Re: Do you believe in fate?

Cause and Effect

Take a look at this YT clip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM-_XaBVneE

Here you see hundreds of mousetraps loaded with ping pong balls. When the whole thing is triggered balls fly everywhere in all directions.

Does it all seem random to you?

It isn't

Every ball, every movement, every collision occured because of a cause. Every cause was in turn the result of another cause.

There is nothing at all random about what happened.

If you went back in time and established EVERY SINGLE FACET of forces and planetary influences as they were at that moment in time, the entire thing would happen again EXACTLY as before.

The balls went where they were because of billions of individual factors.

The size and weight of the balls
The strength of each spring in each mouse trap
The position of the balls and traps
The atmostpheric pressue
The viscosity of the air itself
The speed of the planet turning
The minute vibrations of the Earth in that moment
The humidity of the air
The temperature of the air
The amount of static electricity present

and so on

There comes a point when the number of individual factors, or causes, becomes so vast, that our human minds can not comprehend them and at that point we then label the entire thing as being random.

Nothing in this world is random. Nothing at all.

Everything has one or more causes

Once you understand this you realise that there can be no "fate" or other wishy washy answers.

There is only cause.

When people talk about fate, all they are really doing is admitting that they do not understand the complexities of individual causes that lead to a specific outcome and in that ignorance, it is easier to simply label the entire thing as "fate".

The national lottery draw is not random.

Just as the ping pong balls, the outcome is the result of billions of causes. The salient point is that humans can not resolve or compute all of those causes and thus can not predict the outcome. Therefore we deem it random.

The term "Random" simply means we can't compute or predict something, it doesn't mean that things are happening by chance, or by sheer unchecked chaos.

A great deal of rigging and corruption in the online gaming and gambling industry is predicated on the knowledge that most people have no understanding of odds, probabilities and statistics. They present a screen that "seems" or "appears" to be "random" but which is in reality nothing of the sort.

Every "choice" we make is the result of many causes. We would make the same choices whenever all of those causes were present.

Think that through and you realise there is no real free will. We are all just meting out the results of cause and effect. We react to causes just as every other living and non living thing on this planet does. We have no choice in the matter.
We are all made of the same universal stuff, the same building blocks. Lego bricks if you like.

Science dictates how those lego bricks operate, what affects them, how it affects them.

Cause and Effect

Re: Do you believe in fate?

First, congratulations, Realist on your well thought-out, extremely intelligent post. Seriously, It's magnificent.

This thread has gotten me to thinking of the ancient Greek play writers like Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus. They wrote tragedies and even today we refer to Greek tragedies as dealing with fate.

Usually, our protagonist has some fatal (ie fate) flaw. As soon as the audience identifies that flaw, they know with absolute certainty that he will come to a bad end.

In modern times, we might refer to Hitler, a man stricken with the fatal flaw of megalomania. From the moment Hitler invaded Poland on Sept 1st 1939, his fate was sealed. From that instant on he was doomed. IMO that was fate.

Re: Do you believe in fate?

No I don't believe in 'fate ' only random occurrences and coincidence...

Re: Do you believe in fate?

I also agree that nothing is random. Try picking sweets out of a bag randomly, it's impossible because you always have the option of choosing a different sweet randomly

Re: Do you believe in fate?

I am thinking back to 9 eleven and many people who had planned to go to work that day did not go in as afterwords they said other things happened such as a sick child, or car problems which prevented them from going to work.

Was that fate?

Re: Do you believe in fate?

Not sure but I'll bet they see it that way.

Re: Do you believe in fate?

That is a very good question Adanac, and I would defy anyone to answer it logically.

Re: Do you believe in fate?

With all due respect, people are not pieces of candy or ping-pong balls. People have personalities and various emotional disorders. Those personal foibles can and often do set up a chain of events that lead disaster.
Was it a random occurrence that led to Hitler's demise ? No, of course not. Once he began the war, his fate was sealed.