zeeshan said on June 20, 2003 11:47:

HI Nina.. a very very interesting topic to discuss. I have been thinking so many things. So many things... so MANY things I never thought about before. Isn’t this funny how life changes our perceptions and our point of views. I always belived on fate that YES, there is SOMETHING controlling us and I still do.

God (yes I believe in god) gives us options. It is not that we are 100% CONTROLLED or are possessed by some other power but God gives us options. God told us what is right and what is wrong. It is UP TO US to choose a path to walk on. So once we choose a path on, our fate starts from there but here comes another point... what if one changes his path? where does the fate goes? Answer.. it goes away. Fate depends on the path you choose. The partial control that fate has on us depends on our path.

We are always... always given options in our life. So choosing the RIGHT PATH is the most important task we must do. Yes it is there.. yes it control us but it is something that we make for ourself. Confusing? Yes.. maybe a bit but I am trying to say is that YOU GIVE BIRTH TO FATE AND THEN FATE TAKES CONTROL. Fate drives you exactly where you want to land if you want it to. I believe on “BELIEVING”. The concept of “believing” (for me) is so strong that sometimes I think... I can make my own fate if not then make the fate take me where I want to go. I am always ready to see new option.. I am always ready to accept something which IS THERE and which I couldn’t see before so I think that one has to be FLEXIBLE. Becoming rigid, hard and stubborn about sticking to wrong concepts only take us to a bad end.

VERY INTERESTING TOPIC INDEED!

Zeeshan

Aschrum said on June 20, 2003 12:24:

neither funny nor confusing (the girl on office)

i dont believe in god
i dont believe in fate

but i think so that it is an interessting topic

zee.
and what is the “right” path? (of the thousands to choose) ;)

zeeshan said on June 20, 2003 12:59:

lols!! heheh excuse me! :)

Z

derek said on June 20, 2003 21:46:

live and let live is my motto choice or not .but its what i do

purplemedusa said on June 23, 2003 16:29:

