The concept of a fate has been around for millennia, even today. The idea that the events in your life are determined before they happen, and they will inevitably go as it’s planned, including random events and your choices, is a very powerful one. Fate is often claimed to be written and in the hands of divine powers or something supernatural, who may or may not be willing to change it as they please. Quite ironically, fate is also sometimes in the minds of those who reject divinity altogether, describing it as a consequence of the laws of science. For those former ones, mathematics, physics, and chemistry have already determined what’s going to happen now and in the future, as it can’t be in any other way, including human decisions.

The existence of a fate eliminates the idea of free will. It essentially draws our human minds as simple naïve observers, lacking any might to change anything that’s going to happen, as their choices are already decided before they face them, and the outcomes are set beforehand. For fate, free will is no more than an illusion, and scientific evidence seems to be pointing nowhere but in that direction. Observations so far seem to indicate that our minds and thoughts are formed in a physical location, more specifically our brains, which when damaged or modified, directly change our behaviour and memory. In short, our free will seems to be nothing but chemistry and a chunk of our body.

This implies that human decisions are caused by natural phenomena, chemical interactions of substances in our nervous system, independently of how complex those are to predict and determine, thus they’re inherently deterministic. They even may be predicted as a result of logical causes: our conduct has been studied for a long time, and human actions don’t look random at all, but in some ways predictable, and understandable. From involuntary impulses to complex decisions, the outgoing actions we carry out are not completely unpredictable, if not at all, and psychologists and etologists dedicate their time to research what causes them, and what effects some stimuli has on us.

Even if we assumed that the chemistry causing our actions is so complex that it would be impossible in practice to precisely predict our behaviour, the fact that it’s predetermined prevails, and its implications as well. Natural phenomena dictating our actions and thoughts erases free will from the equation altogether, turning our sense of choice into an illusion. This may not sound all new and unexpected, but it also implies that knowledge is also an illusion. After all, knowledge, our discoveries, research, and beliefs, is all in our minds, which as we argued, is all part of a deterministic physical reality. In other words, it was set beforehand that we would discover set theory, general relativity, or discuss Hard Determinism; it was determined a priori that we would realise that it was so. It’s even a weird sentence to put into words.

This Hard Determinism removes randomness out of the picture. After all, if an event is random, its outcome can’t be predicted before it happens with complete certainty, thus events like flipping a coin or rolling a dice are, in principle, not random; they only appear random to us. However, Physics, in particular Quantum Theory, may disagree from this idea. A main foundation of Quantum Mechanics is that some events can’t be presented in a deterministic way, but in a random probabilistic manner. For example, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle tells us that we can’t tell with absolute certainty the position and momentum of a particle, such as an electron, or put in an other way, we can’t tell where that particle is and where is it going at the same time with no error. The distribution of electrons around an atom’s nucleus is also given in a probabilistic form, in what are called orbitals, which are regions of maximum likelihood of finding an electron.

The famous “Schrodinger’s Cat” metaphor also has links to probability. Subatomic particles have what’s called a spin number, which takes up one of two values, and when not observed, it is impossible to tell which one of the two it will have, having each 50% chances, until an observation is made, at which point we can see which spin number the particle had.

Quantum Theory points us in the direction than randomness is not only an illusion, but an undermining property of the Universe we live in, and the presence of such aleatory events may suggest that the world is not completely deterministic, if at all. However, despite Quantum Mechanics has proven very good at describing phenomena at a microscopic level, down to the size of atoms and molecules, it ressembles nothing at all macroscopic and astronomical events. Tangible objects, people, planets, and galaxies do not behave in such a probabilistic manner. They occupy a very well defined region of space with precisely measurable speeds, and the current theory that best describes their interactions and behaviour is Einstein’s theory of Special and General Relativity, together with Electromagnetism.

