The Possibility of Fatalism

     

     Plenty of philosophers have rejected the idea of fatalism with the new findings of quantum mechanics, but what if I told you the main philosophical problems could be accounted for and fatalism would still be on the table? This would certainly make thinking logically about the progression of the universe a lot easier, and would certainly do materialism a favor.

     What exactly is fatalism, determinism, compatibilism, and libertarian free will? Well, our ideas of free will seem to be embedded on us at birth. Either we take the idea from certain other humanistic behaviors, such as that of certain religions which use it as a foundation, or we genetically believe it to be the case. Either way, believing in free will is an almost human universal. I won't go too deep into the argument for free will, but there are three basic stances on the free will issue. You have the philosophers who believe in determinism, compatibilism, and libertarian free will. Libertarian free will is the belief that I assume most of us had or still have, that being that actions are able to be chosen. Basically, it's that there could've been an alternative to what had already happened. Determinism is the school of thought that every action a person takes is totally determined by outside factors like beliefs, actions, and environment. Compatibilism is the belief that free will and determinism are mutually compatible with one another. Fatalism is the basic extension of the determinism school of thought, that one thing occurs only because another one had already set it in motion.

     Fatalism seems all but true if you accept determinism, but modern quantum discoveries have shaken its coherency. The double slit experiment has made it appear like there's a little bit of chance or randomness involved in situations with subatomic particles. I am all but happy to accept this possibility, if it wasn't for the fact that there's no way to measure randomness. It is hard to predict what will happen given these conditions, however, the jump to assuming its utter randomness is nothing short from a logical leap. In fact, it's the same logical leap people take when looking at correlative charts. Correlation =/=  causation. This experiment proves our inability to understand an aspect of quantum mechanics, and that's it.

     So what about the philosophical contentions made? The biggest claim I want to address is the claim that, "if everything has a cause and effect, and nothing is random, why doesn't everything just happen at once?" This contention was made by Bret Weinstein, and something I consistently had in the back of my head for awhile. This may seem intuitively like a well formulated contention, but as I hope to point out, it is far from air tight.

     Allow me to point to a plausible response. What if the universe isn't unfolding all at once due to energy constraints? As we've demonstrated with general relativity, gravity affects time. Perhaps it's just a harsh intuition, but perhaps gravity is keeping everything from exploding into the ultimate "yang utopia." On a side note, I have been theorizing that perhaps gravity's purpose is to be a negative force, densifying the rest of the universe, and perhaps before the big bang, the loss of gravity or loss of density in gravity is what gave it that initial expansion.

    But perhaps we will never know, however what's the real purpose of this theorization? If we are to think of the universe as a large conglomerate of matter, then having it at infinite density at the beginning of time would make sense as to why we are unable to theorize about what had happened before that 10 ^ -50000000 seconds. Infinite density does not agree with our mathematics. To make sense of this, I've begun to hypothesize about the possibility of infinity, and singularities to be the real "nothingness" that we've been looking for. What exactly is "nothingness" anyways? The absence of matter? The absence of energy? None of this has ever been recorded, and all thought experiments hold to be futile.

    The real purpose of this idea is to give ourselves a visualization of what could've happened at the beginning of time, or what to expect from time. Time seems to only be the way it is because of foreign density, and gravitational pull. My theory, is that quantum tunneling could've caused fluctuations in the beginning where time and space were unrecorded for. If there was, of course, antimatter or dark matter pulling against the density of the universe, we could easily see how a lack of gravitational pull would've caused an explosive velocity out of this infinite density. But obviously, this density still has some sort of influence on the modern day, right?

    Why don't things have infinite energy? 

    Why isn't everything happening at once?

    

    Simply because something's holding us back. Perhaps the flow of time will only increase as things progress, and it would appear to be the case. But until this is scientifically testable, this is nothing but hypotheses. 

    Something theoretically feasible, if this happens to be the case, is finding that point of infinite density's origin, and throwing matter back at it to cause things to reverse in time. Or, in reverse, find the force that is pulling us away and dissipate its effects. Somehow, someway.

    Determinism, and by extent fatalism, is thereby not debunked with this contention. As downloading a file on the computer takes computing power, so does life take will, and the universe take energy.