Thread: Fate or Free Will?

I'm going to read the other posts in a second but just addressing your OP.

No, it is wrong.

While time may pass differently for different people who are intercepting more data at different speeds, the same event happens at the same moment but at different times.

Considering time is a measurement of man, like you said it is only relevent to the person measuring. If one person is playing tons of video games, with no clock or anything to indicate the exact realistic time, and another is sitting watching a black wall, with no time indication, one person can't tell the other that the time is up before it is up. That just doesn't happen. While one may arrive in a different relevent time the will both say "TIME" at the exact same time.

It is the same way that a fly can beat a person's hand. The fly has many eyes and a brain that is focused on not being killed. The processing power is all focused on all the data coming from the multiple eyes. This increases the speed the fly is capable of determining where to escape at, thereby being able to avoid your hand that is moving so slow in comparison to his outmatched speed. But this is only relevent to the fly.

A sleeping person is only a computer turned off. Just because a computer is turned off does not mean that it hasn't passed through the same time interval, it just isn't capturing any data, and therefore the next moment seen is the data entering during awakening.

Originally Posted by nsRaven

Hmm, I guess you can say your free will dictates your fate.

Exactly, you haven't gathered the data that some psycho is going to kill you in your sleep, so you assume that you are safe to go to sleep, but that was YOUR choice. You chose to go to sleep.

The psycho isn't from the future, you are passing at the same time, the data comes in differently. when you get stabbed you wake up and you are in pain at that time, not in the past, not in the future.

Fate assumes that you can determine your fate without finding the data that CAUSES said result.

But that is just it, the free will to gather the data leads to finding out what is the most likely possibility of what is fated to happen. Does it mean it will happen and you can't stop it? No. If you found out that someone wanted to kill you and was waiting until you went to sleep you would probably:
a. Not sleep for as long as you can.
b. Hire a security team.
c. Kill him before he kills you.


It was your choice to fall asleep, it wasn't god's choice, or fate's choice, or FSM's choice.

Your choices lead to results, every action has an equal but opposite reaction.

Or if you are physics minded:
If one object exerts a force on a second object, the second object will exert on the first a force equal in magnitude but opposite direction.

But I don't think that is the main idea ^^

Correct what you are talking about is PERCEPTION of time. you don't time travel when you fall asleep you just simply stop perceiving time.

Same thing if you fall asleep as the passenger in a car, while the driver stays awake. When the driver wales you p at your destination you didn't teleport there just because you didn't perceive the travel. You still traveled you simply didn't notice it.

As for you paradox... you can't travel back in time... only forward. As the speed of light example presented earlier is a (theoretical) method to travel forward in time there is no way to travel backwards. Once you are there you are stuck there.

With relativity, it's not that your perception of time is slowed, it's that space-time itself is distorted. It all depends on your frame of reference, too.

Originally Posted by DancingCorpse

I think there might be fate, but limited. I believe there was a study that showed that our brains will start reacting to an action we are about to do before we ever think of doing it (albeit, by a few mili-seconds, but still surprising).

Also, moving this to the more appropriate forum.

How can there be limited fate? Fate, by its definition (or the ones I've heard, anyway) means you have no choices - you might think you're making your own choices, but if you believe in fate, then Fate has already made those decisions for you... you're just doing what Fate set before you. Or something.

Free will and destiny are mutually exclusive concepts - you can't be predestined to do something and also have true free will/free choice.