How can we know what acts are due to free will and what are due to destiny?

[/B]You can't actually define destiny because all attempts to determine what is and what is not will ultimately end with, "well this could have been your destiny." So even trying to escape destiny ends up with THAT being your destiny.

If you ask me, it is a stupid word, that should be left to stripper names and transvestites. (no offense to either)

The only true way you would be able to claim a destiny is to have it somehow placed before you, but that would mean your life was then already preset and you were just acting out situations that you have absolutely no control over. If you have no control then everything you do is no longer your responsibility. If you were a murderer then you shouldn't be punished what so ever because it was your destiny and you were just fulfilling it. However no one would ever let you off on such an argument. Which only goes to show that people really don't believe in destiny even though they will toss the word around like it means something.

If destiny is real then you really couldn't escape it otherwise it wouldn't be destiny. But as far as free will goes, it is just a made up concept. We have the illusion of choice but really many decisions you have to make are beyond your ability to actually decide. Such as eating, you don't have the choice to never eat again. Well if you try you will die, you might call that a choice but what I am saying, is that you do not have the choice to live and never eat. So how free will are you really?

Another way to look at it is this. You don't have the option to not feel something. Your body does not obey your every command. It often does things far out of your control, so where is the free will in this? You also don't have free will to affect your environment, sure certain things can be done but very few options are available.

If you really truly examine your world, you will realize that even the choices you make are influenced by chemical responses in your brain. Boredom, sexual desire, apathy, ect are simulations that effect your actions and behavior. When you are bored, you seek out entertainment, some stranger than others. When you are sexually frustrated you seek out sexual fulfillment, some stranger than others. When you are apathetic you refuse to seek out anything and just like the others, it's sometimes stranger than others.

If you would rather just imagine that you have some destiny then how much reality are you really dealing with?

somehow it has something to do with casue and effect....i dont see the link but i guess there is one.....

Some people, however, are more gifted at certain things than others. For example, a musician would have a great talent in music and a dancer would have talent at dancing and a mathematician will have...you know what i mean.

maybe destiny is just a word people use to describe their gifts?
what i mean is that for example if I had a high iq and a scrawny build, I would have a destiny as a doctor or something like that and not a Rugby player.

likewise if I was built like a tree trunk and have an IQ of a stick, My destiny would be a rugby player and not anything intelligent.

If you are religious tho and believe in divine command, then maybe destiny can be used to describe god's will.


Also, The thing Krumple says about free will is very true.
I mean, we have free will, but every decision has consequences. So you HAVE the choice to murder someone, but the consequences would be a death sentence.
you ARE free to go to school naked, but the consequences would be severe embarassment and probably expulsion.

these are just random thoughts off my head, tell me what you guys think.

Thanks you both, it is playing into my hands and will progress my work about freedom.
First of all I disagree there's no destiny. As far as we agree, that we sit on the rock, that is flying in the universe - and the entropy of the universe and its parts is still growing - we have the destiny.
Second point is, in my opinion, we may influence the destiny, but it seems there is always a limit: for single human, for humankind, for the earth, for the universe.
If both above theses are true, applying the "point of view" should be easy.
I guess, Marcus Aurelius answered the first question in this thread:

"God, give me patience so that I would accept what I cannot change. Give me strength so that I would change what I can change. And give me wisdom so that I would be able to differentiate one from the other."

Hello everyone! In first place I have to disagree with you when you discribe "free will". You expose the limitations of our bodies and spirits (saying that we can't choose to never eat again, for exemple), however these things are not related to the concept of "free will". The choices one can make are always submitted to the limitations of "humanity". To assume that one has no free will because it is impossible to make some choices, actually is to say that one can't be "omnipotent".

About destiny: I think that the idea of destiny is just a wrong interpretation of the events that surround people. Random things are happening all the time (if they're natural events, they can't be fully predicted. Otherwise, if they're people deeds, they become submitted to their free will). Thus the idea of destiny comes up just when one ignores his/her free will, assuming that whatever happens is "commanded"
by someone or something. It's a matter of point of view. (By this I am not saying that I believe in destiny or that others might believe if they like it. I'm just saying that seeing the world as indifferent to your actions is actually a way of doing it.)

Through having to believe the future has happened and also believing in free will, i had to adjusted my reasoning.
You watch a movie and the characters play their part, we watch the story unfold.We watch the repeat on the telly and funny enough its just the same.
Now your in the film of your life and you are writting the script as it progresses.Now if someone was to watch that film over and over again would that take away your freedom of choice?NOW, if that film was available before you wrote it...would it take your freedom away?:perplexed:

Your freedom of choice would not be taken away, because such a movie refers to your acts when those have already been made. So it would be your changeless past.

But assuming that your "life movie" has already been whote, it's not actually yours! :perplexed:

No im writting it now,its just that someone yesterday saw what i was going to write.Its all a matter of timing.If you filmed me writting this post and you could catapult it into the future,would it take away the freedom of my expression?

