of fatalism and free will

this has been bogging me all along lately. this is an unending battle. here are some of the thoughts on free will, which is an on going process till i reach to a firm decision on the existence of either:

read this post before proceeding.

some definitions:

free will - the ability to make your own choices under no coercion.
fatalism - everything is written and we follow a script.
determinism - the ability to predict something will occur - fatalism
non determinism - the inability to predict something will occur - free will

i always thought that free will is a part of fatalism. my understanding was that because we see things random enough, we have the notion of non determinism. but what if events weren't as random as they seem to be. what if behind the fog of non determinism lay determinism, so elegant and graceful, that even though if we discovered it, it would be beyond our comprehension.

we all are a product of influences. hence we always react to events after taking the reference from the influences. and so, we have built a causally dependent chain. now this in my earlier post associates with determinism. but here i would like to interject.

i think there is free will here. influences do affect our decisions, but it is we who decide how much we want it to affect us. for e.g. : parents beat up a kid, so 1.) either the kid decides never to lift a hand on his children 2.) or the kid beats his children as well owing to his childhood experience. so it is up to the kid here on how he would react to this beating. he is not forced on to behave in some way.

influences just restrict your ways to behave, they don't decide actions for you. ones decision will always be in his favor. he will not do anything against it and so because we kind of know how he is going to behave, we attribute it to fatalism (fate). for e.g. your friend knows you for quiet sometime and so he will be able to predict with decent accuracy of your decisions. that said you still aren't coercing him to arrive at a decision, you are just commenting on it. and thus he is exhibiting free will.

as said in the earlier post, this may be because we are participants in the system. for someone who is unaffected by it, outside the system, and for that someone who knows everything, it is fatalism. fatalism for him, free will to us because we still do not know. and if he is just an observer, not an all knowing personality, it then is free will to both of us. because he doesnt know how we are going to act, despite that he has all the information of our behaviour.

i guess it is all a matter of attitude. how you look at things. if you just have given up and let the nature of events make the decisions for you, despite you exhibiting free will by showing lack of concern, you will associate it to fate.

from a scientific standpoint, everything follows an equation, everything is ordered. and there are concepts that we havent understood so far. but whenever we did so, we found it to obey an equation (for e.g.: the distribution of prime numbers, reinmann -zeta function)

so is it fair to say that because we have not understood the system enough to formulate rules and which is why we have a notion of free will when everything could be actually ordered?

till i have something more to say, i will leave you with this question, do you believe in free will or fatalism?

cheers,

fatalism

fatalism 0 free-will 2

fatalism

fatalism wins again

fatalism 2 - free will 0

going in

thats it! i am going in!

of goodwill and extremism

goodwill and extremism. lexicographically, there are antithetical to each other. and on prima facie as well it looks so too. but then is it really? in my opinion in a certain state goodwill borderlines extremism. that state is achieved when somebody has power and is defiant.

for e.g.:

let us assume that there are 10 people who are a hindrance to a community. the problem here is that the word hindrance is purely subjective. hence, a certain set of that community view it as a hindrance and others don't. violence is the easiest way to rid something off and we are animals at core, so the group uses violence and rids the community of the bad blood.

what ensues is that, the group now has equivocally gained the trust of the community and to ensure the situation doesn't repeat itself, it starts policing and has its own laws and of course gets drunk with power. and since it has the power, it now tramples over the constitutional rights of an individual and enforces its then goodwill and now tyranny/extremism.

this goes on until another set finds it unbearable and then upsets the prevalent group and the whole cycle begins again.

what this effectively translates is that, the government should have an effective strategy for mob control. mob = junta, public at large.

people have tolerance factors. when everyone gets upset, it translates as a revolution and history says no governing body survived a revolution and hence in this case, there will a restoration of order. however, it only lasts for a short time, until the tolerance is not pushed and the whole cycle starts over again and again and again.

cheers


p.s.: i realise the flow breaks off somewhere.