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,