Suppose you’re going through a cafeteria line and when you come to the deserts, you hesitate between a peach and a big wedge of chocolate cake with creamy icing. The cake looks good, but you know it’s fattening. Still, you take it and eat it with pleasure. The next day you look in the mirror or get on the scale and think, “I wish I hadn’t eaten that chocolate cake. I could have had a peach instead.”
“I could have had a peach instead.” What does that mean, and is it true?
Peaches were available when you went through the cafeteria line: you had the opportunity to take a peach instead. But that isn’t all you mean. You could have taken the peach instead of the cake. YOU could have done something different from what you actually did. Before you made up your mind, it was open whether you would take fruit or cake, and it was only your choice that decided which it would be.
Is that it? When you say, “I could have had a peach instead,” do you mean that it depended only on your choice? You chose chocolate cake, so that’s what you had, but if you had chosen the peach, you would have had that.
This still doesn’t seem to be enough. You don’t mean only that if you had chosen the peach, you would have had it. When you say, “I could have had a peach instead,” you also mean that you could have chosen it – no “ifs” about it. But what does that mean?
It can’t be explained by pointing out other occasions when you have chosen fruit. And it can’t be explained by saying that if you had thought about it harder, or if a friend had been with you who eats like a bird, you would have chosen it. What you are saying is that you could have chosen a peach instead of chocolate cake just then, as things actually were. You think you could have chosen a peach even if everything eels had been exactly the same as it was up to the point when you in fact chose chocolate cake. The only differences would have been that instead of thinking, “Oh well,” and reaching for the cake, you would have thought, “Better not,” and reached for the peach.
This is an idea of “can” or “could have” which we apply only to people (and maybe some animals). When we say, “The car could have climbed to the top of the hill,” we mean the car had enough power to reach the top of the hill if someone drove it there. We don’t mean that on an occasion when it was parked at the bottom of the hill, the car could have just taken off and climbed to the top, instead of continuing to sit there. Something else would have had to happen differently first, like a person getting in and starting the motor. But when it comes to people, we seem to think that they can do various things they don’t actually do, just like that, without anything else happening differently first. What does this mean?
Part of what it means may be this: nothing up to the point at which you choose determines irrevocably what your choice will be. It remains an open possibility that you will choose a peach until the moment when you actually choose chocolate cake. It isn’t determined in advance.
Some things that happen are determined in advance. For instance, it seems to be determined in advance that the sun will rise tomorrow at a certain hour. It is not an open possibility that tomorrow that sun won’t rise and night will just continue. That is not possible because it could happen only if the earth stopped rotating, or thee sun stopped existing, and there is nothing going on in our galaxy which might make either of those things happen. The earth will continue rotating unless it is stopped, and tomorrow morning its rotation will bring us back around to face inward in the solar system, toward the sun, instead of outward, away from it. It there is not possibility that the earth will stop or the sun won’t be there, there is no p[possibility that the sun won’t rise tomorrow.
When you say you could have had a peach instead of chocolate cake, part of what you mean may be that it wasn’t determined in advance what you would , as it is determined in advance that the sun will rise tomorrow. There were no processes or forces at work before you made you choice that made it inevitable that you would choose chocolate cake.
That may not be all you, but it seems to be at least part of what you mean. For if it was really determined in advance that you would choose cake, how could it also be true that you could have chosen fruit? It would be true that nothing would have prevented you from having a peach if you had chosen it instead of cake. But these ifs are not the same as saying you could have chosen a peach, period. You couldn’t have chosen it unless the possibility remained open until you closed it off by choosing cake.
Some people have thought that it is never possible for us to do anything different from what we actually do, in this absolute sense. They acknowledge that what we do depends on our choices, decisions, and wants, and that we make different choices in different circumstances: we’re not like the earth rotating on it’s axis with monotonous regularity. But the claim is that, in each case, the circumstances that exist before we act determine our actions and make them inevitable. The sum total of a person’s experiences, desires and knowledge, his hereditary constitution, the social circumstances and the nature of the choice facing him, together with other factors that we may not know about, all combine to make a particular action in the circumstances inevitable.
This view is called determinism. The idea is not that we can know all thee laws of the universe and use them to predict what will happen. First of all, we can’t know all the complex circumstances the affect a human choice. Secondly, even when we do learn something about the circumstances, and try to make a prediction, that is itself a change in the circumstances, which may change the predicted result. But predictability isn’t the point. The hypothesis is that there are laws of nature, like those that govern the movement of the planets, which govern everything that happens in the world – and that in accordance with those laws, the circumstances before an action determine that it will happen and rule out any other possibility.
If that is true, then even while you were making up your mind about desert, it was already determined by the many factors working on you and in you that you would choose cake. You couldn’t have chosen the peach, even though you thought you could: the process of decision is just the working out of the determined result inside your mind.
IF determinism is true for everything that happens, it was already determined before you were born that you would choose cake. Your choice was determined by the situation immediately before, and that situation was determined by the situation before it, and so on as far back as you want to go.
Even if determinism isn’t true for everything that happen-even if some things just happen without being determined by causes that were there in advance-it would still be very significant if everything we did were determined before we did it. However free you might feel when choosing between fruit and cake, or between two candidates in an election, you would really be able to make only one choice in those circumstances-though if the circumstances or your desires had been different, you would have chosen differently.
