Wrote It, Just Need To Get It Out Of My System

According to our current best understanding of physics, the universe is deterministic. That is to say, if you had a perfect knowledge of the position, spin, charge, and momentum of every single particle in the universe you could in principle predict everything about any future state of the universe as a Schrödinger wave function with 100% accuracy. Without getting into esoteric math and physics, this literally means that the future is as fixed as the past.

(In fact, the only reason we remember the past and can't remember the future is that the second law of thermodynamics produces an artifact called the "Arrow of Time" which points from lesser to greater states of entropy — but that's a subject for a whole 'nother gigantic wad of cosmology and WAY more than I want to get into here…)

Of course we DON'T know the full description of every single particle even in a tiny piece of matter or space, never mind the universe. Just a raw accounting for the particles in any piece of anything we can apprehend is beyond our capabilities.

The future's ultra-sensitive dependence on initial conditions means even a vanishingly tiny uncertainty results in extreme and geometrically compounding outcomes. Popularly known as the "Butterfly Effect" this is described in chaos theory and explains our utter inability to predict much of anything with more than the most trivial short-term accuracy. Future states are, in fact, so unpredictable in a macroscopic world due to the limitations of our Knowledge Of Everything that it's more useful in our subliminal blip of a barely existing finite lifetime to go ahead and treat it as if our decisions actually affect it.

Treating the universe as if we determine any part of it is an emergent phenomenon related to consciousness. Both are illusions when considered at the Laplacian microscopic domain, of course. But we don't live at that level, and that description of the universe is not just useless but impossible when describing macroscopic things and events.

Our domain is "emergent" from, but not inconsistent with, that impossibly fine-grained and detailed domain. In our coarse-grained domain, we can describe things that have no meaning in the microscopic domain. In our world, macroscopic, coarse-grained descriptions of the universe are useful in that they let us call a chair a chair, instead of making us describe every single property of every single field involved in the microscopic interactions that cumulatively express chair-like properties.

The baseline microscopic reality is that "There Is No Spoon". But understanding that also means we understand that we control none of it, not even in principle. The most useful way to deal with the universe, in fact, is to realize that the only things we can control are our reactions to it. This is again an emergent property, and does not exist in the clockwork, microscopic domain of particle and field theory. But it is as useful in our domain, and as valid, as treating the coarse-grained description of a chair as "real". It's certainly more correct (or less incorrect, as you prefer) than a worldview in which we believe we can change anything outside ourselves.

Once we sort that out, we can get on with not concerning ourselves with the part of our lives which results from things we can't do anything about (e.g., nearly everything) and focus instead on our own internal happiness, morality, and peacefulness.

 In Our Next Episode: Fiction of some sort. Or truth suitably disguised by lies, as you prefer.

P.S.:  Was out to dinner with the Beneficiary tonight. A chain steak restaurant, it attracts a lot of families. We were seated in a booth where people headed for the restroom passed by. In particular, a mother was herding her little girl that direction. The girl was seven or eight, had wild black hair that seemed vaguely out of control, and was dressed in a full-blown, bright pink, Disney-style princess outfit which, it was clear, she was wearing just because that's what she wanted to wear today. Lots of layers of satin and chiffon. She was as proud of that dress as I've ever seen a kid proud of anything. 

She looked at me haughtily as she went past, and I wouldn't have dared to say anything to her about it even if I'd been so inclined. After the appropriate amount of time, the door to the restroom hallway slammed open, and the pink cloud of princess came gallomping back past our table, laughing and paying no attention to her mother, who was in hot pursuit and trying to fix the hem of the dress on the run.  The little girl, you see, had managed to snag it in the top of her left COMBAT BOOT, and made it ride up.  No delicate slippers for THIS stylish little princess.

I hope my grandsons all meet one just like her someday.