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This is not what I think but why

Friday, February 04, 2005

Fatalism, Free Will, Determinism_2

Absolute belief in determinism culminates in negating free will. Determinism thought as an entity leaving no choice for us to infuse our function is almost as bas as fatalism: "what will be will be," and that no matter how hard we try to change the current of events, they keep their 'pre-programmed' order as everything is predestined and planned . Perhaps the difference between fatalism and determinism is that fatalists believe that God has decided the fate of the world as is, but determinists hold that it's the acting and reacting of causes which bring about events_events are not planned beforehand but are the natural consequences of merging causes: the addition or subtraction of any cause can change the following result. Free will on the other hand accentuates the possibility of acting and reacting as one CAN_not really 'where there is a will, there is a way'.
Determinism seems logical except for the moral responsibility of people for their actions: determinism implies that people are not responsible for what they do. That's why Sartre says, 'man is condemned to be free and is responsible for this freedom.' Nevertheless, free will does not mean that I can, for instance, lay eggs, or act freely when a thief has his pistol on my forehead asking for my money. Our free will is internally and externally bound and constranined. We shouldn't fail to see that there is nothing absolute, nothing perfect, nothing a hundred percent.
Libertarians believe that some phenomena in the world are to happen like sun eclips and venereal diseases if we are not using contraceptives or are not careful enough. Many things follow deterministic law. Free will stresses that some of our actions are done without any obligation and only out of pure genuine free choice. A student can choose to study literature or quantum physics knowing that he has the capability to follow either and that with either degree he'll have almost the same status and income. When s/he opts for one it is not because s/he couldn't choose the other. But if we can't decide between available options it is because of Heisenburg's Uncertainty Principle: there is always a certain indeterminacy in our knowledge. An act may be predictable but unpredictability is due to lack of knowledge rather than absence of causes. Add to all this the quantity of randomness and chance happenings.
A final word, perhaps for the moment and a bit naïve, is that we are all free in some cases to act but our acts are mostly bound by determinism. I believe there is something in between. Neither are we pre-programmed totally to shirk duty and become passive actors putting the responsibility on determinism, fate, God or something, nor are we purely free to act as we wish. Letting for the curbs, we are what we believe we are, and it is always good to believe that we can be the source of change, move and innovations both in our lives and in the lives of others, otherwise we would leave our children to be brought up by themselves saying that 'what will be will be,' or that we can't change the current of deterministic events. We should only believe in ourselves and be brave enough to accept the responsibility of what we do. And when we fail, we shouldn't lose heart: each failure means that there still other options which we haven't tried.

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