Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Fatalism and Futility

"I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go."
The Waking, Theodore Roethke


Fatalism is the belief that there is only one possible future. The name comes from "fate" rather than "fatal", but emotional nuances still haunt the term from the first time you hear it, making it more natural to dismiss and criticize. The idea is at odds with the idea of free will because the normal conception of free will requires that no natural laws completely determine human behavior, whereas obviously human behavior can affect the physical world. This would imply that non-physical causes have physical effects, and therefore the sum of physical laws isn't enough to completely predict the future.

Fatalism suggests that the conditions of the future have a constant, non-variable value. However, everyday language, even among fatalists, treats the future as a variable to be affected by each decision and action. I've heard several people ask, "If the future is predetermined whether or not I make a given choice, why bother doing anything?". There are two ways to read this question: present actions don't actually affect the events of the future, or actions don't affect the fixedness of the future. Both are troubling thoughts.

The first case is obviously absurd. We make choices every day that ripple outwards and have incredibly unexpected consequences. It's even more absurd than it might seem, because if memories are physical states in the brain, then future memories couldn't be affected by present actions, so you could have absolutely no recollection of many choices and actions. The absurdity leads many people to reject fatalism and determinism outright.

But fatalism doesn't require this absurdity, because fatalism holds not just the future as constant, but also the present and all choices and mental states. Any choice that will be made is fated to be made one way or another. It's still a perfectly valid and useful mental model to treat the future as a variable, because it's a mathematical unknown in any equation and still must be solved for. Even the past can be treated as an unknown, as historians are well aware, because we've lost information and can't be certain of exactly what happened. There are many "variables", but no free variables.

The reasoning of the original question is a form of proof by contradiction, assuming fatalism and then deriving absurd results from the assumption. Proof by contradiction is worthless if it makes extra assumptions, because then the error can't be traced back to the original tentative assumption. In this case, the contradiction came from the extra, false assumption that there are free variables.

I can't refute the other way of reading the question, though, because I completely agree with it. Your actions and decisions (constants) can't affect the fixedness of the future by any means. It's like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps: you have no variability to imbue the future with, so you can't actually change its course. The feeling of helplessness is understandable in a psychological way, but not actually supported by any logical argument.

As an example, imagine I can read your mind, and you're standing at a fork in the road. You decide to go left and I tell you "Go left". So then you decide to go right just to spite me, and I say "Go right" right away. You give up and decide to stay put, so I say "Don't go anywhere". Then you decide to run in circles quoting Shakespeare, but before you can move I say "Run in circles quoting Shakespeare". You will probably feel an overwhelming sense of futility before long, but eventually you decide to ignore me and just go about your business. After a while, you start to realize I'm the one who should feel overwhelmed with futility, not you. If I keep doing this forever, I'm nothing but a nuisance. If I ever stop, you've won the game. Finally, I'll say "Tape my mouth shut" and you will.

The same reasoning applies to fatalism. Everything you do is predetermined even if you try to cheat the system by changing your mind, but it doesn't matter. You'll never know what's around the corner until you turn the corner, and it shouldn't bother you that something is already around the corner whether you look or not. It can't help being there, but you can (deterministically) decide whether to look.

1 comment:

Sara Barnett said...

Thanks for putting that into words for me. Very nicely expressed.