BF2S Forums Coincidence, believe it?

Nothing happens for a "reason"

Zimmer wrote:

This may be a bit complex to understand at first, but bear with me.

Everything we do technically is not out of choice. Nothing we do is random and everything that happens has been pre-generated.

Take this image : If we had a very very smart person back at the Big Bang, who knew all the current laws of science we know now and all the knowledge of particles and quantum physics, he would have, clearly, predicted that Earth was to be created, and thus, eventually predicted that you would ask this question, or kiss some girl at a party. This is correct, as back then, he could have accurately predicted the location and state of every particle in the universe ( just like we can for the future - technically ).

Thus, from this, we can deduce that these facts are fixed and so you are currently sitting at your computer doing something. I am not denying that it is your CHOICE, but the facts are still there, you were going to do it if you believed it to be choice or not. As you cannot randomly do something without it being able to be predicted.

So technically, there is no reason, there is no real choice and there is no coincidence.

Now, you can argue all you want that there is some "randomness" about the universe, but then again, that may be at a quantum level ( quarks ), and although quarks may be random in their movement and speeds, the particles they create can be predicted. Just like a person cannot be predicted in a crowd, but the crowd can.

yes, i agree that everything that is fixed can be predicted, but that very very smart person that knows everything could not predict what i am going to do.  We have free will, particles, do not.  He could only predict what i do if he could predict what i'm thinking, and he can't.  i don't fully understand your argument, so maybe i misinterpreted.

anyways, i think that coincidence is all mathematics.  There is a certain likeliness for any one thing to happen at any one time, and sometimes we perceive things as a huge coincidence, but really, it was bound to happen.  You could also think of it on the other end of the spectrum, where everything that happens was extremely unlikely to happen but SOMETHING has to happen, and it is just a coincidence that these certain things have happened (i.e. the odds that all my ancestors have met the right person to have a baby who met someone else to have another baby, etc. all the way till i was born, with all of them living long enough for it to work out, was extremely unlikely imo.  But there are always going to be babies born, so there are always unlikely coincidences happening.  sry if that was a poor explanation, it is a complicated subject lol

p.s. if you believe everything happens for a reason, kylef (and people who agree with him), does that mean you believe in a higher power/God?

Canadianloser wrote:

Zimmer wrote:

This may be a bit complex to understand at first, but bear with me.

Everything we do technically is not out of choice. Nothing we do is random and everything that happens has been pre-generated.

Take this image : If we had a very very smart person back at the Big Bang, who knew all the current laws of science we know now and all the knowledge of particles and quantum physics, he would have, clearly, predicted that Earth was to be created, and thus, eventually predicted that you would ask this question, or kiss some girl at a party. This is correct, as back then, he could have accurately predicted the location and state of every particle in the universe ( just like we can for the future - technically ).

Thus, from this, we can deduce that these facts are fixed and so you are currently sitting at your computer doing something. I am not denying that it is your CHOICE, but the facts are still there, you were going to do it if you believed it to be choice or not. As you cannot randomly do something without it being able to be predicted.

So technically, there is no reason, there is no real choice and there is no coincidence.

Now, you can argue all you want that there is some "randomness" about the universe, but then again, that may be at a quantum level ( quarks ), and although quarks may be random in their movement and speeds, the particles they create can be predicted. Just like a person cannot be predicted in a crowd, but the crowd can.

yes, i agree that everything that is fixed can be predicted, but that very very smart person that knows everything could not predict what i am going to do.  We have free will, particles, do not.  He could only predict what i do if he could predict what i'm thinking, and he can't.  i don't fully understand your argument, so maybe i misinterpreted.

Yeah, you didn't fully understand. Your free will is nothing more than an electrical impulse of thoughts through your brain. Actually, it doesn't exist. It's an abstract idea you think you have. That electrical impulse is created by particles colliding with each other in a specific way. That specific particle movment can be calculated by the very smart guy. Therefore, what you do could have been predicted at the Big Bang. There is no denying you still have your choices, but those choices come from a reaction which comes from a reaction which comes from a reaction all the way back to the big bang. Therefore your choices are already predetermined, even if you want to believe they are not.

Um, crazy juice? That's the sort of comment that comes from someone who doesn't understand and doesn't like the idea because its quite daunting.

If anything, this is a balanced and well thought out idea. Emotions? Emotions are electrical impulses in your brain. Of course every person will think something different, but you still can predict what each person will be thinking. I was giving you a singular example. You don't seem to understand this. If you don't want to work today, that is still technically your choice, but it could have been predicted back at the Big Bang... Your actions and your thoughts, if we knew all the particle rules and laws of science, can be predicted to perfection. Why do you think they made the Hadron Collider? You can't understand it because you don't want to. You don't want to agree to the fact that all your actions, whatever they are, emotions and physical, can be pre-determined 6 billion years before you are even born. Thought is just another particle process, like every other. There is no abstract part in any of this, therefore everything can be predicted.

