pondering on fate, determinism, and free will
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so i recently played steins gate. i don't have anything interesting to say about the game itself (in the end, i didn't like it very much), but... well, it got me thinking a lot about the concept of fate. that game takes a pretty reductive stance on the topic: for most of the story, the characters grapple constantly with the notion that fate is apparently insurmountable, no matter how hard you try to change the outcome. then, at the very end the narrative suddenly decides to circumvent the notion entirely, in favor of a typical shonen-esque ending that says, "never give up! everything happens for a reason and the future is inherently unknowable!"
nothing about this portrayal of fate sat well with me. so, in response, i did the very normal and reasonable thing of... uh, spending six hours on wikipedia the next day reading a wide variety of philosophical arguments on the topic. wheeeee~
(the monkeys paw curls. ultimately nothing i read during that dive had any notable influence on the ideas i'd already been cooking since the night before. orz)
okay, let's cut to the chase. do i believe that fate exists as a genuine and relevant force that dictates outcomes in our lives? well, my answer is probably unsatisfying: yes and no. but hear me out, i promise i'm going somewhere (hopefully) interesting with this.
let's look at the "no" side first, because i think it's easier to explain. on a fundamental level, living creatures -- crucially, not just humans, but all creatures of any shape or size (even including plants!!!) -- necessarily possess the capacity to make decisions. this is an undeniable aspect of living. we all have physical needs that constantly demand to be met: hunger, thirst, safety, health, etc. for any given need at any given moment, there will usually be several different possible ways to meet it. there is always a deliberative process, even if this happens unconsciously, behind deciding which possible path toward meeting that need will be the most preferable one. the circumstances that influence that decisionmaking process are constantly changing, and our ideas of what we need and how we need it change accordingly.
a common refutation of free will is that it is entirely possible (in theory) that every such decision we make is not a true choice but simply the logical, rational outcome that follows from the consequences of past events. in other words, there is always a "right" choice that we naturally gravitate towards based on the circumstances that prompted the decison. however, i think in humans especially, this is demonstrably untrue... we simply don't always make decisions rationally. there are innumerable possible reasons why someone's decisionmaking process might be impaired, which often results in unpredictable behavior. you could argue still that even such irrational behavior is still informed by past events that necessarily led to that outcome, but personally i believe that irrationality in behavior inherently precludes any sort of logical analysis.
the core point here is that the capacity to weigh alternatives and decide which way to go is an obvious, undeniable flag signifying the necessary existence of agency. any attempt to undermine this notion by suggesting that the "true" cause of events was something both outside of us and unknowable to us just feels like missing the point and arguing semantics to me. we'll come back to this in a few paragraphs.
now, moving on to the "yes" side... er, actually first i need to go down a brief tangent to support this point before i explain it.
one of the key features of my personal worldview is the adage of "there is no such thing as an original idea". it's not meant to be taken fully literally; obviously there is a lot of capacity within human intellect and creativity to synthesize ideas into a novel shape. but on the other hand, it is indisputably impossible to arrive at any bit of knowledge without first having an at least rudimentary understanding of the "building block" ideas from which the knowledge can be rationally derived.
to make a very basic, reductive example, imagine a hypothetical person who has never experienced fire before. one day she stumbles across a pile of ash, and begins to puzzle about what it is and where it came from. even if we suppose that in all other respects this person has a very solid understanding of the local world she lives in, it would be unreasonable to expect that she could deduce that the ash is a byproduct of something being burned, if she has no idea what "burning" is at all. right?
the basic idea permeates all of social life. this is a huge part of why quality of education is so influential to a person's life outcomes. it's why "science" isn't merely doing experiments but demands exhaustive amounts of research, and why burning libraries is such an effective strategy for political suppression. no matter what, every novel idea is synthesized from existing knowledge. nothing comes from nowhere.
