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.

Metaphysical Questions: can we do away with them?

Given that one of the purposes of Post Modern Philosophy (PoMo) is to eliminate the need for metaphysical questions and adhere to some sort of "language game", tossed out by Wittgenstein and furthered by Rorty, the obvious question has to be then, is it possible to remove metaphysical questions?

Rorty of course, in his "don't want to get trapped in an argument I can't win" style, has relegated metaphysics to some sort of "private language". With PoMo relying upon empirical language and such, what is the place for theories? Are these not metaphysical questions with an official stamp?

For me, Voltaire may have actually had a quite apt knowledge of human spirit when he stated that if "god did not exist, man would create one". It seems to me, that metaphysical questions are a driving force in humanitas.

While I believe that one day Science will be able to map every part of the brain (consciousness, ...), there will still be the question of whether it is truly correct.

So I have to ask then, is it feasible at all to think it is possible to abandon metaphysical questions???