Fate/Destiny... do you believe our paths are already made..?

I heard a brilliant quote from the genius physicist Stephen Hawkings...  "its funny how people who claim to believe in fate still look before they cross the road"

It's funny how people think they had a choice as to whether to look.

: )

I don't believe in fate at all.

Maybe you were destined to write that

Ian M wrote (see)

Maybe you were destined to write that

If that's the case I wish destiny would rustle me up a cup of coffee. Preferably brought to me by Natalie Portman who has decided I'm the very man for her and we're going to have all the babies!!

Natalie Portman...   mmmmmmmmmm!    

No, I think everybody has free will. I do think some things happen for a reason though.

Screamapillar wrote (see)

No, I think everybody has free will. I do think some things happen for a reason though.

Explain.

If we have free will then we cannot be "fated" to follow a certain destiny.

However, I believe that some things happen at certain times in our lives in order for us to evaluate certain things about ourselves or a situation. 

Who/what controls when those things happen at certain times?

"Free Will" cannot happen IMO, even if there is no "higher power" controlling our destiny, or some sort of cosmic plan, we are wired to react to situations and follow a certain pathway in life by culture and genetic loading.

I do think we have free will to a certain extent, along with that comes the responsibility to live life in the best way we can. By that I mean, we have the freedom to make life choices. I've been looking again into Buddhist principles which seems to suggest this, by living the best way we can is to do no harm to anyone, including ourselves. We have the freedom to make such choices, but then we cannot have free will if we are to live by those principles.

Dunno if that makes sense or not, but I know what I mean 

I don't know... this is just another thing I'm agnostic about!  The thought of not having free will is a very scary one, but then if we have free will where does that leave the theory of cause and effect, and the universe behaving itself according to natural laws which we think we can describe? 

I had a deep and meaningful (i.e. drunken) conversation with my brother about this and I think my get-out clause was that the universe is actually an infinite mix of different possible universes, each with sensible cause-and-effect natural laws where people do have free will, and when you make a choice you're simply deciding at that time which deterministic universe you carry on living in.

I do have a book called Time and Free Will which I started reading once but really couldn't get my head round.  Maybe I'll give it another go, but it might just freak me out too much. 

There are lots of things which are outwith our control, but in terms of how we live our lives as individual on a day-to-day basis, we have free will and free choice.

Intermanaut wrote (see)

Who/what controls when those things happen at certain times?

Physics.
I guess the questions are slightly more complicated though. Maybe for starters.

Do you have free will?
Do you believe you have free will?
If you belive you have free will, does that give you free will?
What is free will? 

Hmmmm - playing devils' advocate, it seems to me the reason some people walk away from an accident and others don't is that their time wasn't up. One of my friends lost her 20-year-old son because instead of coming home for the weekend by train as usual he accepted a lift from another guy who was going in the same direction. The car went off the road on a bend and hit a tree, my friend's son and another lad died, the driver and the other passenger didn't. Why do some survive a plane crash? Is it fate, or just random?

Random is just a non predictable fate though. 
If I toss a coin. The result will be random and un-predicable, but if it lands heads, it lands heads, thinking that maybe it could have landed tails doesn't change the fact that it landed heads. 

What does it matter?  Would you change anything?  Could you?

Laplace's Daemon is a conjecture by the great mathematician that there could be a being, or a machine, a mind large enough to comprehend everything in the universe right now, which would then be able to apply the laws of physics and mathematics to determine any situation in the future.  Laplace unfortunately didn't know about Quantum Physics which has a principle that effectively means that you can't know both where everything is and where it is going, at the same instant.  So the Daemon could never know the starting point that would enable it to conjecture the future.

Even if you knew all the laws of physics, those same laws mean you can't predict the future with any detail because you can only guess the starting point.  So, if everything is fated, we can't test that - we'll never know.  So fate or free will, we'll never know the outcome, and therefore choose the one you prefer to believe!

I like to think I choose to look both ways before crossing.

free will or free willy then?