You changing your mind at the last minute and hitting your hand of the desk in anger is not a random reaction. It was caused by a reaction which was caused by a reaction which had a cause ( the big bang ). Even if you think nobody was expecting that, it could have been predicted back then.

A human can perceive whatever they want, but that perception was already known at the big bang. It's all a chain reaction, if you want to believe it or not. Many people can't because they don't want to agree with the fact that free will is just an abstract idea. The big bang made particles move, which made others move, which created the earth and particles on earth created us. So particles inside us are already on a pre-determined path, if you like it or not. We can still control ourselves and our actions are still our own, but that does not mean, for one minute, that we are random with our emotions. We never are. Which means we can be predicted.

Zimmer wrote:

Um, crazy juice? That's the sort of comment that comes from someone who doesn't understand and doesn't like the idea because its quite daunting.

If anything, this is a balanced and well thought out idea. Emotions? Emotions are electrical impulses in your brain. Of course every person will think something different, but you still can predict what each person will be thinking. I was giving you a singular example. You don't seem to understand this. If you don't want to work today, that is still technically your choice, but it could have been predicted back at the Big Bang... Your actions and your thoughts, if we knew all the particle rules and laws of science, can be predicted to perfection. Why do you think they made the Hadron Collider? You can't understand it because you don't want to. You don't want to agree to the fact that all your actions, whatever they are, emotions and physical, can be pre-determined 6 billion years before you are even born. Thought is just another particle process, like every other. There is no abstract part in any of this, therefore everything can be predicted.

You changing your mind at the last minute and hitting your hand of the desk in anger is not a random reaction. It was caused by a reaction which was caused by a reaction which had a cause ( the big bang ). Even if you think nobody was expecting that, it could have been predicted back then.

A human can perceive whatever they want, but that perception was already known at the big bang. It's all a chain reaction, if you want to believe it or not. Many people can't because they don't want to agree with the fact that free will is just an abstract idea. The big bang made particles move, which made others move, which created the earth and particles on earth created us. So particles inside us are already on a pre-determined path, if you like it or not. We can still control ourselves and our actions are still our own, but that does not mean, for one minute, that we are random with our emotions. We never are. Which means we can be predicted.

I understand the idea perfectly Zimmer, you're not the only one capable of understanding anything remotely complex.

Yes everything is a chain reaction, but you cannot predict what will occur in the chain reaction. You can predict what could occur if occurances before that have enabled a certain something to occur.

For example, two people walk into a coffee shop, you know that one of many outcome could occur, but there is no way you predict which one will occur. The most likely is that they will go to the till and order, but there are infinite other outcomes that could occur, they could decide they dont want anything, they could be distracted by something else and not buy a coffee, they could get something else on the menu, someone could come in and rob the coffee shop, the roof could fall down. You cannot predict what will happen, you can't even predict every single 'possible' that could happen.

You cannot predict a person's emotions, admittedly you can for large happening, i.e their whole family dying, they are likely to be upset. But for day to day occurances, there is no way to predict what they will feel and how they will react to those feelings, they may not even act on their feelings at all, but try to let it go. As for predicting their actions billions of years ago, thats nonsense. The events that could have occured are endless, and for each even that occurs, there are an endless number of follow up events. With infinite events occuring in the universe at every single moment, there is no way to predict the future completely accurately.

If you look at the lottery, there is no way to predict that, it is purely chance. There are 49 numbers that could be the first one out, for each of those 49 numbers, in the event that they are first out, the following events have all changed. There is no way to predict event after event after event. Yes you can predict possible events, but when so much of it is down to chance and so much of it is down to free will and emotion, there is no way to predict everyone's actions and reactions. Especially billions of years in advance

bennisboy wrote:

I understand the idea perfectly Zimmer, you're not the only one capable of understanding anything remotely complex.

....

But you don't. Your last post shows precisely why you don't. You cannot use a human being right now as an example of being able to predict someone elses actions. That is not what I am trying to show you. First of all, I said that we would have to know all the particle rules ( which we do not, yet ) and all the laws of science ( we know most of them ) and second we would have to be very smart and go back to the BEGINNING of the universe. I am not even going to go into your example of how we cannot predict people, because it's not an appropriate example. It does not stand in this argument.

