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Fate? Destiny? Free Will...
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Rants Is there such a thing as Free will?
Or is everything already planned out for us.
Fate. Destiny. Does it exist?
In my mind, I have to believe that we have free will. I do not believe in fate. My belief in free will allows me to 'know' that I make my own future. That, because of my decisions, my future is constantly changing and reshaping. Because of my decisions that I make with my own free will, I am truly a person and have walked my own path without anything intervening.
If I were to believe in fate, then I would know that every action I have ever made has already been well planned out. That my death is already known. That someone knows what I am going to do when I am older, what I will look like, and how I will act. These are things I don't even know myself.
If you fall and scrape your knee - was that already going to happen? Could you have caught yourself from tripping, or would that have been the plan all along?
If you were to see into your future, would you be able to change it from happening? Or, would your future be that way simply because fate planned on you seeing into your future, and therefore BECAUSE you did so, your future was what you saw...?
Think about it.
Touched upon for ages, but free will has a specific validity to it. Mainly in that as much as one argues for deterministic forces, they're left with the undeniable fact that they are arguing. That they themselves are actively choosing to say those words. Whether someone is behind a curtain pulling the strings on their puppet arms and legs is irrelevant, if we cannot experience the puppeteer, he cannot exist, for us at least. And to touch on the words of Sartre:
There was a madwoman who had hallucinations; someone used to speak to her on the telephone and give her orders. Her doctor asked her,
appearently it cut off the rest of my comment, sadness.