Dead Indian Poet

FATE OR NO FATE? March 15, 2010

FATE

PART – 1

Is there such a thing as fate? Is there a certain force or some kind of entity that determines it before hand? Is there a formula that can pre-decide the outcome of events. Fate is a notion or a stereotype that people have come to accept. Or, something that can be blamed if things go wrong. Or even something that can be held responsible for the result of an uncertain exercise should it go wrong.’Fate’ of routinely, scheduled, standard or habitual experiments or undertakings can be determined by scientific formulas and from previous successful and similar experiments. This is because a study has been carried out for years and, for a specific type of action that has been carried out, there is certainty in the type of its reaction or outcome. For example, we know that the sugar will certainly dissolve and disappear when mixed with water and stirred. We can say that is the ‘fate’ of the sugar (and/or of the water) with high levels of confidence because we have seen it happen a thousand times before. And we must also appreciate the fact that, that fate was decided by science, by the nature of the two entities and their reactions to each other. We also know from great experience, if we keep adding sugar to the water, that we will reach a quantity after which no more sugar can dissolve to become one with the water, because the water is said to have saturated. This too, is the ‘fate’ of the sugar (or water). In another example, if a person keeps eating high cholesterol content food, he is prone to putting on weight and highly susceptible to heart attack. This has been proved from the past trends by doctors. Hence we can be confident about this fact too. And if such a person grows fat or suffers a heart attack, we cannot blame it on fate. It is his own doing and had he been more careful, he would have been able to prevent such sore outcomes on himself. According to me, there isn’t any imaginary force that pens down the consequences of different actions. Every result of every proceedings on this earth is purely scientific in nature, I would like to believe. The nature of the end result depends upon the nature of the entity and how it reacted to another, or under which conditions it was put through.

For example, consider a young boy running very fast on a path. Along the way, his mother calls out his name from one side. So the boy turns his head and looks in the direction from which his mum is calling. He loses focus on the path ahead and bumps into a metal pole and ends up knocking his head hard against it. He loses his balance and falls awkwardly on his fragile hand and breaks it. And his trailing leg grazes against the rough ground below, and sprains badly. He lay there crying as his mum ran to the scene to investigate and empathize with the little boy. Five years later, the boy is without one hand and walks limp because the sprain on his leg never healed. His brain is functioning less than half of its normal capacity because the skull was too fragile to prevent the impact from reaching his brain. Now, as relatives and friends visit the family of the little boy, they sympathize with the boy and blame it on fate. They often say , “Poor kid. What sort of fate did God write for him?” This is bullshit. No one wrote the kids fate. The present state of the kid was decided purely by science. By the nature of the constituents of his body. And by the way he reacted to the situation that led to his depressing condition. Let’s analyze.

