HiddenRanbir wrote:I'm not sure I understand that last post...
Look at it this way. Imagine that it was possible to see into the future, and you saw that 20 years from now you'd be working a boring desk job. You don't think that fits your personality, so you decide to try and change that.
You decide that you're going to avoid the business world and become a concert pianist, hoping that this will enable you to avoid the boring future that you saw. You spend the next five years studying with masters and practicing five hours a day. You're good, and offers begin to pour in.
One day, you get an offer from a recording company that would like to make an album of your music, and you set up an appointment to negotiate with them. On the way to the meeting, you get into an automobile accident. You get out alive, but your left hand is crushed and has sustained permanent nerve damage. Because a pianist is so reliant on both of his hands, your career is over.
A good friend of yours feels sorry for you, and in an attempt to help he gets his father to offer you a position in his company. You start off small, but eventually work your way up the corporate ladder.
And so, despite your best efforts, you find yourself in the same boring desk job that you sought to avoid in the first place.
Does that help?
Actually, the real question is: Would you still have been stuck in the boring desk job had you not seen the future and tried to change it? If the future is shaped by the actions of the past and present, could things have been different had this one action- traveling to the future- not occured? Had it never happened, it therefore would have never set off the chain of events that led you to drastically altering your life to become a pianist. So, would the future have been different?
On second thought, it's probably better if you try not to think about that. I wouldn't want anyone to get a migraine.
Basically, the idea is that there is a sense of inevitability in time travel. This makes things really complicated, but it's rather fun to try and puzzle it out. Another example is the
Grandfather Paradox. According to this, it is impossible for you to go into the past to kill your grandfather and prevent your birth. If you did such a thing, then you would never have been born in the first place. And, since you never existed, you would have therefore been unable to go back into the past and kill your grandfather.
Complicated, isn't it?
However, I think that this has little to do with the issue of free will and predestination. Think of it this way. Imagine that you were to able to take a peek in the future, say the year 2025. While you were in the year 2025, the years 2004- 2024 would have been in the past.
One theory is that time is linear. It's not possible for us right now to go back in time and change what we did in the year 1999, is it? No, of course not. If you imagine time as a straight line, then it might help you to understand what I'm saying a bit better. You can move forward and backwards along the line, but the line still remains one single, unbroken, straight line.
So, according to this, it would not be possible for you to change your future. It's not predestination though. Predestination makes it sound as though the whole thing is being guided by some unseen presence or force, and I don't believe that is so. Rather, it's an issue of past, present, and the linearity of time.
As for predestination versus free will, I'd like to believe in free will, and that I alone govern my actions and can decide what becomes of my future. Predestination is just another part of 'pocket providence'. When bad things happen- like unnecessary or untimely deaths- it's far easier to say "Well, that's God's (or whoever's) way" or "That's part of God's plan" than actually trying to figure out why these things happen. Besides, I think it makes people feel important and better about themselves. People can claim that life is sacred and that some unseen force has a master plan to guide us all, and it make us feel special and separates us from other animals.
So, I like to believe that I decide what happens in my life. For instance, right now I can finish this post, or I can go and put a gun in my mouth and kill myself. I'm free to do either, but my decision is to finish this post.
Then again, it's arguable that I was predestined to finish this post instead of killing myself.
It's a vicious cycle.
"The person who knows how to laugh at himself will never cease to be amused." --Shirley Maclaine