If this time travelling could be done, such an event would not take your freedom of choice away. You would be at your own "time-period" where such a thing as me in the future knowing what you did or will do (in this case I would be in the past) would not do as much as weigh on you somehow. You must consider, also that the fact that I have traveled in time might influence other events. The fact of knowing what future will be by this mean may change the future itself. The capacity of choosing is not lost, the chain of "cause and effect" is not broken.

Im not saying we can travel in time because we are creatures of time but the future is now, if time is no barrier.I must tell you, i believed in free will and nothing is written, till we write it.
I then had dream that correctly predicted a certain event that convinced me the future can be seen.It put all my beliefs into confusion and by reading others experiences and others thoughts, i came to the only logical conclusion i could.I believe we live in the here and now but time is like a journey on a train, we can only look out of the side windows, as that is our moment in time.On occassions we may by certains means look backwards or forwards on our journey,as we can when a train turns a bend in the tracks.We catch glimpses of the past or the future.We dont notice the past as they appear as memory and the future has to be a pronounced event or it passes without notice.I may be delusional but i cant escape the certainty of that dream.

Free will requires only one thing:

It requires that we THINK we are acting freely.

Even if our every thought, decision, and action is predetermined, so long as we are convinced we are acting freely then we will never ever think of our acts as destined.

I see, it is interesting how those things happen. Facing such a case, I would analize it first: the prediction was something that could happen as a natural sequence of actual events? Or it was something completely unexpected? I think this way because I always consider the possibilites that may happen in particular cases, such regards can't be taken into account as predictions". Knowing possibilites is quite different. You talked about your dream: isn't it a reflex of your consciouness? Studing possibilites is the way to "predict" the future, since we have free will things will happen mostly according to our own choices. But in my opinion, as I have priorly said, it is a matter of point of view. I don't believe in predictions, actually such ideas come to us as potencial occurrences that we interpret as an hability to foresee the future. Traveling through the time, as you said by the train analogy, would only show to you (in the case of advancing in time) what would be the consequences of your acts in the "present". That doesn't scape the idea of studing probabilites.


Finally I suggest that we create a new thread about this interesting subject, because this one is about how to define what acts are due to destiny and what are due to free will. :bigsmile:

Destiny refers to a predetermined course of events. It may be conceived as a predetermined future, whether in general or of an individual. It is a concept based on the belief that there is a fixed natural order to the cosmos.

In my studies I have considered the idea of destiny many times. Life is like a game of chess? a big game of chess with infinite pieces and infinite choices. These choices will open new paths to you and close off others. For example when a computer plays a game of chess, every time you move it looks at ever outcome for every game and takes a path that it feels with lead to victory. We might not sit around calculating ever step we take but each step leads to a different path. These paths affect us as well as other in the universe. I could give millions of examples but I will shorten this to one or two.

Consider the following and when I say consider I mean don't just read what I said consider the further paths and steps that could have opened or closed for some many entities. Hopefully this will give you the answer you are looking for.

You are walking in a park enjoying the day. You see a rock on the ground and think to yourself? People rollerblade on this path all the time and someone will end up hitting this rock and falling. So you pick it up?
After picking up the rock you throw it to the side and continue down your path. About the same time the next day a person on rollerblades does not fall on the stone that you moved and continues down the path. The rock that you removed from the path landed on the only exit of an ant hill which you didn't notice not intend to happen. The ants were closed in the hill until they were able to dig out from a different area. The path chosen by the ant lead them to area safe from the rock that had closed of the first exit but also right along the path of a rolling ball that a child was chasing. The ball stopped just after rolling over the exit and the ants went into a defensive stance to protect the freshly made exit. As the child follows the path of the ball he/she stopped to pick up the ball without notice of his/her foot being in freshly made and now being defended exit to the ant hill. The ants go up the child's leg and start to bit him/her. The child cries and the parent comes running. Unknown to anyone till just then the child was allergic to ant bits and was rushed to the hospital to be treated.

Considering the fact that you saved someone from falling because of a rock you caused the child to be hospitalized. You being the doctor on duty that day at the hospital find that as you enter the door for your daily job the nurse runs to you in a panic because there is a child near death with an allergic reaction to the 20 or so bits he/she received from an ant hill.
I will leave that story open for you to consider the endings but give you a small look into the alt to your choice. This is the second of an infinite number of paths you could have taken with all different effects.

You see the rock as before but decide to leave it. You are too busy enjoying your day to consider the effects of the rock laying there on the ground. The next day at about the same time a person trips over the rock you didn't move and you see this. You run over to help them and find yourself introducing yourself to the one you are going to spend the rest of your life with. The ants continued building their hill and made new exits in different locations designed for better structural integrity vs the stress of saving the queen and their lives. The child takes the ball from on the ground and runs back to their parent with a smile of happiness.

This simple path could have changed some many more lives or paths that would have been unknown to you. Maybe the child would have survived and later found a way to stop the life threatening effects of the ant bits in other people. Something you carry on your person that can instantly stop what would normally cause you great pain, expense, and maybe even death. So many other paths could have been created by this one act of destiny.

