Board Thread:The Last Sovereign Discussion/@comment-27713488-20180327004110/@comment-31808207-20180409050222

For point #2, I'm not sure it actually doesn't matter. The nature of the person or force doing the predestining can have a significant impact on how that predestination is perceived. Tell an Atheist that his life is predestined by God and he'll say lolno, tell him that his life is predestined by the interaction of physical forces and he might agree. Conversely, tell an Al-Jabiriyah Muslim that everything is predetermined by the will of Allah and he'll agree, tell him it's predetermined by faceless uncaring cosmological forces interacting and he'll probably call you a heretic and.or infidel. I agree that the two might be indistinguishable in terms of their effect on the world, but the distinction has a significant effect on the observer's reaction to that effect in many cases. Which is potentially relevant both in-universe and to our out-of-universe discussion of what would be a "good" or "bad" way to play destiny.

Speaking for myself, I'm of the opinion that you do need to have an undeterministic universe for choice to be meaningful because otherwise choice doesn't exist. It doesn't matter how unique that action may or may not be if there was only one thing you actually -could- do in reaction to the situation. There's no agency involved. It's the difference between watching a movie and playing TLS. The movie can still be a good story, but trying to say the outcome involved viewer agency would be silly.

My own attempt to put what Leto was saying into the situation you desribed would be, the circumstances might be such that the man didn't honestly have any realistic likelihood of choosing not to stab the other. Maybe stabbing the other man was (from his perspective) the only way to save his family. So, from his perspective the situation is technically a choice "kill him or not kill him" but the circumstances are such that it's realistically not a choice at all. Which isn't necessarily predetermination, but now take that to a less clear-cut situation where there are moral implications of both killing and not killing. Is the outcome still assured? If you could somehow replay the scenario a hundred times, will the man doing the killing always make the same choice in the same momemt?

Thinking about it, Simon's comment when he chose to absorb the first seed of corruption comes to mind. "It doesn't matter if there are an infinte number of choices, because being able to choose any of them would mean not being a person at all." He does acknowledge that sometimes there's not really a choice even when there's technically a choice. The question is, is there -ever- really a choice or is our answer to any situation just a function on the circumstances and who we are?