' Wrote:Lay out the choices of every life, every event and decision, regardless of time.
If you pick any point in time, you could say the choices led to it. However the person picks that choice.
Fate and free will need not be seperated, they can be intertwined.
But DO they? How can you know that any choice you make has not already been predetermined? If you come to a fork on the road, you have a choice to go left or right, but whatever choice you make could have been already decided in the cosmic scheme of things - if you choose left, what proof do you have that you could have ever chosen to go right?
Going off of what Jammi said, suppose you somehow managed to "learn your fate" and now have a vision of your own future. Suppose that it's a pretty crappy future in your opinion and you decide to change it, so you act in a way that ensures it won't happen the way you saw it. But then you realize that if there is a fate, then whatever you saw in your vision is complete bollocks because it would imply that you somehow unshackled yourself from the predetermined fate that governs everything in the universe. The only explanation would be that you were fated to see a vision of...something...but it couldn't have been your future because that would dictate that you have control of it. The point here I'm trying to make (poorly) is that it's impossible for there to be both free will and fate.
I also think the answer to this question heavily depends on your personal beliefs regarding humans' place in the universe - if you consider that people are just another part of the natural world and aren't in some way 'above' the laws of nature, then you might look to scientific theory for an answer. Back before the 20th century Newtonian physics was held up as proof of predeterminism - if you established all the initial conditions in a system then you could know the state of that system at any point in the future. Of course, now we have quantum theory and chaos theory and we know that two systems with the same exact starting conditions will act completely differently over time. The randomness that we now accept scientifically could be a type of "free will" since there is an inherent uncertainty in the future of anything.