Right now, scientists can predict many of the things that will happen in the far future, correct? Well, the same thing applies if you were back at the big bang, just that this time, your tools are 3 million times more accurate. Therefore you can predict everything that happens. Down to your eye jerking. Yes? For example, right now, scientists know for a fact that we will all become a large pile of goo in a few million years by the 2nd law of Thermodynamics ( you better read it up ). This 2nd law can be applied to go backwards as well. Everything was more ordered in the universe several million years ago, and back at the big bang, everything was perfect. Perfect matter ( or non-matter ) and all solid. By this law, the person back at the big bang could have predicted everything up to now. Why? Because the universal law of entropy states that it is ever increasing. This means that the universe is becoming more disordered ( particle-wise ) and thus things turned into liquid and then turned into gas ( becoming more disordered = moving further apart ) and we are alive right now because of this law.

This is precisely why we can predict what happens in the future, but not accurately. We do not have the tools, therefore your example is pointless. Assuming we did have the tools - which can, of course, be obtained. We just do not have the current brain power to figure it out - then we could predict everything. Down to the last particle moving. Which could possibly be one of your electrical impulses telling you that you want to fuck someone.

We can predict what happens in the chain reaction if we know the positioning of those particles, which is the Big Bang, and how they dissipate and change through time ( 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, again ) and therefore we could, in theory, predict everything that has happened up till now. Every thought, every action, every movement. It just is. You clearly didn't understand what I was saying. Once you can predict the movement of particles, there is no infinite number of outcomes. Just one.

MadKatter wrote:

Zimmer's post has merit. People's actions can be predicted, People on a whole can be predicted. However, that doesn't change who is controlling the strings.

(I've taken a theory of knowledge class, statistics, and all of my close friends have taken psych courses. Bear with me )

Bingo, my man. Bingo. As you can see from my posts, I never said someone else was controlling you or your actions and that is what people need to comprehend. Someone who really understands what I am talking about. We are still ourselves, but we can be predicted down to every single particle in our body. We still think and do things out of our own "free will", but those things that have been done were decided on long before we were even born.

Well MadKatter, certain things to tend to go towards the theory that particles are self aware. Like if you fire a beam of photons through a slit, you would expect them to go straight through and make a nice line on the other side, yet they do not and instead they make a pattern. But, if you look closer ( as if you were an observer ) the pattern disappears and a line appears. Weird shit, quantum mechanics, weird shit.

Zimmer wrote:

MadKatter wrote:

Zimmer's post has merit. People's actions can be predicted, People on a whole can be predicted. However, that doesn't change who is controlling the strings.

(I've taken a theory of knowledge class, statistics, and all of my close friends have taken psych courses. Bear with me )

Bingo, my man. Bingo. As you can see from my posts, I never said someone else was controlling you or your actions and that is what people need to comprehend. Someone who really understands what I am talking about. We are still ourselves, but we can be predicted down to every single particle in our body. We still think and do things out of our own "free will", but those things that have been done were decided on long before we were even born.

Well MadKatter, certain things to tend to go towards the theory that particles are self aware. Like if you fire a beam of photons through a slit, you would expect them to go straight through and make a nice line on the other side, yet they do not and instead they make a pattern. But, if you look closer ( as if you were an observer ) the pattern disappears and a line appears. Weird shit, quantum mechanics, weird shit.

I never said that you said someone else was controlling our actions. I just said that they are not pre-determined, and the further you get from an original event in a chain reaction, the harder it is to predict what will occur, until it is impossible

Of course. Anything that ever happens just happens.

If 2 similar things (or whatever the coincidence is) happens, it happens.

Of course quite often 'coincidences' are not coincidences at all, but you have to judge on a case by case way. But yes i do believe in coincidences, i've never even questioned them before...

For example there was this one time. Omg. Does everyone know of the weeblstuff.com animation about kenya. If not, inform yourself. Right well. I was talking to a guy I get along with faaaairly well with on msn one time. Not quite friends but you know, we got on.

Anyway, earlier that day i'd found an msn emoticon of the dancing tiger from the Kenya short, and thought it was awesome. He was the first person to appear online after i'd got it, so i said hi and everything, then brought it up and just said 'Kenya '. And he.. went.. nuts. Swearing at me, telling me I was an awful person etc etc. He had a right rant at me. I had absolutely no idea what was going on, which of course made it even worse cos I was just like wtf's up with you. I asked a friend of his what had happened a few days later, and explained what happened, in detail of course because I knew the Kenya tiger must've set him off.

It turns out that his girlfriend (who he'd been going out with for years and in fact has started a family with now - this was a few years ago) was having to move to Kenya for a few months and they wouldn't see each other at all until she got back. I mean. Wow. Coincidence .

But of course it was a coincidence. How could it not have been? These things just happen sometimes.

Edit: Zimmer your post reminded me that i'm doing the 2nd law of thermodynamics at uni at the moment and i'm crap at it . Going to fail for sure .

Last edited by Spidery_Yoda (2008-11-22 16:47:07)

No, I do not believe in coincidence.

"Half of everything is luck, James."

"And the other half?"

"Fate."

Coincidences happen for a reason.  They put mystery and humor into life.