Fate! Is it so or do we, as intelligent life forms have control over our own destiny? Do we have free will? I am not trying to prove either way, only to present the facts and one possible, logical progression of thought. The hypothetical experiments that I put forward are experiments that I believe will never be able to take place, therefore never proving the existence of fate. However, they will never disprove it either.
First, and of course in theory only, is it possible to predict the future paths of certain particles of energy. Take two or three of the smallest particles of energy and separate them from any outside influence. By any outside influences I mean everything. All other particles in the universe, gravitational forces (Even those from a star fifty trillion light years away), temperature variations, everything. A pure vacuum. If you were to know all the characteristics of the particles and how they react to each other, would you be able to predict their path? Logically thinking, yes, you would. But for how long? Well if you know exactly everything there is to know about the particles and how they react to each other, without room for even the slightest variation, you should be able to calculate an infinite projection of their path.
If we take this concept and expand on it we come to some, possibly, disturbing realisations. If, somehow, at a given point in time, you were to know the position of every particle of every bit of energy in the entire universe and you knew exactly everything there is to know about every particle and how they react to every other particle, would you be able to predict the future paths of every particle? Logically yes. Does this then mean that everything, although probably not predetermined, has a path that it follows and has no way of changing? If this is the case, then is free-will just an illusion. Do we just seem to have choices but in actuality, when we, supposedly, decide something we are just following our unavoidable path. Is free-will something that we created to make ourselves “the smart ones” feel more in control? And in that case was free-will itself a concept that was inevitable regardless of it’s actual existence or not.
What about religion and where is the soul in all this? Well many people believe that the soul is made out of pure energy (or in some peoples case “not so pure”). It is this energy that I am talking about and the particles or substance that make it up.
As a free thinking human, I would like to believe in free-will, and that we make our own destiny. However, having thought this through, I can not totally discredit the possibility that everything that we think and do was decided when the first particles of the universe set their path a googolplex millennia ago.