The idea of destiny in my eyes I the fact that you control some aspects of your life but others are put in your path by the effects of others and you must ether take that path or figure a way around it if you didn't already choice that path. Just as the child could have gone around the ant or quickly picked the ball up and ran back causing no ants to attack him, just as you could have not noticed the rock all together, just as the person rollerblading could have taken a different path on the same walkway, just as the guy walking down the path could have done the same thing but didn't cause the rock to land on the ant hill would have changed the paths of so many.

You control many paths in your life and your paths are unlimited but the effect of those paths and the effects of other paths can change your life without you even knowing it. This is what I consider destiny. Not a controlled or written path by the gods but a chaos of ever-changing events that paths that make our lives the way they are.

I too think the future might exist, but the way i see it is a bit different to xris. I see the future as something that can be rewritten. Sometimes it is changed and that creates a new future, sometimes it is confirmed. So from the xris movie example, i see the future (and the past) as a video tape that can be watched (lived) again or rerecorded to tell a new story.

The new stories can be sub plots of the original. For example i may be destined to become a soldier in a particular battle. That destiny may be linked to many other people and events that pull me towards it. But just as xris says, if you lived it the first time with an element of free will, you may live again something very close to the original, but be making the same choices of your own free will. Or then again you may rewrite a significant sub plot. Such as falling in love on the way to your destiny. If something is easily rewritten then it isn't your destiny. Things that are hard to rewrite are your destiny, because other people, and events and causation laws will pull you toward it.

The point about free will is that it is choice and inspiration made through the likes of character and spirit. As douglas pointed out it is not omnipotence. On the other hand, it does not follow that given the same situation if you make the same act then it is obvious you have no free will. We have the freedom to repeat ourselves. Also, there are occasions when we have to make decisions very quickly in dramatic circumstances, thus it is possible that the same situation repeated many times would yield a range of choices by the same person...... similarly for times of long reflection.

Science does not necessarily posit determinism. Far from it, the latest understanding is that in any given micro physical event there are a number of subsequent possibilities that will all conform to the conservation laws. Science tells us that which one will be chosen is completely random if the scale is small enough. On the larger scale however, such as tennis balls, then they behave very close to classical physics. This is how theoretical physics is actually describing these forms now. Classical logic describes much of macro scale behaviour because many quantum events scaled up and connected together should do just that. Classical logic is what is mathematicaly predicted from scaling up quantum logic by large statistics.

..... so i see destiny as many micro individual free wills and large cultural forces and also large classical laws and QM randomness, scaled up in the future. Through scale connectivity the universe writes world events. eg. The destiny of a tennis ball can now be classically determined with very high certainty of probability to be 'out' before it is seen on tv. But that does not undermine the nano 'edge' of the ball being a fuzz of random activity. Randomness can buzz and ride like a gnat on the back of a buffalo. Free will can float like a spinning leaf on a river of destiny. Look closely enough ..... and all is fuzzy. Stand back and all is destiny.

With regard to responsibility ..... who would try and deny their destiny? For destiny is written in the scale we are interconnected.

If you believe your experience to be true and not delusional then you have no option but to correct your opinions.Its not predicting like a if an apple grows it will have to fall to the ground sometime, its being able to see it fall on a certain day on certain person with whom you had no idea existed.For me who this certain event,not the apple by the way, experienced it, its not up for debate.I experienced the future and i dont care if others dont believe me.For those who dont believe me,they have to make their own conclusions on these subjects, not tainted or gifted with my experience.
Lets say we know by prophecy that a certain horse will win a certain race,now how does that effect our future? does it change it,does it change my future or was it always predicted,all of it.The prediction was predicted and the effect of the prediction was predicted or did the prediction change the future that could not be predicted?????:perplexed::perplexed::perplexed:

If I am forced at the point of a gun to hand over my wallet, then, of course, that is not an act of free will. But, if, in the normal course of events, I give some money to a beggar because I want to help him, then, of course, I have given him the money of my own free will, since I did what I wanted to do, and I was not forced in any way. So, it really isn't hard.

Of course, religious people may have some very different idea of what free will is. But that is not what we ordinarily mean by "free will".

Exactly, and far too few non-scientists understand this.

Although I'm not sure science contends that the outcome is inherently random -- what it contends is that it cannot be predicted. (unpredictability is not mutually exclusive even with pure determinism)

If I decapitate someone, science contends that I cannot predict he will die?

What are you talking about? Go back and read my quote from Pagan where he says if the scale is small enough. We're discussing the atomic and subatomic realm here. Sure, we can predict certain macroscopic things with complete (or near-complete) confidence, like you'll die if your head gets lopped off. But that entire decapitatory event is reducible to the subatomic constituents of your body and their interactions, and the discussion is whether this predictability still pertains to them.

The operative ideas here are 1) uncertainty and 2) chaos.

Uncertainty asserts that a particle's momentum and position cannot be simultaneously known.

Chaos asserts that the outcome of a given event is contingent upon initial conditions, and small initial errors or derangements can become exponentially magnified.

Neither of these principles should be taken to mean that any physical interaction at the particle level will produce random results -- only that we cannot predict them.