So I am in North Carolina staying with my wife's sister. We will be staying with them until Friday, then we will be headed up to Virginia to see my sister's wedding. So it's been a great time to relax and have fun with family. I should post some pictures, not for viewing, but to put them in the cloud instead of using/cluttering up my own disk-space.
*Now the reason for the title, I just watch FlashForward on Netflix.Turns out it ended up being canceled after the first season, which left me with a bunch of questions on how it ended. So in looking at the ending of the series and at the ending of the novel, which the series was based on, it brought up the concept of freewill vs predestination.
This is always a tricky subject and often leaves you more confused than when you started, but the Wikipedia article did a great job of summarizing the moral, physical, and social ramifications of the subject. However, it took me to Newton's third law of motion, in that for every action there is an equal and opposing reaction.
I tried to limit my scope of the freewill controversy to the physical realm by examining the aforementioned third law without the bothersome idea of a conscience agent. If every action has an equal and opposite reaction, this implies the original action must have been a resultant reaction from a previous action. With this thought you can theoretically trace any event to a root cause, with logic dictating there must be an original action to which to attribute all reactions. This implies an external source, presence, or agent outside of the system; which in this case is the physical universe.
I have obviously oversimplified an extremely complicated topic, but I was to trying to tie-in physical laws into the matter of freewill and predestination. That if my previous argument is true, an external source put into motion a predictable and traceable line of action and reactions; this making the original source responsible for a deterministic future. With a determinable line of action and reaction this points to and implies determination of all events. Summarizing, both physical and conscience entities react to previous stimuli, meaning they react to a previous action. With this line of thought it shows a cascading effect, demonstrating that future event are directly connected to previous actions.
Given that the third law of motion is correct, the future of physical events is absolutely deterministic, giving credence to predestination in the physical realm. Now venturing into the conscience agent, one could argue all conscience thought and action are too indeed resultants of previous stimuli. i.e. You eat because you're hungry, you sleep because you're tired, and so on. I would then argue that human behavior is predictable and deterministic given enough knowledge of past events and the insight to interpret those events. I am not arguing against free-will, but that free-will behavior is in itself has a predictable outcome. Again this is an oversimplification, though it has allowed me to cope with the idea that all things are deterministic in that all things are reactions to previous actions. That the future is deterministic, though it is the scope, lack of previous knowledge, and lack of insight that prevents us from the total realization of future events.
* Disclaimer: I am no expert, nor do I pretend to be one, these are just my thoughts and I encourage comments and criticism. Also, please excuse any spelling or grammatical mistakes.
