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Jonathan Lollar
Dr. Santas
PERS-2199
March 28, 2013
Unit 2- Fate
Fate and determinism can be a tricky idea to tackle (unless it is already determined that
you will do so, then relax and just go with the flow, you’ll get there!). By nature we tend to
believe in two things:
1. We have free will do make any decisions or actions that we please.
2. That there is something greater than ourselves.
The real problem is being able to reconcile our desires for free will while simultaneously putting
the necessity of our actions on some greater source. This source can either be natural law and our
own neurological makeup, or what we perceive as God. In his USA Today article, Jerry Coyne
claims that our minds are simply “meat computers” and that we have no more control on our
decisions than that of the very laptop I am typing with right now. He essentially says that a
computer is a slave to its own programming, and we are a slave to natural law. The same claim
can be made in regards to religion or a divine entity. The necessity of our actions will come from
a form of divine will and not from ourselves. This is the kind of hard determinism that Skinner
talks about, but is there any way to reconcile our free will with any form of divine or natural
law? Compatibilists (i.e. Anselm, Aquinas, James, Hume, etc) operate under the assumption that
our actions are not entirely enslaved by determinism. They seek to describe a world in which
Divine Providence is able to exist with our free will.
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We see a form of compatibilism in the film Minority Report with the character of John
Anderton. He learns of his so called fate, and even the discrepancy that Agatha sees in his future.
The idea is that the precogs can see the future, but Anderton can choose not to go through with
the crime. This would show that PreCrime is actually flawed and that free will is still a factor,
despite the existence of beings that can see the future. We see proof of this flaw in the ending of
the film. The precogs predict that Anderton will be killed by Burgess. Burgess is then confronted
with his so called fate, and instead chooses to kill himself. The free will had been present (and
functioning) all along, despite the existence of the determinism created by the precogs. This
action mirrors the idea of soft determinism set forth by James. Your fate is set out in front of you
by the precogs, but you can still choose to act differently. This is allowed by the minority reports
and the alternate visions that Agatha sees. This can only be possible if time is planar. This
allowed Burgess to come to a crossroads in his point of time. Picture it this way; make his
confrontation with Anderton a stop light at an intersection. He has three choices: killing
Anderton, letting Anderton live, or killing himself. Each of these choices are a road that he can
turn on, but each road had to have existed prior to his reaching that point in time (or atleast the
potential for the road). This is why a minority report happens. Now, in order for the system to be
perfect, time would have to be entirely linear. This would allow the precogs to take your choices
into account and adjust for them in their visions. We can see an example of this if we look at the
incident where Anderton fulfills the precog’s vision of the murder he commits. Try as he might,
every decision he makes just continues the chain of events that leads him right into the hotel
room where the victim was at, just as Oedipus was unable to escape his own prophecy no matter
how hard he tried. They would have been able to predict this with complete accuracy because
there would be no alternate timelines to take into account. We see this line of reasoning in
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Aquinas’ presentation of divine foreknowledge. He suggests that God is temporally displaced
from us. He illustrates his point by saying that God is up on a hill watching us. Up on this hill he
is able to see the road that we walk on all at once, which makes our past, present, and future
God’s present. However, through his displacement all future contingents are known by God, but
they still remain unknown to us, which allows us to keep our free will, since we are unable to see
our own future. Based on this new found infallibility, the only way Anderton would have been
able to have chosen not to kill the victim, was for it to have happened in an alternate or parallel
timeline. By making this jump he would have not only changed his future, but it would have
changed his past as well in order to conform to the new timeline. Then it can be imagined that
the prediction of the murder would have never even taken place in the new past.
Agatha explains at one point that knowing your future opens up possibilities and choices
that otherwise would not have existed. We see this same sort of mentality in The Matrix when
the Oracle tells Neo not to worry about a vase, and then he knocks it over. She responds and asks
if she had no mentioned the vase, would he still have knocked it over? We see this same sort of
parapsychology in the Oracle of Delphi. She tells Croesus that an empire will be destroyed when
he asks if he should assault Persia. After learning of this, he then goes to Persia and loses. The
prophecy was not wrong, it was only vague enough to illicit a response from Croesus and create
the destruction of an empire. Even though there is the prophecy, he still creates his own destiny.
