I was recently researching the difference between Fatalism and Determinism.
In Fatalism - Nothing can change what will happen, it will come about whatever is done.
In Determinism - Everything changes, therefore everything in principle can be changed.
Now this confuses me, because, can't Determinism lead to Fatalism or the other way around? Every change is already fated, there's no will, it will happen the way it is going to happen.
Fatalism is a purely philosophical question. Aristotle, AFAIK, was the first to offer a philosophically-based argument for fatalism (which he didn't believe to be true), and then tried to show why this argument fails. His argument for fatalism was better than his counter-argument.
The argument he made rests on the truth-value of statements. Imagine I say "it's going to rain in Boston tomorrow". That appears to be a logical proposition. Logical propositions have truth values, and although we can't know the truth value of such a statement when it is made, we will tomorrow: either it will rain, in which case I was right and what I said true, or the opposite.
Either way, if one asserts that the statement has a truth value when I make it, then it is (like all propositions in classical logic) either true or false. If it is true, then
necessarily it will rain tomorrow, because otherwise my statement wouldn't be true. If it is false, then
necessarily it won't rain tomorrow because otherwise my statement would be true.
The hangman paradox is one argument I use against the type made by Aristotle. On a given Sunday, a judge tells a man sentenced to die two things:
1) That the man will be hanged some time before the week ends,
&
2) That the actual day will be a surprise.
The man reasons that if he makes it to Friday, he will be hanged on Saturday. But he will
know that he will be hanged on Saturday, and therefore it won't be a surprise. As it must be a surprise, he can't be hanged on Friday. But what if he makes it to Thursday? Well, we know he can't be hanged on Friday, and as it's Thursday he'd have to be hanged that day. But once again it won't be a surprise.
This reasoning goes on and the man logically determines that he can't be hanged.
So when he is hanged the next day, he is surprised.
One way of approaching this paradox that I find illustrative is that it depends upon the truth value of statements concerning the future, and under the assumption they have truth values, logical deductions using them fail.
Fatalism is simply the belief that something, whether God or propositions about the future, entails that everything is fated to be.
Determinism is another beast entirely, although this is a relatively recent change (and it is not always true; determinism is still sometimes used as a synonym for fatalism).
When physics began to be more and more developed and the sciences deemed to be different than a type of philosophy, determinism was applied to systems (e.g., the solar system or mixing dropping pellets of pure sodium into water). The origin of physics is mechanics: the study of how things move in what ways and when and why. So we develop a formal language (mathematics, and in particular calculus) that allows us to write down models/equations of planetary motion or how much force it takes to push a bolder on the top of a hill so that it will roll down.
Equations like F=ma and classical kinetics enable one to model systems such that we know in advance how they will be have. Given a fully developed prototype of a Steyr IWS 2000 with a barrel length 47.24 inches (and that is equipped with a hydro-pneumatic sleeve to reduce recoil), a factory scope with a properly aligned MOA for a range of 1,000 yards (that is then further modified just before firing to account for the direction of wind, temperature, etc.), and loaded with a 15.2mm 540 grain Armor Piercing Fin-Stabilized Discarding Sabot round that has a muzzle velocity of 4757.29 feet per second, I can tell you how many inches of homogenized (rolled) steel armor the round will penetrate at that range (1,000 yards).
The more accurate my instruments for ranging, temperature, air pressure, humidity, wind velocity (keeping in mind that velocity is speed with a direction), etc., the more I will no exactly what will happen before I fire.
That's a deterministic system (not just the rifle, but the entire process, the round, the target and the target's material make-up, etc.). I can determine in advance what will happen. In classical physics, determinism went from being more or less identical to fatalism to describing models which determine the outcome of some system in advance. And as scientists became very good at doing this, eventually it was just sort of taken as given that all systems were governed by deterministic laws such that if you had Laplace's "demon" (not to be confused with Maxwell's demon, which concerns a violation of thermodynamics), you could determine everything that will ever happen. And within classical physics, determinism was a sort of assumed postulate as there were no nondeterministic laws. If we couldn't predict something exactly it was because whatever tools we were using, from our math to our measuring devices, weren't adequate enough.
Determinism of this type is not purely philosophical but fundamentally a matter of physics. What makes it a matter of philosophy now is the advent of modern physics which is no longer purely deterministic laws, nor is time an independent entity. Both relativistic physics and quantum physics yield different possible answers to determinism. In the former, at most we can say that if the quantum world is deterministic, it's very hard to see how. In the latter, movement in space is movement in time (they aren't separate concepts). So a star that you've looked at your whole life every night may very have never actually been there since long before you were born. However, as light travels at a finite speed, you are always seeing the past. Furthermore, a the laws of physics hold in every frame of reference, changes of coordinates in 4D geometry (specifically Minkowski) mean changes in a position of spacetime.
Two sentient beings may have similar frames of references with respect to "time", much like the way everyone on this planet does. However, it can also be true of a being hundreds of lightyears away. The problem is that at that distance, angular movement and the resulting change in coordinates means that the "now" of the sentient being (which right before experienced a "now" like we do on earth), can suddenly be a "now" hundreds of years in the future relative to our "now", or hundreds of years in the past. Arguably (and it has been argued), this entails determinism: every "now" the past for some other planet and the future for some other planet. Therefore, every "now" is happening, was happening, and will happen depending on coordinates in Minkowski space. It's true that those observes on planets with "future nows" relative to our "now" cannot (at least as far as we know) know what's going on in their "past" and our "now" until the distance between us in "time" (i.e., a distance metric in Minkowski space) has passed (i.e., if their "now" was 100 years in the future relative to our "now", they could only learn what was happening at our "now" after 100 years). However, they are still 100 years ahead of our "now".
