Quotes About Determinism

El hombre es un artefacto determinista metido en un universo probabilístico

For me, the single most important question is how to construct a society that is just, safe, peaceful - all those good things - when people finally accept that there is no free will.

"You," your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

So a child's path is already determined by age five, provided his or her parents have enough knowledge, foresight, and indeed money. Very few poor or less educated parents have the resources or knowledge to make these choices so early on.

It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset.

Baruch Spinoza, who said, "There is no mind absolute or free will, but the mind is determined for willing this or that by a cause which is determined in its turn by another cause, and this one again by another, and so on to infinity.

Is everything we do determined by the cause-and-effect chain of genes, environment, and the cells that make up our brain, or can we freely form intentions that influence our actions in the world?

If you time-travel to the past, you can't change it any more than you can change the value of pi. If you travel to the past, you are, will be, and always were part of the past, the very same past that leads to your traveling to it.

Free will is the sensation of making a choice. The sensation is real, but the choice seems illusory. Laws of physics determine the future.

Wellspring looked grave. "You realize that an entire future destiny might accrete around this momentary utterance? It's from just such nuclei of free will that the future grows, in smooth determinism.

As Schopenhauer said about free will, you can choose whatever you desire, but you're not free to choose your desires.

Schopenhauer said about free will, you can choose whatever you desire, but you're not free to choose your desires.

Unlike many later atomists, and unlike his Stoic rivals, Epicurus rejected determinism not only in the physical realm but also in the realm of human agency.

No program can say what another will do. Now, I won't just assert that, I'll prove it to you. I will prove that although you might work till you drop, You cannot tell if computation will stop.

For if phenomena are things by themselves, freedom cannot be saved. Nature in that case is the complete and sufficient cause determining every event, and its condition is always contained in that series of phenomena only which, together with their effect, are necessary under the law of nature.

Nothing happens by blind chance.

By the mechanism of retrospective determinism we will find the "cause"—actually

To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality impossible.

If everything from the furthest planet to the smallest atom of our brain acts according to Newton's law of motion, what becomes of free will?

If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could.

Why did Communism collapse so precipitously in 1989? We should not indulge the sirens of retrospective determinism, however seductive. Even if Communism was doomed by its inherent absurdities, few predicted the timing and the manner of its going.

política cuántica», que describe cómo el mundo clásico de la física postnewtoniana (lineal, predecible y, hasta cierto punto, incluso determinista) había dado paso al mundo cuántico: altamente interconectado e incierto, increíblemente complejo y también cambiante en función de la posición del observador.

che significa che siamo liberi di prendere delle decisioni, se il nostro comportamento non fa che seguire le leggi della natura?

what does it mean, our being free to make decisions, if our behavior does nothing but follow the predetermined laws of nature?