Fate

In a recent conversation I told a friend that Fate was the same thing as Luck.The Lorenz attractor justifies this belief.

Luck is something that can be defined as something beneficial that happens to us that is not in our  direct control. Sort of like walking down the street and finding a $20 bill. The bill was lying there randomly and we were randomly walking there and found it. But it was all math.

Fate is something that pushes us towards a "thing". We choose to ride a bus and when we get off we walk into a person. That person is attractive to us and we exchange numbers. A year later we marry that person. That is Fate. And that is still math.

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The above is the math for the Lorenz attractor aka the Butterfly Effect. Basically, whatever we send out influences things and those things influence what we have to work with. This is what people who cite "yin yang" mistakenly identify with.

Fate and Luck are nothing more than the forces of Nature being influenced in such a way that it affects outcomes in our own lives. They are not mystical things at all, but results from computations. We do something that reverberates and that reverberation rebounds upon itself.

To return to the examples, the $20 bill could have been lost by anyone and found by anyone. A cop driving down the road could have found it. It was not our luck. Most likely we were following that path to get to a destination and just happened upon it.

To run into a person and then marry them? This is less Fate than something random. Any person we run into could be a person that we end up with, but for the most part, the people we run into are just random ones. Some can contribute to our lives and others are just background noise.

Is this an example of the Matrix? Maybe. We can never know if that's the actual truth...unless mathematics says so. But until disproved, Fate and Luck do not exist.

Sartreian Freedom

As an atheist, Sartre denied that man is born with certain values, that man is born with universal ethics. As such, man must define freedom through his own actions. Freedom, in a classical definition, is to be without restraint. Sartre attempted to expand that definition by asserting that man was a prisoner of his own freedom, and that freedom was the only source of values. In short, man decides his values as he discovers his freedom.

As such, it matters not what side of a battle man sides with, so long as man acts with “good faith”, chooses the good of an action. Man, being his own source of freedom, establishes his own values. To deny introspection, to not choose to act for the good, leaves man in anxiety and acting in “bad faith”. Man must not act as others act, in a universal good, because that would remove introspection, would render the decision bad. Being born without a hierarchal system of values, man continually builds his own. As such, man is able to destroy the hierarchy with each choice and establish a new one. Man, realizing that he is the source of values, the fount of freedom, will only choose to adhere to his freedom. Man then, with a god removed, is his own judge.

Sartre was emphasizing that freedom is subjective, in that, man and man alone is capable of understanding his own freedom. Sartre believed that most men hide from their freedom, in denial of it, and adopt the deterministic values of society and/or theology. Attribution to external sources is utter denial of inherent freedom. Things influence things, but man, as an actor, is not a thing. Man is responsible for himself. To act differently makes man inauthentic, and man renounces his humanity.

To further extend freedom, no man has rights, as rights are external things. Rights are determinism. A ruler has the right to rule because the citizens deny their freedom in a Nietzscheian slave-morality as they accept passively the values set before them. Rights
have no ability to guide one’s action, to determine conduct. Man, being aware of his freedom, creates his own values, his own hierarchies. As such, even a revolutionary, one who battles for the freedom of all, denies his own freedom, as a revolution carries its own values and rules of conduct, ethics.

Sartre has established that man being free determines his own values, and as such, those values are mercurial, changing with each situation. A man who must choose between family and country can not rely on established values, but must determine his own action. Man must act for the good. How each man determines the good is man’s freedom. Freedom then is an active form, is not in stasis. Man who resists freedom is in a continual form of anxiety, as he must determine
to act for the good, to create his own values with each situation.