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Author | Topic: Destiny/Free Will | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
peke Inactive Member |
Just wondering what people's views on Destiny/Free Will are.
I believe that people can control their fate, that not everything is a predetermined sequence of events. It has been shown that believing in something strongly enough can make that something happen, however improbable it may be. A study has shown that patients in a hospital who are prayed for have a better chance of recovery. The human mind can influence things in a non-predetermined way. Issac Asminov wrote a trilogy about something he called phycho-history. It concerns the calculations of how a large group of people will act, mob psychology in a way. The actions of a large group could be calculated, but the calculations could always be thrown off if an individual with enough conviction/belief appeared to change the psychology. Even if humans are bound by destiny, I believe that humans would eventually become aware of it and break the hold that 'destiny' would have. Like the way humans can fight down INSTINCTS in favor of being CIVILIZED. The instincts of an animal will always drive it the same way. A human can change that, the same way a human can change it's fate. Attack this all you want! My only reservation being that you attack my ideas, not my words or my analogies.
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Hieyeck Inactive Member |
This raises an interesting point
My personal belief is that Humankind in general is set to follow a certain path, whether by neccessity of survival or by a higher being, i'm not certain. However, how we choose to get there is by our own choice (i.e. a giant maze. there are infinite possibillities of reaching the goal, including backtracking). Something i'm not too ready to believe in but is the one that i do trust right now is that this only holds true until we reach the stage where we are able to easily settle other planets. At this point, humankind will split up according to their own beliefs and traditions, and raise a planet to a culture's own way.
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nator Member (Idle past 2191 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
[QUOTE]A study has shown that patients in a hospital who are prayed for have a better chance of recovery.>>
Actually, the studies which claimed a correlation are pretty flawed in methodology. See:
http://www.skepdic.com/prayer.html It's actually true that people heal better when their OWN outlook is upbeat and hopeful, and if they have a support group. ------------------"We will still have perfect freedom to hold contrary views of our own, but to simply close our minds to the knowledge painstakingly accumulated by hundreds of thousands of scientists over long centuries is to deliberately decide to be ignorant and narrow- minded." -Steve Allen, from "Dumbth"
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Brad McFall Member (Idle past 5054 days) Posts: 3428 From: Ithaca,NY, USA Joined: |
Right, and I "prayed" to plants in a high school experiemental biology class. It was the emotion not Prayer.
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peke Inactive Member |
quote: It still proves my point. People can change their 'fate' with enough willpower/emotional support. I'm arguing that destiny cannot be because that would mean that humans could only improve to a point. That would be true for most other creatures in a way, but humans are tool-makers. Whatever we cannot improve by ourselves, we'll improve by building something to do it for us. The fact we can keep improving ourselfs excludes destiny, because we would eventually find some scientific laws that would predict what humans would do. Destiny would have to keep itself secret, because if the rules were known to us, we would change them.
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Brad McFall Member (Idle past 5054 days) Posts: 3428 From: Ithaca,NY, USA Joined: |
Peke,
I am not poking fun at you, I am still working at a misperception of me so I can imagine if I was not personally speaking but trying to situate Newton's reference to GOD in the proper sociology I would still not necessarily be dissing your point to will, to wit, I had joined PUGWASH started by Einstein and Russell but I think that some other kind of relation of science and society is in process no matter what I will. I am interested in starting a Web-Zine on Nano-ecology if there are any takers with a little more comp experience than I have the time in the biology for.
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peke Inactive Member |
???? I have no idea what your last 2 messages were about...
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
quote: What? You think you're special? --Percy
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Brad McFall Member (Idle past 5054 days) Posts: 3428 From: Ithaca,NY, USA Joined: |
That was funny. I do not know why or how BASIC was developed at Dart-mouth especially.
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nator Member (Idle past 2191 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: Well, there are scientific laws which limit and, on a very basic level, predict what we would do. Physical law limits us.
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Brad McFall Member (Idle past 5054 days) Posts: 3428 From: Ithaca,NY, USA Joined: |
I guess what I meant was that I am not a biological determinist but one who maintians or trys to maintain a difference between orbits and trajectories in biology.
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Minnemooseus Member Posts: 3945 From: Duluth, Minnesota, U.S. (West end of Lake Superior) Joined: Member Rating: 10.0 |
quote: Does this mean that Brad and Hieyeck are the same person? Incoherent and coherent(?) alter-egos? Moose ------------------BS degree, geology, '83 Professor, geology, Whatsamatta U Old Earth evolution - Yes Godly creation - Maybe
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compmage Member (Idle past 5174 days) Posts: 601 From: South Africa Joined: |
quote: How so? Humanity could be destined to die tomorrow due to a astroid stricking the earth. Regardless of our technology, if the asteroid was large enought there would be nothing we could do to stop it. On the flips side, why couldn't our destiny be to continually grow and expand? Where is the limit there?
quote: Maybe that is what we are destined to do? Does not exclude destiny.
quote: That is assuming that we could change them. While I am not sure as to the existance of fate, the whole issue is meaningless unless we know what our fate is and then attempt to avoid it. Here you also run into a problem; if there is no fate, we can not then know what our fate is and therefore can't test if we can avoid it. You are therefore left to wonder; is there a fate that I have just not discovered yet, or does fate not exists and I am searching in vain? ------------------I have conquered worlds...
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Brad McFall Member (Idle past 5054 days) Posts: 3428 From: Ithaca,NY, USA Joined: |
Who is Heiyek? It is true that I do not post anymore on GIS and Biogeogrpahy and feel that the Berklyites would rather not have my slant on BIOSPHERE DATA PROJECT but my net etemology is rather clear
IMpossible Taxacom- Grehan stops snail mail correspondence ICR vision- sent off with more than 4 hours of information True seekers- always play twistor Other web sites looked at MSN or CGI go figure. ::
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Raaven4 Guest |
Destiny or so called "fate" does not exist. There is an infinite number of possibilities that a person can choose. Each possibility leads to more infinite possibilities and so on. Fate is a crutch for the weak-minded just as religion is.
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