Karma, destiny, doom, fate
“A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.”, boldly stated Arthur Schopenhauer, a German famous guru of pessimism. In easier terms, we don’t choose our desires, but may try to deny them. Since the early 19th century, he and other determinists have helped humans to understand what could be one of the hardest things to accept about our existence: that we have a destiny, also called karma, fate, destination, future or doom. Late capitalists would go crazy with the idea that their future can’t be changed by strenght, effort nor advices — this would throw away meritocracy before it even truly starts to work. Many fear that the end of a belief in free will could make us refrain from taking responsibilities for what we do. On the other hand, it could give birth to a new introverted society that lives to find all the answers within, maybe similar to old Egypt. A world probably ruled by priests, rabinos, califas, monks, shamans and psichologists. To what extent do you believe in free will? Would you fancy yourself being the master of all of your actions?
Since humans invented the ideas of mistake and regret, many people have tried to free themselves from guilty. One way to do that has been saying that "it was meant to be", an statement sometimes backed by God’s will, other times by quantum physics or astrology.
Neurosciencists proved that our brain decides before we become conscious of this decision. This means that this decision comes from the depths of our personality, from the sub conscience or a misterious elsewhere - what many call soul. Our personality is built by layers of experiences over a genetic code, maybe written over this same soul. These experiences come from our interaction with other personalities and the rest of nature.
Every second of life unfolds from this complex system of interactions between us and the rest, and if there is no free will, the results of the crossing of our paths is determined, even if not predictable by human knowledge. The existence of destiny finds grounds in the idea that all the conditions that determine our future already existed in our past, including all factors behind our personal decisions that we feel like exercising free will. It is like saying that inside a seed you can already find everything about how it will be as a plant, all the seeds from future plants it will yield, and even the dust in the wind after it fails to perpetuate, or in a future when the earth gets swallowed by the sun. But imagine that the seed is the universe, and the next 1h would be nothing but a consequence of what it is right now subject to the universal forces that have always been there. As Einsten would say, "God doesn’t play dices", so all conditions to everything would be set before the Big Bang. All effects would be contained in their causes. These are the pre-determinists.
Another kind of argument, despite not necessarily mutually exclusive with the first, is justifying the existence of a destiny on the idea that whatever happens, it does because we would have a certain future that already exists in other dimensions, other points in time, or in God's wil. This theory, the post determinism, as the pre determinism, can relate to Einstein's relativity, where our perception of time could be an illusion of us passing by it, and this time would be the opposite axis of space in a cartesian view of reality. Hence future would exist at the same time of our present, and they would be separated by the time the speed of light gets there. So, whatever happens, it does would because everything should end up as it will at some point, like in religious belief of a divine destination for us, including a probable end inside a black hole where we don't really know what happens. Causality would be just a consequence of its end to exist.
The most novel and well accepted view about determinism is the co-determinism, backed by, for example, the chaos theory and Guattari & Delleuze’s concept of rizoma. This school thinks that everything is pre-determined, but in such a complex way that it is impossible to attribute causality. Like the famous butterfly flapping its wings in China and causing a hurricane in Texas. Obviously the metaphor had to accuse China of something. This view is at least humble to recognize that, despite determinism being plausible, let’s recognize we shouldn’t even try testing it.
Nietzsche and Spinoza say that it’s possible that destiny and free will can exist at the same time. This would be explained by a will that comes from immanence, another plain of existence, above our determined dimension, the universe where the body exists. If true, we would be a manifestation of the divine in a material world. In other words, we are Gods that believe themselves limited.
What this long Wikipedia research did was pushing me further away from a masters in philosophy. There are too many hopelessly people trying to draw the universe on a chart. Lucky are those who are only concerned with finding out who they are.
Art: Immanence of a flight painting, from Ovidiu Kloska
