Can there be free will in a world where pre-destiny exists?

the concept of "absolute free will" and "absolute pre-destiny" are mutually exclusive.

If we can agree that all absolutes are a form of perfection...from what I understand, perfection just does not exist in nature. So there is no absolute anything in our universe. Now, if you take those two words away (absolute x 2) it changes things right? To a point where they could co exist?

If people think and believe they have free will, how would they know if they really didn't?

What if we were pre-destined to have free will? Is that even possible?
 
Larry, this is treading in dangerous water. Look: if our lives are pre-destined, then the obvious question is: pre-destined by whom?

For what it's worth, I don't buy it. The pre-destined part, I mean.

Okay, I don't buy the "by whom" part either.

I'd like to address this. I would like this thread to stick to the premise where we are just assuming pre-destiny exists and/or free will exists. How the whole pre-destiny thing, if it exists, got started...off limits. This is a completely hypothetical question and needs to stick within the assumptions of this particular hypothetical situation. In other words, don't sidetrack, don't go there. Just play along. And it's not how lightly you tread, it's where you do the treading.
 
God, in His very nature exists outside of time. He created day and night (which is interpretted as the passing of time). Do you believe He created the world and just let it run amok, or did He create ALL of existence from the beginning of the universe as we know it until the end? "He knows the plans that He has for you" hints at a sense of predestination, or whatever is in store for you is already set in motion, without your intervention. Or, rather, your intervention was planned for in advance. So, all of those right and wrong choices one can make, they are already accounted for. We are simply marching in this parade, seeing merely what we can see from our perspective, and God is watching the entire thing from his blimp.

Sweet dreams tonight. :D

Note: this is meant to be a philosophical take on the Christian God, not a discussio, persay, of religion itself.

When you talk about plans of God for people, the part you probably don't understand about my belief, is that God does not force people to do things. It is their choice, but he can see ahead and know what they will do. He will give them opportunity, choice and ability to carry out their choice. He knows what will happen, but lets them choose. At some point I will either see that I was right and meet God one day in eternity, or if not, die and that be the end of it. I would rather believe life has a purpose more than just live and have fun.

There is no doubt in my mind about this, but I am not going to call everyone else wrong, because that won't change others minds'.
 
I'll turn this car right around! No Diety Talk! I'll close the thread! It's a hypothetical situation!
 
If we can agree that all absolutes are a form of perfection...from what I understand, perfection just does not exist in nature. So there is no absolute anything in our universe.

Perfection is an opinion. Most of the religious crowd might argue that God created nature; God is perfect, therefore nature is perfect. I would argue that the perfection of nature is largely irrelevant. The laws that govern our universe are what they are; life on Earth is the way it is because those laws are they way they are. There isn't much more to it than that. edit: not trying to get the thread closed, just speaking generally...

Now, if you take those two words away (absolute x 2) it changes things right? To a point where they could co exist?

It depends on how we are defining absolute. In my mind, having absolute freewill makes you an all power genie. I will myself to become a dragon. I will myself to levitate. I will myself to breathe underwater. My will be done.

The only other absolute freewill I could think is simply within the confines of the universe's physical laws. But I think thats already what we've been talking about.

If people think and believe they have free will, how would they know if they really didn't?

What if we were pre-destined to have free will? Is that even possible?

There is an excellent Futurama episode on this, fyi.

The point is we don't know if we have freewill or not. More to the point, if we were somehow turn our freewill on and off, would it make our lives any different? No. We act in our daily lives as if we have freewill. Whether our freewill an illusion or isn't a question we can answer. The "future" isn't a place we can experience. There is no way to verify whether your choice at some point in time altered your future, or whether you are simply playing a part in a story that has only one ending regardless of what you think you choose.
 
I'd like to address this. I would like this thread to stick to the premise where we are just assuming pre-destiny exists and/or free will exists. How the whole pre-destiny thing, if it exists, got started...off limits. This is a completely hypothetical question and needs to stick within the assumptions of this particular hypothetical situation. In other words, don't sidetrack, don't go there. Just play along. And it's not how lightly you tread, it's where you do the treading.

Understood. My question is: why would the universe need to be so complicated? Why would it require the many extra components required for every living human, and therefore possibly every living non-human and every thing else in the universe, to have every detail of its entire future more-or-less planned out?

It's just too needlessly complicated, except perhaps in some quantum mechanical way.
 
Fun topic Lar!

My guess is that free will is very limited.

