Just how much is everything predetermined?

Today we're going to look at determinism and think about the question about how much everything is pre-determined. I'm going to start with the example of football, as it's March, close to the end of the football season in May. There's a lot of discussion about which teams are going to win the title, which teams are going to be relegated from their divisions, and - from those divisions lower than the Premier League - which teams are going to get promoted.

The Championship: English second tier football

The example I'm using here is the Championship, which is English second tier football and the division below the Premier League. We're looking at the current full table with games played (GP), games won (W), games drawn (D), games lost (L), goals scored by the team for the team (F) and goals scored against the team (A), goal difference - which is the difference between goals for and against (GD), points (Pts) and form. When it comes to form green bars are wins, red bars are losses and small dots are draws.

In the Championship you have twenty four teams who play each other twice, once at their home ground (home matches) and again at their opponent's home ground (away matches). This gives you 46 matches to be played throughout the course of the season which starts in August and ends in May. The Premier League (top tier) has twenty teams who all play 38 matches home and away. The Championship is considered the tougher league mainly because of fixture congestion. Matches are generally played on Saturdays and sometimes Sundays, but in the Championship there are also mid-week matches so teams can play matches every 2-3 days for periods just to fit all the matches into the season.

Consider that if there was such a thing as determinism then it would be clear which team would win the title, which teams would be promoted automatically (top two teams), and which teams would qualify for the play offs (four teams below top two positions) at the very start of the season. But see football and all competitive sports are not like that. Looking at the current top of the table, you have Leeds and Leicester both on 82 points. You have Ipswich on 81 points. Nothing is certain or determined at all and we cannot even say for sure how much is pre-determined.

You see more than anything sport, and not just football, is determined far more by possibility and probability. There are many different variables at play here, even right down to the performances of individual football players and decisions taken by football managers. Even the results of individual matches is not a given or a certainty. At this stage in the season a couple of losses or even draws in succession, or even an injury to a key player, could spell disaster to any of the top three teams and mean missing out on promotion to the Premier League altogether. This is why competitive sports such as football are so attractive and also explains the very close relationship between competitive sports, races and gambling. There's always opportunities for money to be made by someone.

So just how much of our reality is pre-determined?

So we come back to the original question.... You see to make any statement about anything in the future, you have to accept that there is a future to begin with, and that the future exists in the here and now. But when you take a step back and really think about it, you may begin to realize that this throws up some real philosophical problems. If reality is entirely predetermined, then one of the very first casualties is truth. You see in a predetermined reality you think and feel what you think and feel because you cannot think and feel any other way.

Okay so how can you seek truth or know what truth is without coming up against the possibility of illusion or falsehoods? How can you be right if you don't know what is wrong?

You can't because this would mean that I believe what I believe because I can't help myself, and you believe what you believe because you can't help yourself. There is no way to approach truth without the possibility of illusion, falsehood or error.

However there is some level of predetermination baked into our reality. You cannot have bodily contact with water without getting wet. You learned that putting your hand in fire or something very hot results in pain and getting burned probably very early in childhood. You know that when it is dark then day will follow night, just as human beings generally have a head, two arms and two legs attached to a body. These are just a few examples of how some degree of predetermination is baked into our reality. If there wasn't, then what would be the value of belief?

But the predetermined can also involve variables

There was a study done some years ago in the United States among parole board judges which discovered that the outcome of parole hearings was relative to the relationship between the judge hearing the case and food rather than the law and the prisoner's conduct. This discovery was based on the finding that the closer the judge was to having eaten some food the more likely it was that the prisoner would be granted parole and released from prison. Conversely the hungrier or less satiated the judge felt when hearing the case, the more likely it was that the prisoner would be denied parole.

I can give you an even better example. The death penalty exists in over half of all US states. Generally speaking, if you murder someone in the course of a felony (arrestable offence in the UK) or the nature of the murder is especially heinous or cruel, you can be charged with capital murder - which if you're found guilty and convicted can result in a death sentence. It's all written down in statutes, laws, what qualifies and what doesn't, who is eligible and who isn't. Yet if you look at how this all turns out in practice you would not be able to determine what is capital murder as against what isn't capital murder. It's a crap shoot.

This is further evidenced by the fact that the vast majority of states with the death penalty on their statutes don't often schedule executions and even in the states which execute relatively often - currently Texas and Oklahoma - murdering someone is far more likely to end up in a life sentence than the death penalty. The reason why comes down to cost more than anything else. Capital punishment is incredibly expensive when compared with life imprisonment. Securing the state's right to execute just one prisoner can easily run into millions of dollars over decades. Most counties which bring prosecutions, even in states such as Texas and Oklahoma, simply don't have the resources or public funds to apply capital punishment with any degree of fairness or justice.

Generally speaking in the United States capital punishment exists for political rather than social reasons.

Duality and non-duality

If you dig deep enough online, particularly on Youtube, you should find a debate going on regarding free will and determinism. You don't have to dig that far to find it. It's just another example of discussions and debates people have online which is centred around some duality or either or choice - left v. right politics, whether God exists or not, and so on. My point here is that getting caught up in thinking in dualities or polarities - for example moral reasoning - has a tendency to distort your perspective because existence itself, and life, isn't particularly dualistic in nature. It's non-dualistic.

I spend a lot of time in life, and indeed the main point of this blog I'm writing, is to highlight the meta-physical nature of life and existence and also reveal some of the secrets of the occult and what we understand to be mysticism. There's some degree of self-interest, as I'm trying to promote Qultura which I've spend decades developing, but generally I'm here to level out the subtle nuances of life, the mysteries, so that what seems mysterious and counter-intuitive makes perfect sense.

So I'm going to leave you with the yin yang symbol, which to some people symbolizes Taoism and the Tao Te Ching. It's very similar to the Creative Law meme. You have yin which is white, the negative, feminine principle and yang which is black, the positive masculine principle. Yin is the north side of the mountain, and yang is the south side. But see it's neither yin nor yang which is important here. It's the space between yin and yang which is the most important. How so?

One mantra I keep repeating over and over again is 'All existence is change, all existence is relationship.' See it's not possible to exist without also being relative in some way to everything else in existence. So generally when you take up one position in any debate based on duality, you either discount or dismiss the other position. Inevitably you end up with a distorted perspective and skewed thought processes. The key is to understand that both positions in duality are relative and usually also dependent on one another for their existence. Take for example physical form and space, reality and possibility, free will and determinism, and so on. You cannot have one without the other.

See one thing I've noticed about people is that generally they focus on the form and the position, and not on the space, the environment and relationship. But see all too often it's understanding the space, the environment, and the relationship which helps you to understand the position, the form, the individual and the perspective. This means that generally many people try to understand the individual without understanding the environment and the relationship, which is separateness, the primary illusion that most human beings buy into to some degree. So what you end up with is a lot of people not understanding the relationship, the individual and getting the wrong end of the stick.

And that's where all the problems, arguments and conflicts begin....