I've been thinking about fate a lot lately, so I decided to write down my thoughts. Tarun, one of my colleagues, sees life as a pilgrimage—a journey where only certain significant waypoints are marked, passages we're destined to reach. The rest lies in our hands. So the destination is fixed, but how we travel there depends entirely on ourselves, on our free will.
I find myself largely agreeing with this view, BUT... There's one nagging thought that won't let me rest. Come with me to a crossroads where a young man stands, caught between two paths. One path—to his left—is comfortable, short, straightforward. The other—to his right—stretches longer, more tangled. By an act of free will, he chooses, say, the left path.
But here's what troubles me: could he have chosen otherwise? After all, he's a creature shaped by his preferences, his history, his convictions—like any other human being. What if we rewound time to that exact moment, let him choose again under identical conditions, without any memory of what followed? Wouldn't his freely reasoning mind arrive at the same conclusion, choose the same road? Because the same mind, with the same makeup, facing the same choice, would think the same thoughts?
Think of something you've done that still brings you shame. You wouldn't do it now—you've learned, you're wiser. But then? That person in your past—who happened to wear your name—could he truly have acted differently, given what he knew and who he was? (Though to answer a strict 'no' feels like a slap across our own face...)
Let me move to something more technical. Imagine a device—an enormous hard drive—capable of storing a perfect copy of the world. Everything. Life, the universe, all of it. We've copied the world as it was in 1960 onto this device. Now we can play it back at leisure, watch it unfold like a film. In principle, there are two possible outcomes.
In the first case, despite the device's theoretical perfection, something we call chance will always intrude. So when we launch our replica of the world for the first time, events may unfold as history knows them, but in another iteration, some unforeseen crisis could trigger World War III, and in yet another attempt, the author of these very words might never be born at all—all of it the ripple effect of those small contingencies that ultimately shape the free choices people make.
In the latter view, we invoke chance merely as a crutch—something to steady our minds as we grapple with systems and relations so bewilderingly intricate that human understanding cannot fathom them (much as ancient peoples once blamed the gods for thunder).
So perhaps there is no such thing as coincidence at all; it is simply our name for complexity we cannot grasp. Which means that if we ran an infinite number of copies of our world, we would arrive again and again at this exact moment—me striking these philosophical musings into the keyboard, and later still, you, dear reader, encountering them on the page.
I find myself drawn to this second path. And note well: nothing I have said here denies the existence of free will (quite the opposite), nor does it strictly demand that we can predict the future (though it doesn't rule that out either).
If I may add one more rational thought: this is far from being merely idle philosophy. Contemporary science, particularly quantum physics, grapples with it seriously from every conceivable angle, and philosophy has been circling this question for millennia without settling it. So the riddle remains: Are we truly the authors of our own lives? Or does each of us walk a path already written, and will what must happen inevitably occur?