Well fatalism discounts your actions and choices as being deterministic of your ultimate fate… that some things were always meant to be, whether you ran into traffic every chance you got or only sat at home playing video games, those fated things would happen.
Determinism states everything that happens is determined by everything that happened before… so your thoughts, actions and choices would very much play a role in determining your ultimate fate, but those same thoughts, actions and choices would too have been determined by previous thoughts actions and choices as well as the influences of the outside world etc.
People who believe in autonomy as distinct from determinism/randomness believe themselves to be supernatural, imposing their will on the natural world through their bodies but remain, partly, apart from and immune to the influences of the natural world and thus remain autonomous. They have trouble reconciling neurological disorders, the effects of drugs and brain chemistry with this view and often contort themselves into odd shapes to try and maintain it… either by denying those things and instead claiming other supernatural forces at play, claiming that such brain manipulations only make it difficult or impossible for us to command our bodies, but our will and mind remain intact or some other such invention.
Now having said all that…
I have to ask you… what is the minimum requirement for a choice?
Let’s say a man has a woman and her baby held hostage at gunpoint and gives you two options, which you magically know to be true:
- He shoots you, then he kills both of them right here and now in front of you as you bleed out
- You ask him nicely… and he will let them go, hand you the gun and turn himself in to the police
Now you could argue, that those are only options if we discount you… you being who you are and having the values that you do, would (I hope) “chose” option 2 every single time without fail. That this is a foregone conclusion and would be perfectly predictable to anyone who knew you in the least.
Yet those are still options, no?
and that remains a choice, no?
So let us say that we take ourselves to be part of our brains…
You may ask yourself, should I go make myself a snack or sit here and read MMP’s post, given determinism are those even choices?
If we discount your character (in this case those brain parts), do you have options about what to do next?
The answer is yes (even given determinism)… but just like the example above, if we knew your character well enough… the choice would likewise be perfectly predictable.
You suggest that this seems like a trick of language… but I honestly fail to see how.
The one making the choices is YOU… So if your character should turn out to be immaculately definable and thereby perfectly predictable… how does that in any way change the nature of choice?