Do you believe in fate?

Post Reply New Topic

Don’t talk wet!


Aliens interfering from space are suppose to be saving us from destroying our planet. It seems that you have been reading a few to many fiction novels my son.

Good aliens offsetting the things done by bad one, seem too much like the story a ten you old boy told me. He said he had powers like superman, and when I asked him how comes he cannot lift a car, he replied, he had kryptonite imbedded in his liver weakening him to that of other humans.

I don’t know anything about physics or anything but this is a more likely story. No aliens are interfering simply because they are to far away, or have better things to do then to travel billions of miles to do the equivalent of telling an elephant, a lower life form, not to strip too much bark of the trees because they will kill the trees.

That about the aliens sounds very like C. S. Lewis's ideas in his sci-fi trilogy.

Re. OP: Cause and effect are categories/classifications we apply to the world, which seem to match reality, certainly in the case of simple actions, and so we tend to believe that certain events cause certain effects, but we don't actually know if they do.

Belief in fate, as in that certain things happen to you for particular reasons, is just one way of ascribing cause and effect, which can be comforting or nightmarish depending on the "cause - effect" connections that you perceive/believe in.

The funny thing is that believing in it almost certainly has an effect on something, ( if only on your state of mind )

I think the reason why I don't believe in "fate" as such is because it seems to suggest that only certain things in your life have that kind of "meaning"/weight. I believe that everything is equally determined.

.

Well humans have often been known for a tendancy to go against fate <.< Will to live maybe?

To"go against fate" one must know what is fated. How does one do that?

"Fate" is often what seems to be the most pessimistic (or maybe optimistic) view of what awaits mankind. <.<

Even we can describe time as the fourth dimension, this dimension can be only moved in one direction - to the opposite to the other three. So it something special. We do not have for the three dimension of space an equivalent to the Second Law Thermodynamics, which rules all processes in the known universe.

There is something special with time.

This would mean that something/someone had set this reason. I do not see such a force anywhere.

I definitely believe in biological fate - ie what you look like, your wiring, your mannerisms, your capabilities and shortcomings, set you in a very narrow channel and at the very least restrict a 360 degree of freedom down to about 5 degrees - and the older you get the more that ratio counts down to about half of that.

As for whether I believe its a predestiny written of a divine origin - don't know, seems like it just as easily could or couldn't be. I'm not sure I believe in chance though, the biological/genetic issue also sets the stage for so many subcurrents in your life that if your headed for a drop, its going to happen just like if you're set to float along without a problem - very likely there's not a lot that you could do outside your own nature that would radically change things. I say that in the sense that if you were lets say picked on all your life but had a moment of epiphany and completely turned your life around - it was very likely to happen and if the ingredients wouldn't have been there sooner they would have been there later. People who also make radical changes in either life views, choices of faith, the makings were again already there and just waiting for the right trigger.

I hope I didn't drive that home too hard as 'matter of fact', its definitely my opinion but of course like anyone its the best I can make of the anecdotal evidence I have at my disposal.

They COULD just stop being ----s and give us some of there million year obsolete green technology but nah... practical shortcuts like that just put a damper on the awe and wonder .

I have not figured that one out for myself yet. I just know cause and effect rule the universe. I believe I am no exception.

Does really "effect and cause" rules the universe. We have the assumption that this the case, because in our daily scope of experience "effect and cause" works quite deterministic (our technical world is based on this fact). If it comes to to the microscopic area this no longer true.

An example: We know that e.g. 50% specific radioactive substance will decay in a given time. So we can say that after this time out of 4g of this substance 2g will be decayed. But we can't say that one particular atom will decay at a certain point in time.

An other example: The rules governing the relation between temperature and pressure of gases are well known and basis for a lot applications. So an engineer can calculate very exactly the temperature and pressure of a gas in certain circumstances, but he can't give a figure for the position or speed of a single molecule at certain time.

It is extreme unlikely that a brick will jump spontaneously upwards and will get colder - but no law of physics does prevent the atoms of this brick to move in the same direction upwards just by accident.

A little switch in the moment of my conception or a bit natural gamma radiation through the sperm of my father and I would be either a total idiot or born with three eyes or not born at all. One stillborn child less of Catherine of Aragon and perhaps the English Reformation never would happen ...

All this effects do interfere with each other and produce within the on the first view so orderly universe a lot a chaos and randomness. That I am alive and be born in for human history in a very civilised society with significant wealth and ever better medicine is a lucky accident. Some decades earlier I would be perhaps one of millions killed in war (or given my sexual orientation in a concentration camp).

---

I can't see here any kind of reason!

Just because we are unable to determine when one particular atom will decay at a certain point in time, does not change the fact that an atom will decay at a certain point in time. Just because we are unable to determine the speed or position of a single molecule at a certain time, does not change the fact that a molecule has a speed and position at a certain point in time. Physics makes my brain hurt and although I find it very interesting; I must admit I am not bright enough to fully comprehend it. There is some theoretical physics out there which I compare to belief in God.

I have trouble with concepts of...would have, could have, should have. To me they have no relation to what is, was, or will be. I beleive everyone can attribute their existence to some simple thing but I do not believe those things are random, no matter how seemingly happen chance or simple they might be, because everything has an eternity's worth of chain of events leading up to it.

Again there is this confusion between predictability and inevitability. When traveling a road you may not be able to predict how it will twist and turn but that doen't mean the road path is not fixed.

How do we know - when I apply strict empirical means, must say, that this just an assumption. What we measure (to stay with the example of a gas) is a statistical sum of the behaviour of single molecules or of the decay of atoms. When it comes to a close observation we end up in random behaviour.

Quantum-Mechanics shows very drastically that the way we measure does inflect directly the state of the measured object. In the Double-Slit-Experiment measuring the way of a single electron does change his behaviour from wavelike to particlelike.

The Quantum-Mechanic also works Probability-Waves. We can't say that an particle is on a certain place. We can only determinate the most likely place and describe this a wave of probability. But when I would calculate this wave of probability for any given object in our world, I can say that this on this place, because all other places are so unlikely that the end universe is more likely to happen first.

So this deterministic "cause and reaction" is just a illusion based on imprecise measurements.



They do happen randomly - as shown above. A minimal influence can change a system drastically; the so called "butterfly effect". The problem is we don't know which butterfly will have which effect when and if at all.