The boy was running just fine before his focus changed from running, to finding out where the sound came from, and what possibly his mother wanted to say to him. Had he continued looking straight and focused on running until he stopped, I ensure that this would never have happened. His body is made of material that was not able to withstand the impact of the metal pole or of the hard ground beneath. At that speed, according to the laws of nature, if the pole and the skull were to collide, the one to suffer damage is the skull or brain due to repercussions. It is known scientifically that metal is the harder of the two and is bound to withstand the impact and all the kinetic energy of the collision will be transferred to the softer entity which was the boys head. It was not pre-written by some ultimate and invisible force that the boy should have his brain dysfunctional. Secondly, as he fell to the ground awkwardly on his hand, it was bound to break. Once again from physics, it is justified that the hand was the weaker member when compared to the rest of his body. And also, the rest of the body is about 7 times heavier than the little hand of the boy. If a heavy thing were to fall on a lighter and breakable item, the lighter and weaker of the two is bound to be overwhelmed by the heavier. It’s the only way science works. And still on this topic, had the boy been a little more experienced (learned/ trained), he would have known to quickly withdraw his hand from under the area where his body was going to fall. It’s called motor skills – once again scientific. We all know from artificial intelligence and from biology that the brain learns from experiences and it trains itself using some chemical and electrical signals. The boy had never come across a similar event before in his life, so he did not have the motor skill or muscle reflex to remove his hand from underneath his falling body. And since he was a little boy, he still had to develop his muscles and bones so that they can be a little stronger to withstand such impacts with a better protection. Thirdly, he fell to the hard ground only because of the rules of science, not because he was meant to, or because it was prewritten in some book under his name kept in a vast memory cabinet of a huge imaginary super computer. He fell plainly because he lost his balance. We know from science, that if something with a mass and volume and with a defined shape, has its centre of gravity outside of its base, then that item is bound to lose balance and fall to such a position that a new base is formed for the new position of the centre of gravity to remain vertically within. The kid bumped his head hard on the pole, and because of inertia, part of his body continued moving forward, while the other part of his body was brought to an abrupt stop, which caused the centre of gravity of his body to fall outside of the base which was his stride length. So the body tried to arrange itself to a new position so that a new base can be found in which the centre of gravity can make the body remain stable. And that new base, unfortunately, was the entire height of the boy which now lay flat on the ground so that the emotionless centre of gravity can lie comfortably within the bounds of it. Once again, he had little time to think, or possibly lack of motor skills, to avoid the twisting of the leg thereby spraining it. As the boy hit the pole hard, his brain was suffering from the impact and therefore could not process other critical information apart from sending out signals of pain to the muscles and triggers to the lachrymal glands to release huge amounts of tears for the eyes, and to the adrenal glands to release adrenaline for the high respiration rate to cope with the physical and psychological trauma, and to the larynx to produce high pitched wails and cries as an alert system sort of like an ambulance or prison siren to warn nearby people that something has gone wrong. So the brain, even if it was well trained in motor skills, had limited time to process so much information, and thus the boy could not prevent his leg from getting twisted and sprained. As he fell to the ground, he grazed himself badly not because he happened to be on a rough ground; not because it was written in his ‘fate’ that he shall lose concentration while running at that particular time and place; not because he had a previous life of bad deeds; not because his parents had been naughty and needed to be punished – he fell there at that time purely because of science and the laws of nature. As his centre of gravity was displaced, he had no control over his body and gravity took over. If not for gravity, the boy would have fallen with much slower acceleration and landed on the ground softly like a balloon, but we all know as much as we would have liked it for the little boy, gravity is gravity. And we need it more than we didn’t need it at that time when the boy fell down. It is physics. We can say with great confidence that it was in fact gravity which caused the boy’s fall after the impact and not some fate written under his account before he was even born.

From this example, it is evident that every result physical in nature on this earth, is completely the work of nature as we know it. And such results can be documented and their formulas formulated. If we know the input to a system whose nature we know, we can most certainly determine the output of such a system. And that would be the ‘fate’ of the inputs. So, from this we can conclude that fate has a similar meaning to result /product / consequence.

So the ignorant people who are blaming the outcome of the boy’s depressing condition on fate and on some imaginary entity for having pre-decided it, are very wrong. We have put in the dictionary some words just so that we can blame them. When some events occur which are out of our reach to rectify or prevent or cancel out their negative effects, then we look for someone or something to which we can dump all the responsibility to. We have come up with non existing concepts to throw the blame on. If there is a big tsunami or earthquake or volcano that is out of control of human aptitude, then the blame is put on an imaginary fellow called God. And we soothe ourselves knowing that it was God who did it, because we like God. So if he did it, he must have done it for a good reason because he knows everything, and he knows what the right thing to do is always. If we blame it on God, we feel less affected by the pain, and in a way find that stable comfort state much quicker than if we hadn’t anyone to blame. The fate of everything in this world is decided by science. And we can learn about it from studies, previous experiences, generating and proving formula and the likes.

Fate, according to the dictionary is the force or principle believed to predetermine events. This force is nothing but physics or science or nature. And when they say believe in the dictionary they are tending towards theology. And from the above discussion, we can safely say that the result of anything on this earth has nothing to do with mythology. If there was really such a thing as fate that was pre-decided, then the writers of this fate are none other than the scientists collectively from various fields who have investigated and proven laws that govern various entities under different conditions.

The next time I hear someone saying it was written in his fate, I will slap him/her, because that is just being ignorant and stupid. However, this is not all there is to fate. It is much more complicated than just this much. We have thus far only discussed how fate is related (or not) to things with a definite nature, things that exhibit standard characteristics every single time, routinely and scheduled undertakings. How would we relate fate to activities or experiments with random and chaotic reaction? I mean there would not be any formula, or past experience or reference to conclude the result with even a slight accuracy. Then what becomes the determining factor? For example, the minds or people, their reactions to different emotional exposures, or the influence of a third party that could totally change the point of view of the person thereby changing the way he would react? I wonder if science still plays a role in such cases, or have we made haste in ruling out the God factor? Could fate really be a thing of existence after all? Find out on the next Fate.

-dex

13/03/10