We are free in our choices in so far as we are aware, during the window of oppertunity, of multiple courses of action which can be undertaken and have aquired the means to do so.
My senses aquire information about my environment. See light(and objects that reflect light), hear sound,smell fragrence, taste flavour, feel force/texture/temperature ect. My memory allows me to recall past experiances and recognize sensations that I have felt before. Can you , before ever experiancing the taste of wine, like it or dislike it? can you, when you hold a baseball at arms length, reason a priori, that a the ball will fall to the ground rather than the sky? you know this because you we’re taught this, and you observed from experiance, that the theory holds true when we test it.(thank hume for this argument)
We are born with the capacity to learn and as we age we expand our knowledge base, from this knowledge base and the awareness of our current environment, we can reason and make descisions.
I belive that we have the capacity to be our own guide. Nobody live my life for me, everything i do is for my own reasons or a reaction to stimuli/environmental change.
I would say that i act of my own accord and this also means that i don’t believe in fate in its ultimate sense; living in a world without any control.
But, i also think that based on my attained knowledge/beliefs i am predestined for some actions. More or less everyday its a neccesity that i aquire and eat food, drink fluids, because i belive(with strong grounds) that i would die without those things and i don’t want to die.
Also, there are certain potential situations in which my range of possible actions are limited by my awareness and skill and history. e.g. if i applied to harvard or any ivy league college, my lackluster high school grades, being a canadian citizen, having no way to procur the funds to pay for the education, would all limit my ability to get accepted and undertake this action. My history to date has made it predestined that i could not go to harvard.
My history or my prior experiances, play an integral role in any action i wish to undertake,my prior actions brought me to where i am today, but being that I am the person in direct control of my actions i am responsible for any predetermined limitations which plague my aspirations and potential actions.
My birth is responsible for my initial location, my lack of money limits my ability to move. If i we’re to save some money i could move, but to leave the country i need a passport.
We all have our limitations and our history(the string of experiances that preceed this moment) is responsible for our current state(our aquired skill/ knowledge/ assets) and thus also responsible for our limitations, but, being that we are responsible for our history ,as we act of our own volition in most cases, this means that our fate is the result of our own choices/actions and its us that limit ourselves so to speak.
Fate; an event that will inevitably happen in the future.
Choice; consists of that mental process of thinking involved with the process of judging the merits of multiple options and selecting one for action.
Humans are limited in they’re choices by they’re location, awareness, skill. If i live in Iran and someone tells me they have $1,000,000 that they will give me if i make it to Canada in 20 min. their is no human being, living in Iran, who could collect the money. The reason for this is that humans are limited in the rate at which they can travell. If i never was told of this offer, i could never collect the money. If i developed a teleporter, hence augmenting my skill or ability to travell, i could collect the money. But, being that i have not attained the skill or ability to move from Iran to Canada in 20 min. this is a choice which is impossible for me to undertake and complete succesfully. Realistically, i could got to the airport and realize on the way i have already failed.
Its inevitable that I will die. I know this because I am human and no human is immortal. I know that food water and air are needed to sustain my body and hence extend the longevity of my life. From this attained knowledge, it became inevitable that i, given the ability, will eat food and drink water and breathe air(which is relatively out of my control).
There is no force other than my knowledge and my will which compell me to action. We all exist in this current moment, we all approach the future a day at a time.
When a day passes and a new one begins, the prior day is no longer as vivid as the current day and our memory allows a recollection of prior experiances.
The future is much like the past, it is not as vivid as our current experiance. The idea of the future arises out of our awareness of a real or potential action we may or may not attempt to undertake at a moment yet to come. We can think of moments to come because we have passed through many a moment and belive that we have a quota of moments not yet used up. This idea of a quota of moments is a result of our mortality. Nobody has an unlimited supply of moments and hence we call this condition mortality(in opposition to mortality is immortality, which is unending existance)
Only after we commit to an action or belief do effects become inevitable. Before i go to the fridge, its inevitable that i will eat(because of prior beliefs/knowledge)but the particular means by which i choose to fufill this need are arbitrary(my personal choice). I was not predestined to eat hot dogs or a penut butter sandwich but i was predestined to eat as a product of the human condition.
We all have our freedom to choose, some have more freedom than others because of our attained awareness, skill/material,location.
There are very few actions which are inevitable and so , believing in fate in its untimate sense is absurd.
fate is any event in ones life which is inevitable.
Some events are inevitable, because of the nature of our bodies(eating, sleeping, drinking, dying) others because of our location in relation to the location of other phenomona(car crash, lightining strike,roberry) others because of our skill(losing/winning a game, failing/passing a test,) others because of our interests(me reading philosophy and smoking weed).
We have the least control over our bodies nature(as it has its needs) we have some control over where we go but the phenomona which occur along the way are more or less out of our control(as we only control ourselves and our possesions) what we choose to do, or what we have an intrest in, is limited by our awareness(as i can’t choose to do something I am not aware of)our skill(as some actions are beyond my ability) and our location(some actions are location specific).
With these limitations on the ammount of control we have in our lives, its not any surprise that people , when aware of some freak occurance like a car crash or lightning strike that a person experiances, attribute the cause of that to a higher force or fate; when in reality, if a person dropped thier keys on the way out the door , they could have been a witness to the accident and not the victom.
their are such a wide array of potential freak occurances which could occur to us, its a matter of time before someone is in the wrong place at the wrong time; but this doesn’t mean that we have no control,which is what the fatalist implies, just that thier are events which are sometimes out of our control.
so to sum up, fatalism is for the weak; its for people who don’t want to take responsibility for thier actions, and its a remedy for a weak persons failures. When one feels powerless to have a controlling influence on they’re life, its not that they have awareness of destinys cruel project as much as they accept ones weakness as inevitable and in that way, fatalism is lifes greatest cop out.
fatalism is for the coward, the weak, and in Nichean mentality, the herd animal(ie someone who needs to be lead). I consider myself the opposite of a fatalist and will fight to the death for my life.