Relativity and Electromagnetism, just like classical Newtonian Physics, are completely deterministic, and virtually leave no events open to chance. Just like in the example of flipping a coin or rolling a dice, their apparent randomness comes from the huge number of variables and complexity in precisely predicting their motion. In fact, though dealing with events at a microscopic level, Chemistry describes interactions between substances in a rather precise way. Chemical reactions produce certain amounts of products and energy out of certain quantities of reactants, which can be measured and predicted beforehand. It’s not random how much carbon dioxide is produced when burning a certain quantity of ethanol, it can be measured, just like how much energy will such a reaction release.

Being that we understood our thoughts and ideas as generated by electrochemical receptors inside our brains, despite our glimpse into Quantum Physics, they might as well be a deterministic process, one that, in principle, can be predicted a priori. This would imply that none of our decisions is freely taken, as they could’ve not been in any other way, turning reality into an inevitable chain of events in which we are simple spectators with the illusion of choice, freedom, and participation. All of that information is not written in the mystical way that mythology tells, nor in the hands of divine powers, but as a consequence of the laws of nature and it’s mechanisms.

This also implies that the amount of information contained in the universe is constant, as knowing all the variables in advance and all the laws that relate them provides a complete picture of how will the entire Universe develop. Not only could you describe the whole of human existence, but you could also precisely predict every event in it, from the formation of every star and planet to their destruction and fate along the eons, just like knowing the position and velocity of all the particles in Earth’s atmosphere at an instant would enable you to predict with absolute precision the weather at any point on the planet’s surface.

In essence, information is about what repeats in a pattern and what doesn’t. If we consider strings of digits, not all strings of digits contain the same amount of information, and not necessarily related to the string’s length. An infinitely long string of one digit contains very little information, much less in fact than a non repeating finite one. A random string of digits contains maximum information, as it cannot be compressed in any reliable way. This indicates us how information seems to deeply correlate to what is random, and thus how disorderly it is. If something isn’t random, we can say it’s orderly, as it obeys a pattern.

Thus, information is quite a lot like order, and the more disorderly a system is, whether it’s digits in a number or the positions of particles in a substance, the more information it contains. In Physics, and roughly defining it, entropy is a measure of disorder in a system. A high entropy system is a highly disordered one, just like a substance in gas state is more disordered than in a liquid, and that is more disordered than when solidified. Following our chain of equalities, entropy roughly indicates how much information a system contains.

This correlation contradicts what we intuitively developed previously, due to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which tells us that the level of entropy in the Universe is increasing, thus the amount of information in the Universe is increasing with it. In consequence, the amount of information available in the past, whether it was before the formation of the Solar System or twenty seconds ago, is smaller than the amount available now, hence insufficient to perfectly describe the events of the present based upon it. In other words, the information available now is not enough for the events of the future to be completely deterministic, and the constant increase of entropy over time makes the events further and further away in the future, harder and harder to describe precisely or accurately.

Some physicists have pointed at those quantum mechanical uncertainties as the source of such increase in entropy, hence information, in the Universe, giving a rather tidy explanation from the point of view of science. However, does this also bring back the idea of free choices in our equation, or are they completely unrelated? Again, those uncertainties are critical at a very small scale, but are they relevant to the physical processes that, apparently, may rule how our thoughts form?

They might not, after all. The effects of those uncertainties are minuscule for the sizes we’re talking about. Despite the apparent tiny dimensions at which chemical processes take place, the level at which those uncertainties are tangible is even tinier. It’s hugely disproportionte, and isn’t really enough to explain the amount of information our thoughts may be generating. Perhaps our thoughts really are foremed in a deterministic manner, and free choice is nothing but an illusion, yet the future isn’t written in advance. Furthermore, those events are randomly occurring, and even if their effect weren’t negligible, it does not really leave a gap for an actual free choice, as it would mean that we are in control of those events, ruling out their probabilistic nature.

We’ve been developing scientific thought in order to fulfil our curiosity about the reality we live in a reliable way, one that can prevail across the times and from person to person. Could it be that such scientific evidence is now telling us that the curiosity that fuelled and fuels it was inevitable, together with our mistakes about it? Have we been fooling ourselves in thinking that our interest for knowledge is deliberate? Perhaps we have, and as uncomfortable as it feels, our freedom of thought is more an illusion caused by our ignorance, than a right derived from our natural state.