Destiny

So in my blog post Perfect Information, which I wrote a white ago, I posited that everything since the beginning of time has been "fated" to happen. If you aren't willing to read my tl;dr post, here's a great summary that somebody posted in the comments.

"Because everything that is inorganic is predictable (which is true, though no being other than a god will be able to have all of that information), and organic beings are simply a process of inorganic chemical reactions, all of our actions are predictable."

In other words, because everything in our universe has to obey the laws of physics, with the proper information and knowledge of these laws, one can predict the outcome of anything. This leads to interesting question, "Do we have free will?", which leads to the subsequent question, "Is there such a thing as destiny?"

In my AP Literature class in 12th grade, my teacher told me that the Greeks believed in both free will and destiny. This seemed completely ludicrous to me because free will and destiny are polar opposites, and the Greeks weren't idiots. However, after listening to what my teacher had to say about it, and mulling about it for a while, the idea made more sense to me. I still don't have a really solid grasp on this issue, especially seeing as how most of my ideas on the concepts are rooted in semantics, but I do think that it's impossible to accept what I wrote here AND believe in free will.

In the end, everything is relative. To prevent myself from getting sidetracked, I won't expand on such a powerful claim, but I will say 2 things. First, think of The Matrix. Then, find Plato's short story "The Cave", and then read it. To summarize, it's basically The Matrix but by a Greek person, bearing the exact same message that we can never truly know whether or not what we perceive as reality is actually reality; there is always the possibility of a higher reality that transcends us. Moving on, there's no definitive, objective reality, because in the end, we perceive reality through our senses, which we know for a fact are limited. Our eyes are only capable of seeing a minute sliver of the electromagnetic sliver; someone without a knowledge of science would most likely claim that our universe only consists of 1 type of electromagnetic wave: Visible light.

My point here is that everything is relative, including probability. Let's go back to the coin-flipping example I presented earlier. Let's say 2 people are flipping a coin; winner gets the other person's phone. Like I said before, the coin is "destined" to fall on a certain side; an ultra-powerful intellectual can predict it given the proper mountains of information. But when the coin flip happens and one person inevitably loses, you wouldn't expect him to say, "Hey, you cheated, it was bound to land on a certain side to begin with!" Even though according to what I said earlier, one could calculate the exact outcome of the coin flip, the loser knows that the winner almost certainly doesn't have the intellectual capability to perform such a feat. From their point of view, it was a perfectly fair 50/50 game. My point is that, similar to reality, probability and whether or not things are "destined" to happen is actually a matter of perspective.

The issue of free will is a tricky one, because I think it often times devolves into a semantics issue. The phrase "free will", is tricky to deal with because our capability are naturally limited, and in the end, it's still more of a spectrum than it is a concrete definition. I want to be able to create gold out of thin air, but human bodies are quite limited when it comes to physical ability and that would violate the law of conservation of matter, so I can't. Do I not have free will when it comes to this issue? Now consider a robber is holding a gun to a father of three and says that he will kill his family if he doesn't help him open the family safe. Does the father have free will here? He technically still has the physically ability to foolishly not open the safe. I think the definition of us having free will is simply us not being controlled by some all powerful puppeteer.

Destiny is also a tricky one, because it turns into a semantics issue. The problem with the Free Will vs. Destiny discussion is that a lot of people believe that if one is false, then the other is true, and vice versa. This is why I say this matter as much more of a gray one than a black and white one. I believe, that from the universe's perspective, all of us do have a "destiny", because the entirety of the universe contains all of the necessary information to pull the perfect reconstruction and construction of the past and future. However, I don't believe that this negates our free will, because it implies the universe is a sentient entity controlling our actions, which I believe it isn't. This is how I think the Greek's simultaneous belief in both destiny and free will works out.

Oh yeah, there's also multi-verse theory which proposes that an alternate universe is created whenever a timeline reaches a decision tree. In short, clusterfuck, and we choose our own destinies if that makes any sense.

I don't know why I wrote this post. On to more concrete things.