Quotes About Determinism

The children of blame are cynicism and hopelessness. When we succumb to believing that we are victims of our circumstances and yield to the plight of determinism, we lose hope, we lose drive, and we settle into resignation and stagnation.

While we are free to choose our actions, we are not free to choose the consequences of those actions. Consequences are governed by natural law. They are out in the Circle of Concern. We can decide to step in front of a fast-moving train, but we cannot decide what will happen when the train hits us.

That language comes from a basic paradigm of determinism. And the whole spirit of it is the transfer of responsibility. I am not responsible, not able to choose my response.

As an example, shifting your pencil from one side of your desk to the other today could change the gravitational forces on Jupiter enough to shift its position from one side of the Sun to the other a billion years from now. The unpredictability of the solar system over very long times is of course ironic since this was the prototypical system that inspired Laplacian determinism. (Tremaine, 2011)

Laplace's Demon, the hypothetical imp that knows the instantaneous positions and velocities of every particle in the universe, was said to be able to calculate the entire future or past by plugging these values into the equations that express the laws of mechanics and electromagnetism.

The idea that the language people speak controls how they think—linguistic determinism—is a recurring theme in intellectual life.

According to Linguistic Determinism, the language we speak is the language of thought, or at least structures it in major ways.

Every event has a cause--that is ... for every event e1 there exists an event e2 (or a class of events e2, e3 ...) which precedes e1 and of which e1 is a necessary consequence.... If we assent to this statement then your "choice" to do A rather than B, whatever may have been at the time your sensation of freedom from any constraint, was entirely necessitated. You could not have done otherwise and hence, according to this conception of freedom, were not free.

To those of us who remained committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism.

No writer, in truth, is ever really a free agent. What he does in his trade is determined not only by his immediate environment and the ideational currents of his time, but also and more especially by the play of inherited forces and predispositions within him.

A determinist perspective designed to ensure the people's docile acceptance of the circumstances of their existence: the king, the state, the land?

In the whole theory of the material world, Cartesianism was rigidly deterministic. Living organisms, just as much as dead matter, were governed by the laws of physics; there was no longer need, as in the Aristotelian philosophy, of an entelechy or soul to explain the growth of organisms and the movements of animals. Descartes

The implication of the free-will doctrine are not realized by those who hold it. We say "why did you do it?" and expect the answer to mention beliefs and desires which caused action. When a man does not himself know why he acted as he did, we may search his unconscious for a cause, but it never occurs to us that there may have been no cause.

Zeno believed that there is no such thing as chance, and that the course of nature is rigidly determined by natural laws.

Intellectually, I believe there's no free will.

To hold that the Qur'?n believes in an absolute determinism of human behavior, denying free choice on man's part, is not only to deny almost the entire content of theQu r'?n, but to undercut its very basis: the Qur'?n by its own claim is an invitation to man to come to the right path (hudan lil-n?s).

Yates's determinism, like Flaubert's, was a matter of knowing his characters well enough to know their fates, and making the reader see this, too. Just as one never expects Emma to repent of her infidelity and embrace provincial life, one also figures the Wheelers won't move to Europe and live happily ever after. Their weaknesses, well defined at the outset, mark them for a bad end.

It's the same with menus and men and just about anything else: we think we're choosing things for ourselves, but in fact we may not be choosing anything. It could be that everthing's being decided in advance and we pretend we're making choices. Free will may be an illusion. I often think that.

I myself have adopted the position that, in fact, we never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not.

Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are determined.

How, then, does an order of causes which is certain to the foreknowledge of God necessitate that there should be nothing which is dependent on our wills, when our wills themselves have a very important place in the order of causes?

Actualmente mucha gente piensa que vivimos en un mundo predeterminado que sigue un derrotero fijo y establecido. Las decisiones pasadas nos han legado la polución, la despersonalización y la suciedad urbana; alguien decidió por nosotros y ahora nos enfrentamos a las consecuencias.

We need to work hard to fend off our natural tendency to view what happened as having been inevitable. Our minds simply want to explain what happened and close the case, but the world followed but one path among many possible ones. If we do the Rain Dance and it rains, then to the human brain, it looks like the dance caused the rain. In the more rational part of our brain, we know it's not true. Yet we dance on.

Historians imposed false order upon random events, too, probably without even realizing what they were doing. Amos had a phrase for this. "Creeping determinism," he called it—and jotted in his notes one of its many costs: "He who sees the past as surprise-free is bound to have a future full of surprises.