with that in mind, now let's return to the concept of fate. if we took the idea of "free will" to the absolute extreme, it would imply that we're universally allowed and capable of doing literally anything that we desire. obviously, this is very far from the truth. every individual's life is ultimately very strongly molded by the circumstances of the culture and social structures that you're born into. most people tend to very naturally conform to one of the permissible shapes that society allows to them; the alternative is oppressive marginalization. class stratification is also highly relevant here. even in the modern era, a statistical majority of people have their possible life paths constrained at the moment of their birth by their family's socioeconomic circumstances. it's not impossible to break free of that trend, but it's very difficult and for most people probably unfeasible within a single lifetime.
in a sense, we can view these societal level constraints on free will as a manifestation of "fate". for reasons far beyond our comprehension, our lives are usually destined to play out in ways relatively similar to our peers. it remains theoretically possible for someone to move across the world, learn a new language, and integrate into an entirely foreign culture, but the vast majority of people would lack the fortitude and dedication for such a massive upheaval of their ways of life.
fate can also take the form of unforeseeable tragedy. we may be free to pursue the direction we want our lives to take, but very rarely do we possess the total freedom afforded by the power to enact our desired outcomes with certainty. i'd bet probably every single person on earth can relate somehow to the feeling of thinking everything is finally working out for the better, just for life to come around and knock you down a peg again.
so, i believe that fate is best conceptualized as the inherent narrowing of life's possibility space from "everything" to "realistic". it's the truth that despite our best efforts to be the agents of our own lives, there's always a vast network of constraints that tempers our freedom and flexibility. sometimes we have the power to overcome these constraints. sometimes we don't. in that sense, i suppose "fate" does exist... sort of.
but i feel like there's still a hanging thread here. what's the point of all of this...? why are humans so obsessed with the debate over fate versus free will, anyway?
well, i don't really have anything profound to say here. i think the easy answer is... it's just a coping mechanism, really. it's the way that we often try to make sense of why life is so hard and why things rarely turn out how we expected. what's the point of all those decisions we made if there's a good chance our efforts will just be undermined in the end?
when i was younger, i was drawn to the idea of fate for the vague sense of comfort it offered. i didn't understand anything about myself, or the world, or how to navigate through life effectively. "everything happens for a reason" was the tonic that allowed me to just keep going even when nothing ever made any sense. in hindsight though, it really was a crutch. it didn't make me feel better about anything, it just gave me an excuse to not puzzle too hard over it all.
nowadays, i feel basically the opposite. i'm not sure that anything happens for a reason. at least, not for any macro-level reason. people usually have reasons for things they do and often the consequences of everyone's actions reverberate through the society around us. but i honestly don't find it useful to envision my life as any amount of predetermined. it means more to me to remember that even in the midst of all these circumstances i can never control, i'm never at a complete loss of control over my own life. at any point in time, at any place in life, there's always more than one way to go forward. fate may exist in some capacity but it can't take that last scrap of agency from me.
in contrast, i rather surprisingly stumbled across a couple of unconventional schools of thought during the wikipedia dive. they adopt philosophies of fatalism, but instead of seeing the notion as a source of despair, it actually gave them hope. in this view, people cope with the challenges of life by clinging to the idea that no matter what course of events defines their mortal lives, nothing could ever keep them from reaching their fated state of comfort in the afterlife, whatever that may look like in their worldview. i like this. it's not a philosophy i would subscribe to personally, but i appreciate that some people out there think this way.
fate is interesting. to be honest, maybe i just didn't dig into the philosophical debates deeply enough to come across it, but i feel pretty surprised that i didn't see anything like this sort of mixed take on the concept during my research this morning. i sincerely doubt i've said anything that hasn't already been said before by people who have thought wayyy harder about this than me... but i mostly just wanted to ramble long enough to get these thoughts out of my head and make better sense of what role i think "fate" might play in our world. it's easy for me to say i don't think fate exists, not in the way that people normally mean when they talk about stuff like this. at the same time, i think there's a good reason that it keeps coming back up in cultures all across time and space. hopefully if you've read all the way to the end then you at least got some interesting food for thought out of it! thanks for being here <3