Meat_Puppets_No_Strings_Attached.JPG


Imagine you're the Prime Minister or President. Can do do what you like? Yes, as long as major companies approve. There are definite boundaries. Like a CEO's activities are bounded by The Board.

Life generally is like that. You are free to do anything you like ... as long as you breathe, eat, drink, pee, sh1t, vomit, have sex, live amongst social groups, etc. All the time.

The function of life seems to be to churn energy around. A bit like the human batteries in The Matrix. Every moment we are churning stuff around in all sorts of different ways - redistributing heat, changing currents, changing chemical composition, lighting and shading, etc. The universe naturally changes every atom at every instant but life seems to accelerate the change process - and the more advanced the life, the greater the amount of change it can effect.

It also seems that humans have an extra job on top of our basic consume/excrete role - to consume and excrete at an informational level as well.

// excretion


I like to think of it as the "snowball" effect. One action leads to another action. One thought leads to another thought. There is reason for action and a reason for thought however is it destiny that brings you to that first action or first thought?

It could be destiny - in the form of the first quantum fluctuation during the initial expansion of the Big Bang. From that first variable, all others would have sprung, taking into account that there's random effects in there (chaos theory).

The first fluctuation would have collapsed an unimaginable number of possibilities in that first instant - and surely that's what destiny is - a path defined by the collapse of other possibilities. We can wander around on the path - go to the fringes or the centre or anywhere inbetween - but we can't move off the path.
 
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I'd like to address this. I would like this thread to stick to the premise where we are just assuming pre-destiny exists and/or free will exists.

Then with this assumption you are invoking, if not requiring, free will, upon our answers and logic?

Great topic and some great deeper thinkers on here.
One of the great beauties of nature is the questions it raises, many of which are in scope and timescale beyond ever answering. One thing is for sure, any aspect of Nature and the entire universe becomes inherently boring once we've figured stuff out. Ask any scientist.
 
A fish on a line seems to sum it up in my simple mind. (in THIS story, the fish is female - thanks, Madge!)

The hooked fish can go upstream or downstream, while the fisher-person (Wink, Madge!) keeps turning her head, pulling her to her destiny. But, if the fish is strong, she could straighten the hook, tear it from her jaw or even break the line. No pre-destiny here.

But wait!

A master angler always has a better bait, stronger tackle and a better presentation. And fish being the simple creatures that they are, they will take the bait sooner or later.

Of course, the fish could always beach herself on another riverbank or swim straight to the jaws of another predator exercising her ultimate free will. But at the end of the day, the angler will go home with fish in his creel.

My two pfenigs.
 
As a Christian, I believe some things are destined to happen. Certain events I believe will happen regardless of what we do. On the other side, we have a choice to do right or wrong, to be a success or failure. If you believe there is no free will, it means killers cannot refrain from murder. That alone is a bad thought.

I don't go to church much at all anymore, but I do have a philosophy in life that mirrors a Christian POV in a way. Anyway, for me freewill always meant to do as you will or to do God's will. Simple as that. As far as Christians are concerned, we all share the same pre-destiny of an afterlife if you believe in that stuff, as well as an Apocalyptic end as portrayed in the book of Revelations.
 
I don't really buy into any idea or theory that romanticizes human existence.

I think we ultimately live in chaos on a spec of dust in the solar system.
 
I'll turn this car right around! No Diety Talk! I'll close the thread! It's a hypothetical situation!

I would just echo the words of another poster, if we are predestined, someone must have control of us. I would just hate to think that I have no choice in life and I will be what I am determined to be by another. I hear sports player and such say they were destined to win, but I don't buy into that. It takes hard work, and discipline to be a success. Great people are not born that way, but they become great.
 
I would just echo the words of another poster, if we are predestined, someone must have control of us.

Not at all.

Destiny can simply be an inevitable chain of events - one thing leads to another. The fact that we are in the situation we are reflects all that happened in the past to lead us here - whether those events are lead by natural forces or by a colossal man.


FoolInTheRain said:
I don't really buy into any idea or theory that romanticizes human existence.

I know what you mean.

But ... we humans are the most advanced life forms in the known universe. The human brain is the most complex thing in the known universe.

Like humans or not (and we can be easy to dislike), we are special.
 
But ... we humans are the most advanced life forms in the known universe. The human brain is the most complex thing in the known universe.

Like humans or not (and we can be easy to dislike), we are special.

Whoa....again this hinges only on what *we* 'know' to be true. right?

I think humans are over-rated (by humans of course).
If all our engineered comforts would suddenly cease, would we do any better than any other lifeforms?
 
