6 TEST TYPES OF TEA, WRITE OFFICIAL LOOKING LETTERS TO FINALISTS ASKING THEM TO EXPLAIN WHY THEY MISSED AN EXAM, BUY A SIM CARD AND TEXT GOSSIP

Life proffers unavoidable certainties, tenets that anchor us to a universal human experience. Everyone will grow old and everyone will die. 1.43pm will follow 1.42pm unfailingly, day in, day out. If you do not refill the fuel tank, the car will eventually run out of petrol.

Undeniable certainties such as these fascinate literature and philosophy; we all remember foolish Dorian Gray’s efforts to defy age and death, the

inexorable levellers of human existence. Forgone conclusions are strangely comforting in an increasingly senseless 21st-century world. I will die. You will die. Life will not go on. There is safety in simplicity.

Thus these inviolable facts can be defined as

INEVITABLE (‘CERTAIN TO HAPPEN; UNAVOIDABLE; A SITUATION THAT IS CERTAIN TO HAPPEN.’). And from inevitability, one might approach the concomitant concept of predetermination. If inviolable facts are established (again, cite death and the passage of time) then one might argue that every human’s fate is predetermined. You have been born, ergo you will

We are surrounded by apparently random events. Say you’re heading back to college from lectures: go one way and you might bump into your future partner, or a best friend, (or have a life changing conversation with a Big Issue seller). Go another way and you might get knocked down by a bus. Every little decision can have completely unexpected ramifications. However, since Newton, physics has led us to believe in a deterministic universe. Every

physical event has a physical cause and effect. Furthermore, these causal relations can be predicted using nomological laws. In short, assuming that everything there is, is physical (none of this crap about immortal souls and the like) Newtonian physics gave us the fascinating conclusion that if we knew the positions, energy, and direction of every particle in the universe, and we knew the physical laws governing them, then we could predict every future event accurately. There was no longer any room for randomness, at least not on a microscopic level. However things appear to us can be explained given time and effort. But the introduction of quantum theory changed this

Predestination vs. Chance

JAMES NGUYEN ARGUES THAT THE ONLY ORDER WE CAN PERCEIVE IN THE WORLD IS ALL IN THE MIND.

IS INEVITABILITY ITSELF INEVITABLE? PHOEBE LUCKHURST PROVIDES AN INTRODUCTION TO THE TOPIC.

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