Blog Post #1

Personally I don't see anything as pre-ordained. The very idea of pre-crime--being able to predict the future--is just like Minority Report; science fiction. I read Emerson's "Fate" last year in AP English, and because of the amount of time and effort we put into analyzing it I feel inclined to draw from that essay: decisions that people make are inevitable, and the thought process that leads up to those decisions make illustrate just how inevitable they really are, but nobody can predict what exactly those decisions are going to be.

Ignoring polytheism for a second, it is noteworthy that Oedipus kills his father and marries his mother directly because he is told that he will do that and tries not to. Although trying not to do something (fleeing fate) most of the time doesn't lead to doing that thing (fulfilling fate), it does inevitably lead to doing another thing. So with free will, personal responsibility, brain chemistry being the means and fate being the end; the "means" can be predicted and the "end" cannot.

For example, while I was taking pictures for the Sophomore Journal I knew that that was what I was doing, but I did not know if it would be something that I could rattle away on my college app or if it would lead me to join Associated Press or if would make me get sick of photography and dabble in some other hobby. As a high school student, if I were to work towards a particular outcome in my distant future--perhaps I want to get a PhD in archeology and spend the rest of my life lecturing at museums and universities--I would inevitably either lose interest or veer off course towards another self-made ideal of my fate. Our fate is unknown, and thinking about it makes us even more hopeless.