The ability to do better than other lifeforms got us all of our engineered comforts in the first place, didn't it?

Hmmm, yes, but they are not necessarily sustainable in a biosphere of limited resource.
One wonders in the LONG term.....are we doing any better?

Dont get me wrong, I'm not a doomsday-er or anything, but if we look at every organism in the distant past - 3 billion years - it has had a shelf life (except bacteria).
 
Whoa....again this hinges only on what *we* 'know' to be true. right?

That's why I said the known universe. It's a small proportion of the whole (whatever that is) but it's still a stupendous amount of area to scour with barely even a hint that there's microbes on other planets or moons let alone more advanced civilisations. More advanced civilisations would surely have made contact or made themselves known if they were within the communication distances SETI operates in.

That tells me is that 1) life itself is pretty special and 2) that humans are extra special.


Hmmm, yes, but they are not necessarily sustainable in a biosphere of limited resource.
One wonders in the LONG term.....are we doing any better?

Dont get me wrong, I'm not a doomsday-er or anything, but if we look at every organism in the distant past - 3 billion years - it has had a shelf life (except bacteria).

Yes, we're rapidly making the planet less habitable for us and other large species. Nonetheless, we have special mental capacities that are almost certainly unique to us ... how well we use those special attributes is another matter.

Given human nature, it's been inevitable that at some stage we'd become so dominant that we'd deplete and pollute the environment and eventually have a big cull off. The population obviously can't keep increasing forever with natural resources rapidly dwindling. Talk about destiny ...

Still, the inevitable culling of billions does not mean humans will die out entirely or even necessarily lose our technological advances. A smaller human population may yet make incredible strides in the future, including habitation of Mars or even beyond.
 
That's why I said the known universe. It's a small proportion of the whole (whatever that is) but it's still a stupendous amount of area to scour with barely even a hint that there's microbes on other planets or moons let alone more advanced civilisations. More advanced civilisations would surely have made contact or made themselves known if they were within the communication distances SETI operates in.

That tells me is that 1) life itself is pretty special and 2) that humans are extra special.




Yes, we're rapidly making the planet less habitable for us and other large species. Nonetheless, we have special mental capacities that are almost certainly unique to us ... how well we use those special attributes is another matter.

Given human nature, it's been inevitable that at some stage we'd become so dominant that we'd deplete and pollute the environment and eventually have a big cull off. The population obviously can't keep increasing forever with natural resources rapidly dwindling. Talk about destiny ...

Still, the inevitable culling of billions does not mean humans will die out entirely or even necessarily lose our technological advances. A smaller human population may yet make incredible strides in the future, including habitation of Mars or even beyond.

'Scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.'

'We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.'

Richard Feynman agrees. : )


...
 
I can't believe I'm getting into this on a drum forum but here goes...

The realm of philosophy has been crushed by science. Once thorny philosophical questions have largely been reduced to physics.

The philosophical concept of Scientific Determinism (the idea that if one had enough data and enough computing power, one could predict the universe) was destroyed by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. This fundamental principle of Quantum Mechanics states that it is impossible to accurately measure both the position and the velocity of a particle because our own measuring methods (shining light or an x ray on it for example) will affect the measurement. We can measure the location or the velocity accurately but never both.

If it is impossible to know 2 key facts about a particle simultaneously then the concept of Scientific Determinism is out. There will always be an uncertainty in any measurement.The world is not pre-destined.

I'm not sure about whether we have free will though, because as LimpyLoo stated earlier, neurology is finding out how much of our actions are actually unconscious and what they are finding is startling.
 
I can't believe I'm getting into this on a drum forum but here goes...

The realm of philosophy has been crushed by science. Once thorny philosophical questions have largely been reduced to physics.

The philosophical concept of Scientific Determinism (the idea that if one had enough data and enough computing power, one could predict the universe) was destroyed by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. This fundamental principle of Quantum Mechanics states that it is impossible to accurately measure both the position and the velocity of a particle because our own measuring methods (shining light or an x ray on it for example) will affect the measurement. We can measure the location or the velocity accurately but never both.

If it is impossible to know 2 key facts about a particle simultaneously then the concept of Scientific Determinism is out. There will always be an uncertainty in any measurement.The world is not pre-destined.

I'm not sure about whether we have free will though, because as LimpyLoo stated earlier, neurology is finding out how much of our actions are actually unconscious and what they are finding is startling.

+1.

To quote Feynman again, its ok to say " I don't know", because its rather accurate".

Where does our Universe end, and Why am I here, are two questions I'd like answered but I aint holding my breath.

...
 
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