If you believed that about yourself and other people, it would probably change the way you felt about things. For instance, could you blame yourself for giving in to temptation and having the cake? Would it make sense to say, “I really should have had a peach instead,” if you couldn’t have chosen a peach instead? IT certainly wouldn’t make sense to say it if there was no fruit. So how can it make sense it the was fruit, but you couldn’t have chosen it because it was determined in advance that you would choose cake?
This seems to have serious consequences. Besides not being able sensibly to blame yourself for having cake, you probably wouldn’t be able to sensibly blame anyone at all for doing something bad, or praise them for doing something good. IF it was determined in advance that they would do it, it was inevitable: they couldn’t have done anything else, given the circumstanced as they were. So how can we hold them responsible?
You may be very mad at someone who comes to a party at your house and steals all your Glenn Gould records, but suppose you believed that his actions was determined in advance by his nature and the situation. Suppose you believed that everything he did, including the earlier actions that had contributed to the formation of his character, was determined in advance by earlier circumstances. Could you still hold him responsible for such low-grade behavior? Or would it be more reasonable to regard him as a kind of natural disaster-as if your records had been eaten by termites?
People disagree about this. Some think that if determinism is true, no one can reasonable be praised or blamed for anything, anymore than the rain can be praised or blamed for falling. Others think that it still makes sense to praise good actions and condemn bad ones, even if they were inevitable. After all, the fact that someone was determined in advance to behave badly doesn’t mean that he didn’t behave badly. If he steals your records, that shows inconsiderateness and dishonesty, whether it was determined or not. Furthermore, if we don’t blame him, or perhaps even punish him, he’ll probably do it again.
On the other hand, if we think that what he did was determined in advance, this seems more like punishing a dog for chewing on the rug. IT doesn’t mean we hold him responsible for what he did: we’re just trying to influence his behaviour in the future. I myself think it makes sense to blame someone for doing what it was impossible for him not to do. (Though of course determinism implies that it was determined in advance that I would think this.)
These are the problems we must face if determinism is true. But perhaps it isn’t true. Many scientists now believe that it isn’t true for the basic particles of matter – that in a given situation, there’s more that one thing that an electron may do. Perhaps if determinism isn’t true for human actions, either, this leaves room for free will and responsibility. What if human actions, or at least some of them, are not determined in advance? What if, up to the moment when you choose, it’s an open possibility that you will choose either chocolate cake or a peach? Then, so far as what has happened be-fore is concerned, you could choose either one. Even if you actually choose cake, you could have chosen a peach.
But is even this enough for free will? Is this all you mean when you say, “I could have chosen fruit instead?” – that the choice wasn’t determined in advance? No, you believe something more. You believe that you determined what you would do, by doing it. It wasn’t determined in advance, but it didn’t just happen, either. You did it, and you could have done the opposite. But what does that mean?
This is a funny question: we all know what it means to do something. But the problem is, if the act wasn’t determined in advance, by your desires, beliefs, and personality, among other things, it seems to be something that just happened, without any explanation. And in that case, how was it your doing?
One possible reply would bee that there is no answer to that question. Free actions is just a basic feature of the world, and it can’t be analyzed. There’s a difference between something just happening without a cause and an action just being done without a cause. It’s a difference we all understand, even if we can’t explain it.
Some people would leave it at that. But others find it suspicious that we must appeal to this unexplained idea to explain the sense in which you could have chosen fruit instead of cake. UP to now it has seemed that determinism is the big threat to responsibility. But now it seems that even if our choices are not determined in advance, it is still had to understand in what way we can do what we don’t do. Either of two choices may be possible in advance, but unless I determine which of them occurs, it is no more my responsibility than if it was determined by causes beyond my control. And how can I determine it if nothing determines it?
This raises the alarming possibility that we’re not responsible for our actions whether determinism is true of whether it’s false. If determinism is true, antecedent circumstances are responsible. If determinism is false, nothing is responsible. That would really be a dead end.
There is another possible view, completely opposite to most of what we’ve been saying. Some people think responsibility for our actions requires that our actions be determined, rather than requiring that they not be. The claim is that for an action to be something you have done, it has to be produced by certain kinds of causes in you. For instance, when you chose the chocolate cake, that was something you did, rather than something that just happened, because you wanted chocolate cake more than you wanted a peach. Because your appetite for cake was stronger at the time then your desire to avoid gaining weight, it resulted in your choosing the cake. In other cases of action, the psychological explanation will be more complex, but there will always be one – otherwise the action wouldn’t be yours. This explanation seems to mean that what you did was determined in advance after all. If it wasn’t determined by anything, it was just an unexplained event, something that happened out of the blue rather than something that you did.
According to this position, causal determination by itself does not threaten freedom – only a certain kind of cause does that. If you grabbed the cake because someone else pushed you into it, then it wouldn’t be a free choice. But free action doesn’t require that there be no determining cause at all: it means that the cause has to be of a familiar psychological type.
I myself can’t accept this solution. If I thought that everything I did was determined by my circumstances and my psychological condition, I would feel trapped. And if I thought the same about everybody else, I would feel that they were like a lot of puppets. It wouldn’t make sense to hold them responsible for their actions any more that you hold a dog or a cat or even an elevator responsible.
On the other hand, I’m not sure I understand how responsibility for our choices makes sense if they are not determined. It’s not clear what it means to say I determine the choice, if nothing about me determines it. So perhaps the feeling that you could have chosen a peach instead of a piece of cake is a philosophical illusion, and couldn’t be right whatever was the case.
To avoid this conclusion, you would have to explain (a) what you mean if you say you could have done something other than what you did, and (b) what you and the world would have to be like for this to be true.