Predestination and you

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for the original Terminator and Back to the Future Part I.

The other day, something got me thinking of predestination/determinism (i.e. the idea that all things in the universe are set in fate) and its use in popular culture. While predestination usually deals with a specific type of determinism in a religious context, (i.e. who will be saved and who won't), I'll be using this term because the word "determinism" itself is pretty obscure, unless of course you were a college philosophy major and ended up either becoming a professor or working at Barnes & Noble.

Now, let's get to the point. A wise character (I believe it was Neo from The Matrix, although I'm not sure) said "I don't like the idea of fate, because I'd hate to think that I wasn't in control of my own life." When my random train of thought hit this particular station over the weekend, I realized how often the predestination paradox and similar concepts come up in fiction. Remember the classic song "Johnny B. Goode" by Chuck Berry? In the first "Back to the Future", while Marty McFly is back in 1955, he joins the band onstage at the prom, performing Berry's classic hit (which didn't come out until 1957). Although everyone who's seen the movie remembers how he finished the song by borrowing from every band from AC/DC to Hendrix to Van Halen, leaving the 50's crowd shocked ("I guess you guys aren't quite ready for it, but your kids will love it!"), something else happened in that scene. In the middle of the rendition, the band's regular guitarist Marvin Berry calls his cousin Chuck so he can hear that "new sound" he's been looking for. This means that, within the fictional "Back to the Future" universe at least, no one actually wrote the song and that it just exists in the time-space continuum, that it just is. Furthermore, those who remember the original Terminator know that the guy who the future John Connor sent back in time to protect his mother before he was born was also the one who impregnated her with John, meaning that the leader of the human resistance, was bound by fate to exist, creating a "chicken or the egg" paradox.

We've all heard the cliches about this, like "If you shoot your grandfather before your dad is concieved, will you fade away?", but these movie scenes have really got me thinking. I'm not a philosopher, and I don't claim to know the meaning of life or understand the concept of God, but what if we really are just pawns in a predetermined series of events? What if we really don't have any control over our lives, and whatever will be will be regardless of how much control we think we have?

Metaphysics is a bitch, isn't it?

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