✱This piece is a continuation
This text is the direct continuation of Terminology 7: The Resolution of Destiny, Design, Will and Flexible Determinism on this site; the author himself refers back to the earlier piece at the outset. Since it is a separate post on Medium it stands here as a separate article, but it is not the eighth part of the `Terminology` series — the series the author declared has seven parts. The Turkish is the author's own pen; the English is a translation.
In the previous piece we touched on how the chain creation → design → determination/guidance is a dynamic process operating for every being in the universe. This time we shall examine the same truth through a multi-scale lens.
Three lenses
A multi-scale view of the same truth
Information theory
Summarises events of an “unwritable” breadth
Emergent concepts
Gather countless microstates into a single sentence
Quantum physics
Carries the idea of an “open system” onto scientific ground
Four criteria for a sound belief in destiny
TRIGGER
It must direct one to God
Belief in destiny must turn a person to God in every circumstance.
STATE
It must not sever effort
It must not hold one back from effort and striving.
STATE
It must accord with observation
It must be at peace with scientific observation.
OUTCOME
It must stand logically
It must be able to stand on logical ground.
Against the misuse of belief in destiny, two narrations meet us:
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“O Messenger of God! Do the recitations we make seeking healing, the medicines by which we are treated, and the precautions we take, turn back anything of God's decree?” — “They too are God's decree.”
— Ebû Huzâme'nin babasından — Tirmizî, Tıb 21
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“Are you fleeing from God's decree?” — “Yes — we flee from God's decree to God's decree.”
— Hz. Ömer'in Ebû Ubeyde'ye cevabı, Şam seferinde veba haberi üzerine — Buhârî, Tıb 30; Müslim, Selâm 98
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What is really happening here is that a human decision (scale-1) selects a new path within the universal decree (scale-∞). The multi-scale view explains the tension between will and destiny harmoniously.
Information Content and the Paradox of “Writing Destiny”
Imagine a closed system of N objects, each described by K parameters. Let us even make time countable (discrete, T ∈ ℕ). Now imagine a text that records, in order to define every state of the system 100 %, the position of each object and all of its pairwise, triple — all — relations with the others, for all times.
How the idea of “writing destiny in full” defeats itself
TRIGGER
Write it in natural language
The information content of such a text far exceeds H ≈ log N + log K + log T — because natural language is optimised for robust communication by “a human of limited memory”.
STATE
Compress it into mathematics
The information can be compressed into generalising formulae. But then, to resolve every event 100 %, a computation must be run — which is equivalent to living those events.
STATE
Record it directly
The objection from al-lawḥ al-maḥfūẓ: recording all that happens with a divine recorder looks at first like a solution. But that recording is already like living the events a second time; the space, objects and persons within it would have no destiny in the classical sense.
OUTCOME
Therefore: a summarising operation
Encoding destiny at a scale we can grasp is necessarily a summarising act; there is no other way.
✱The term — computational irreducibility
Computational irreducibility: for some systems there is no shorter route to a future state than simulating it step by step — no shortcut formula. This is the author's key move: if fully resolving destiny requires computing it step by step, then computing is no cheaper than living. The concept is due to Stephen Wolfram; the author cites the Wikipedia entry directly.
Moreover the universe is not closed in any absolute sense; it is a system left open by God's will. Hence the idea of “writing it in full” or “recording it in full” defeats itself on informational grounds. And indeed there would be no meaning in things and events being written down somewhere in 100 % identity with themselves.
Events possess lower entropy — fewer options — at the moment of actual existence than the information they carry. Even a video recording adds new information when it attempts to reproduce that moment.
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Which means that destiny is in fact a generative, dynamic pattern — like the source code of a computer game.
Emergent Concepts and Phase Space
A further matter: the concepts we use in writing or recounting an event are emergent concepts. That an object's temperature is 30 °C, for instance, corresponds at the molecular scale to ≈ 10¹²⁰ — or far more — distinct microstates.
The same statement, two scales
Macro scale — a single value
A single temperature that we measure with a thermometer and write down: “30 °C”.
Temperature is a kind of average behaviour of the molecules' energies
An emergent statement: “I shall keep the glass at 30 degrees”
→If an emergent statement is written, that statement is a pattern corresponding to a volume in phase space at the micro scale — not to a single point.
Micro scale — an enormous volume
The same statement corresponds to a region of invariance in phase space.
If I swap the velocities of any two molecules, the average behaviour — the temperature — does not change
Any point within that volume realises the statement
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“So-and-so will die at such-and-such a junction, struck by a lorry.” Even if this sentence remains true, at the lower scale there are almost infinitely many possible realisations: the lorry's model, its tyre pressure, the air temperature, the driver's pulse…
At the level of emergent language a single sentence encompasses, at the microscopic level, a phase volume of indigestible breadth. To read destiny is to meet such a multiplicity. After these examples, do you too not find the notions of flexible determinism and destiny-as-pattern more reasonable, more organic?
“The Pen of Destiny”: Not What Is Written, but What Writes
When Bediüzzaman speaks of destiny he pointedly uses the phrase “the pen of destiny”. Destiny = the dynamic writer; the universe = a book that is read. That is, destiny is not a finished text but a living programme of execution.
What destiny is, and is not
A one-off text, finished and closed.
Something written, read through and done
→
An execution engine that keeps running at every moment and can respond to inputs.
What writes — not what is written
Generative, like a game's source code
Public Benefit and the Balance of Belief
“Its good and its evil are from God.” Destiny is named among the articles of faith so that a person may know he is not without an owner in the moment of anguish. Even events that appear devoid of wisdom may, at a wider scale, be doors opening onto mercy.
Two extremes, two losses
Everything is written in advance and unalterably.
→The multi-scale model of destiny both preserves human will and offers a “window of wisdom” onto events.
Nothing is determined; all is pure chance.
The Scientific Layer: The Quantum Wave Function
✱What the wave function does, and does not do
The quantum wave function (ψ) maps the possible states — but does not determine which will be realised. Definiteness arises from the joint interaction of observation + system + environment. The author's conclusion: the electron's final state is the destiny not only of “the electron” but of the rest of the universe as well. So long as the system is open, the notion of a “fully definite state” never becomes more than a theoretical limit.
What the multi-scale understanding of destiny achieves
1 · It summarises
Through information theory it summarises events of an “unwritable” breadth
2 · It gathers
Through emergent concepts it gathers countless microstates into a single sentence
3 · It grounds
Through quantum physics it carries the idea of an “open system” onto scientific ground
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Belief in destiny should be a means that brings one nearer to God; it should not weaken will and effort; it should be at peace with scientific observation and be lived within intellectual consistency.
✱About the author · series
This text is Felsufi's own view, taken from the original piece on Medium; the site has applied no editorial refereeing. The sources of the two narrations cited are preserved as the author gave them (Tirmidhī, Ṭibb 21; Bukhārī, Ṭibb 30 and Muslim, Salām 98). The phrase the pen of destiny belongs to Bediüzzaman Said Nursi. For the first part of this essay see Terminology 7 on this site; the notions of emergence and phase transition are developed at length in Terminology 5: Macro/Micro States.