Quotations and Literature Forum

I was reading a forum started by Ravenheart about Fate and Freewill (The wheel of time) I was just wondering what your thoughts are as to which is more prominant. Is there some pre-laid path, which we must follow to our death, laid before our feet at birth? Or do we wrtie our story as we go, deciding whether to take the left path or the right? Is our decision, or our destiny?

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Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before

Well I don't beilive there is Free Will but I belive treating people as if they have Free Will is better than everything is controlled by fate. The key thing is I believe that the 'pre-laid path' was there as soon as the Universe started.

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"The Truth may be out there but the lies are in your head"
"I tend to think if God wanted us to believe in him he'd exist."

I've had to make a few decisions this past week and I'd prefer to not be held responsible. Operations and resusitate vs not. I'm probably going to take the hit though when I go to sleep at night for quite some time.

Hmmm... farsix, I am sorry. BHut wouldn't it make you feel a little better to know that next time a series of choices are required to be made by you, you have the chance to take them and manipulate them so that you don't loose sleep and have a clear conscious. I don't know about you, but the thought of being controlled and not having a say in whether I can rest easy over my choices that night is something that worries me a little.

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We hold these truths to be selve evident, but evidence is not ownership. Those words are not a decree that we have life, liberty, happiness. Only an iron clad statement that it is ours if we are willing to do all that is necessary to take it.

It appears to me that Free Will requires the total destruction of a materialist outlook and as I am not willing to accept cartesian dualism I am stuck saying their can be no free will. Maybe there is room for it with quatum mechanics but I don't think adding chaos into the mix will help.

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"The Truth may be out there but the lies are in your head"
"I tend to think if God wanted us to believe in him he'd exist."

Again, you and I agree, YinYangSearcher.

Even when the choices seem to be between bad and almost as bad, they still don't feel programmed or predestined so I'm going with my gut feeling that they are neither.

If the world is set up so that there are no true decisions then so-be-it but still I'm not tossing coins and assuming the heads and tails are the way.

As I said it is better to treat people as if they have free will. It is however I believe an illusion.

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"The Truth may be out there but the lies are in your head"
"I tend to think if God wanted us to believe in him he'd exist."

Now what did I start? lol! I was going to mention something about this topic in my forum, but I guess I can say it here. I believe that our lives are run by fate, but that they were plans laid out and then left for us to deal with. So in my mind we have some free will in our dicisions. The events that occur are supposed to happen, but how we deal with them is our own choice. After we have dealt with one plan, another one is thrown into the mix and so on.

I also have another theory though. It could also be that our decisions or choices may not have an effect on the outcome. We may go about dealing with these events or problems in many different ways, but in the end it might not matter. So our free will to do as we please is not an already laid out plan, but the way things are supposed to happen is. Am I making any sense?
If not ask me. I'm rather tired, so anything that I say right now might just sound like nonsense.

Raven

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"You must learn there is a time to speak all of the truth, and a time to govern your tongue."
~Verin (The Wheel of Time)

Raven, I like the theory, but to say that a person has freedom to choose within a pre-laid plan seems... contradictory. I understand you are tired and there was probably something else in there left unsaid or unexplained. I am very courious about it though.

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We hold these truths to be selve evident, but evidence is not ownership. Those words are not a decree that we have life, liberty, happiness. Only an iron clad statement that it is ours if we are willing to do all that is necessary to take it.

I believe that both fate and freewill exist. To a certain extent, some events are meant to happen, but we choose to a certain extent, the outcome (I know my grammar and syntax are messed up, bear with me). Someone once explained it to me this way: if you get a cold, you can decide whether to take care of yourself and keep it from getting worse, or you can let it snowball into pnemonia. There are certain events that are meant to happen, but how we deal with them and to what extent are our choices.

That was kind of vague, but its all I have at the moment...

Destiny,
Thank you! You put it in better words than I could. Thats exactly what I was trying to say, except I said it the long and hard way.

Raven

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"You must learn there is a time to speak all of the truth, and a time to govern your tongue."
~Verin (The Wheel of Time)

I think our lives are predetermined but our ability to act out our thoughts fools us into believing consciously that free will prevails. That said, one cannot just stop wat their doing and wait for the 'power of destiny' to move them about and make them perform. The thoughts that we conceive and the actions we perform are analogous to the experience of an actor reading out the script for his play for the very first time. Tho his script is pre-written, he has a degree of freedom in it.

MSANAM,
So you basically think that we are like puppets being controlled by a puppet master? Yet we still have some free will even though our lives are already pre wirtten. Explain to me as to how we would have free will if our lives are already pre written. This is according to your theory though, not mine. I believe that our lives are controlled by fate, but that we also have free will too, but I'm just curious as to how you think we are able to have free will.

Raven

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"You must learn there is a time to speak all of the truth, and a time to govern your tongue."
~Verin (The Wheel of Time)

I think I side with MSANAM but maybe a little more extreme as I think that everything os controlled by the laws of physics with perfect determinism anything else seems to suggest that we can ignore the way the world works. Yet I dislike using the word fate not sure why though.

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"The Truth may be out there but the lies are in your head"
"I tend to think if God wanted us to believe in him he'd exist."

Raven, tho our lives are predetermined, we do experience free will in a sense. This is because no nobody explicitly states what it is that we are expected to do (ie informs us bout the way our prewritten life flows), instead we are forced to take voluntary steps and make choices throughout our day to direct ourselves down a particular path in life. Thus, this conscious process that we experience of making choices in our lives is what i was referring to when i sed that free-will exists alongside destiny.

And sigsfried i agree with u, for me, the term fate has an airy-fairy connotation to it. All the bubbly, naive and air-headed ppl that ive come across in my life have readily used this term... thas prolly y i now associate that term with that meaning.