as I truly want. (If you say that freely choosing to follow such whims is free will, think of the last time you tried to resist something like a fatty milkshake or burger while trying to diet.) Basically, I'd equate this to a complete internal locus of control.

[Tvtyrant]

I'll refer this question back to our thread on whether a none interactive, unobservable thing is real. The question has no utility, and is unprovable so it is an untrue question.

[Spanish_Paladin]

I always liked the old-fashioned Copenhagen Interpretation, determinism is very boring.

[lunaticfringe]

I'll refer this question back to our thread on whether a none interactive, unobservable thing is real. The question has no utility, and is unprovable so it is an untrue question.

I'm pretty sure this thread is not asking for a definitive answer. Belief is not dependent on what one can prove. This thread was asking for people's opinions on the matter. Discussion exposes us to new ideas and information. I breifly read up on Mechanistic philosophies due to WorldAdventurer's post and expanded my knowledge.

Whether you feel that has any value is entirely up to you. But if you don't I'm totally judging you bro! Ya feel that! It's my judginess, for shame!

[2D8HP]

...absolute determinism (https://able2know.org/topic/15508-1) depends on absolutes.....


I believe in Absolut determinism:
https://www.absolut.com/globalassets/images/products/absolut-vodka/absolut-vodka-listing.png

...but Smirnoff or Stolichnaya will do as well.

[Tvtyrant]

I'm pretty sure this thread is not asking for a definitive answer. Belief is not dependent on what one can prove. This thread was asking for people's opinions on the matter. Discussion exposes us to new ideas and information. I breifly read up on Mechanistic philosophies due to WorldAdventurer's post and expanded my knowledge.

Whether you feel that has any value is entirely up to you. But if you don't I'm totally judging you bro! Ya feel that! It's my judginess, for shame!

Belief should be measured by how useful something is to the believer. Neither are useful for me, as either way it won't effect my actions.

Oh no. I AM THE SHAMED!

[Roland St. Jude]

Sheriff: I believe in the Forum Rules, which expressly prohibit discussions of real world religion. Everybody's got to believe in something. I believe I'll have another beer.