Is our fate determined?

precognition. But as precognitions exist that reach across decades and even centuries, one could even regard it as a support in regards to the concept of determination of everything that happens. That other authors feel uncomfortable when faced with these ideas is understandable. They profess that they are able to ascertain a free will and they refer to their daily experience of being able to think and generally act the way they want to. They see the evidence for this in the way they can do something unusual or change a decision at any time. But they see this as incompatible in regards to the physical processes taking place in the brain, if they are subject to the law of causality. A marginalised observer often gets the impression that a kind of unexpressed transcendental super- reality is taken advantage of when it comes to the functions of the human spirit and its free will. A little of this is expressed by the American parapsychologist Professor Rhine 3 . He writes: “Our culture for instance presupposes that the spirit differs from the physical body to a sufficient degree that makes the assumption of “free will” possible. Such a freedom of expressing one’s will means that the spirit has its own laws and that the laws of the body and the environment therefore do not or at least not completely control it. They allow it a certain freedom from physical determination, a certain independence in regards to actions. The physical apprehension of the personality on the other side subjects every physical activity to physical laws and leaves no room for a separate freedom. One and the same system of causality, one and the same kind of law therefore applies to the realm of the spirit as well as that of the body. This is why the question of whether the spirit is merely a function of the brain or not, is for us and for the human society generally speaking of decisive importance . Because: • Our society’s philosophies would collapse without the freedom of choice. • No ethics, no true democracy, well not even a science in the form of free research would exist without free volition. If one’s spiritual life is utterly a product of the brain’s physiology then it seems that nothing a human being undertakes can escape the physical legalities. Freedom is then just a fantasy and an ethics subjected to physical laws is nothing more than an utter delusion”. 4 2. 0 THE SPIRIT AND THE PROCESSING OF INFORMATION The points of view expressed so far are going to be scrutinised somewhat closer under the aspect that the human spirit is a system that processes information. 5 The spiritual side of life is the decisive factor for human beings, whilst the biological functions like metabolism, growth, procreation and heredity only play a supporting function, that is to say, make the spiritual life possible. One can generally describe spiritual life thus: It consists of the consciousness (the ego-awareness), of thought processes and the opportunity to act according to the thoughts after a decision of will has been made, the opportunity to collect and to learn from the experiences communicated by the sensory organs, the collection of memories and the opportunity to arbitrarily utilise these memories through the processes of logical thoughts and the triggering of emotions and by these emotions themselves, whereby joy plays a specifically important role. Life consists of the absorption, retention, processing and transference of information from a physical and cybernetic point of view, that is to say, signals that are transferred through physical energy and 3 J. B. Rhine, former director of the Parapsychological Institute at the Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA. 4 J. B. Rhine, Die Reichweite des menschlichen Geistes , Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart 1950, P. 20. 1 5 H. Grünewald, Schaltplan des Geistes , Rowohlt Taschenbuch, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1971; F. Marfeld, Kybernetik des Gehirns, Safari-Verlag, Berlin 1970; P. Glees, Das menschliche Gehirn, Hippokrates Verlag, Stuttgart, 1971.