Croesus could just as easily of stayed home and left Persia alone, just as Neo could have taken
the blue pill despite being the one. In the trilogy, Neo represents free will and choice. He is a
tangible illustration of how our choice and natural law are separate. They are driven by different
sources. Free will has no need of necessity, whereas natural law has to be caused by some force.
Aristotle would applaud this idea of anti-fatalism or the idea that Neo is able to create his own
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future without any necessity or contingents. If natural law were the cause Neo’s actions, then that
would show that his actions take place out of necessity and not of his own free will, which he
represents.
In Next, Nicolas Cage plays a man who is able to see exactly two minutes into his
future, and adjust these visions according to his intended choices. In the Coyne article he says
that: “A practical test of free will would be this: If you were put in the same position twice — if
the tape of your life could be rewound to the exact moment when you made a decision, with
every circumstance leading up to that moment the same and all the molecules in the universe
aligned in the same way — you could have chosen differently.” Anything short of an EinsteinRosen Bridge won’t exactly grant you a way to pop you back into your past to change your
decisions (all paradoxes aside), but Cris is a much more “practical” example of this test. He is
able to change his decision while being controlled by the same laws of nature (or divine law)
each time he looks into his future or changes his mind. Like Neo, he is able to shape his own
destiny, but unfortunately, his choices are not purely his free will. Cris’ choices derive from his
visions as opposed to being free from necessity entirely.
In a sense, Cris is the ultimate version of Aquinas’ illustration of compatibilism. He is
God on the hill, being able to view past, present, and future, and is also able to enact his own
choices. Of course he is limited because unlike God, his view of what we think of as the future is
not eternally extending, since he can only see two minutes into the future. It brings up an
interesting point though. If God has eternal view of time, and our lives and actions, and in certain
orthodoxies it is believed that God is in control and everything happens because it is “God’s
will”. Now let us assume that the hard determinism that the Merovingian presents in The Matrix
Trilogy is in place, but in regards to divine law and not natural law (which is closer to Al-
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Ghazali). If God has infallible foreknowledge, and is the cause for all of our actions, that would
mean that God is a slave to determinism himself. Like Cris, he has power over both will and
foreknowledge, but their actions will still be derived from determinism. God would not be acting
out of His own accord, but because He has already seen that it will be so. This suggests God’s
actions may also be derived from another source, in the same way that our actions come
necessarily from Him. This could mean that either determinism is a force that is independent of
God (like morality in The Euthyphro), or that God is not eternal and has an origin (having to
come necessarily from something else).
Determinism can be seen as the line between being trapped inside of a chain of cause and
effect outside of your control, and living a life in which your choices are your own. Making your
own destiny is seen as somewhat ideal for most. Neo represents the notion of self-determinism,
that we are our own masters and instigate the outcome of our own personal universe. He is able
to bend the world around him so that even natural law is unable to determine anything. Contrary
to all of this, is the hard determinism presented by the Merovingian. He believes that natural law
and chemical reactions (like we see in the film What the Bleep Do We Know) dictate our every
move and each “choice” that we make. Between these two extremes there is the middle ground
of determinism that we see in Minority Report. This would be the soft determinism present in the
life of John Anderton. The precogs see a possible future contingent, but the outcome still relies
on your own free will. Natural law or cause and effect are able to create a chain of causality that
may lead up to a certain event, like with Anderton and his victim, but the outcome will still play
out in whatever way that you wish for it to. What does all of this mean for us? In our everyday
life things happen that seem to be outside of our control. If you are driving on the interstate and
the car in front of you tries to switch lanes and hits someone, then one of those two cars may
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collide with your own car, a causal chain that you had no control over. However, just because
you had no control in the situation, does not mean that there was no element of human control
present at all. The individual in car number one made the ill-advised decision to change into an
occupied lane. That is an act of free will. Now due to natural law and physical cause and effect,
another car was sent into your direction. Car number two and its occupants do not have control
of the natural forces that have no taken over them in the initial collision, but you now have the
choice to swerve or stay on course. With this simple example we see a mixture of natural law
and our own free will. This shows that soft determinism seems to be most compatible with our
own lives, that is, if you choose to believe so.