Fate and Chance: of Movies and Life

Think about these things as you read this.
1) Fractals
2) Classical vs Quantum Mechanics
3) Psychological Priming

Recently I've been wondering at the subtle beauty of psychological priming and how I have little revelations from having something already on my mind and then exposing myself to some new unknown stimuli. It's the principle of sleeping on it, keep it in the back of your mind and the world around you will give you ways of interacting with other issues that you haven't tried applying to the current issue, often with great success. In retrospect it is an activity I use on alot of my issues. I am a big 'stew'-er in so far as when I am confronted with an important decision, even if I am already mostly sure of my response... I still want a day to stew on it. I want time to leave this framework and allow the universe to engage me in other frameworks that might shed new light on the situation. I prime myself with the issue... in fact I think it would be hard not to be primed when confronted with a big decision, and then just live my life normally and see what comes to me.

This relates to fate in a particular way that occurred to me after watching No Country For Old Men yesterday. Early in the movie one character is trying to describe the captive bolt pistol that the bad guy uses (as shown in the previews), to no avail. Somewhat later, Tommy Lee Jones is talking about something else entirely and comments about how the process of animal slaughter has changed since he was a young man and, in effect, describes how a captive bolt pistol is used to do so. Whether he makes the connection is not revealed. But this is an excellent example of priming, where there is a situational backdrop and the events in the foreground reveal new mysteries, that were before unseen.

There is another part of No Country that ties in and I find very interesting. It is best expressed in a scene where the bad guy tells someone, quite creepily, to call a coin toss. The implication being that if they get it wrong, he will kill them. He is having this scene play out with a man and tells the man the story of the quarter, made 20+ years prior and gone through a thousand hands to come here and decide if he will live or die. The paradox here is that it is the fate of this quarter to decide by chance whether this man shall live or die. That is a very interesting idea. I interpret it much along the lines of fate setting the board and placing the pieces, but still it being chance that determines the outcome. As per my intro thoughts, this reminds me of physics. Everything behaves according to Classical Mechanics, except where all the action is happening. If you throw a ball up, you can know it's path and the time it takes to complete that path... but that is the 10,000 foot view. What is really happening when you look at that ball and the air on an atomic level? Is the air actually going around the ball or through? Is the ball all it's own the whole time or is there some flux born entity made up of air and ball? Fate is the path that cannot be undone, but what the real story is the chance that all lines up to make it happen...or not happen.

"As above, so below" is a paraphrasing of part of the message on The Emerald Tablet", written by Hermes Trismegistus and considered the source of magic and alchemy. But it gets me thinking, and already primed by concepts of fate, lack of a unified physics, and a recent blog entry... just how deep is the rabbit hole? Is it the nature of all things that they can be understood at a macro level but at some point become unknowable? Maybe everyone does meet their soul-mate, and all you can hope to do is not be hung up on your last fling when it happens? Perhaps we have a system where right now there is fate and that is (to some omniscient being) knowable, but when the next fated encounter occurs all is thrown to chance and we zoom in one level on our Mandelbrot Set of Fate, where everything looks basically like it did before, but just so slightly different. Life will go on if you make a bad impression on your soul-mate and never end up dating, just like it has for everyone else that did the same, the only thing that will have changed is that you might not become a believer in soul-mates and the future now has very very slightly more green eyed people and less blue eyed people because of it.