Quotes About Determinism

Is there not perhaps a contradiction between our feeling of freedom and the rigor, as we now understand it, with which things operate in the world?

The apparent determinism of the macroscopic world is due only to the fact that the microscopic randomness cancels out on average, leaving only fluctuations too minute for us to perceive in everyday life.

The Newtonian scheme became an illusion of determinism in a tempestuous world of human actions. Economists became preoccupied with mechanical models of markets and uninterested in the willful people who inhabit them.

from that moment in June 1973 I decided to accept the total contradiction that everything from the Big Bang to the end of time is preordained in every sense and that we are totally free to do whatever the fuck we want.

The will is not free it is a phenomenon bound by cause and effect but there is something behind the will which is free

We like the idea that there's always someone responsible for any given event, because it helps us make sense of the world. We like that so much that sometimes we blame ourselves, just so that there's someone to blame. But not everything is under our control, or even anyone's control.

I think there are events of another category that are likewise not fixed in a causal chain: acts of volition. Free will is a kind of miracle; when we make a genuine choice, we bring about a result that cannot be reduced to the workings of physical law. Every act of volition is, like the creation of the universe, a first cause.

People used to speculate about a thought that destroys the thinker, some unspeakable Lovecraftian horror, or a Gödel sentence that crashes the human logical system. It turns out that the disabling thought is one that we've all encountered: the idea that free will doesn't exist. It just wasn't harmful until you believed it.

Because I think there are events of another category that are likewise not fixed in a causal chain: acts of volition. Free will is a kind of miracle; when we make a genuine choice, we bring about a result that cannot be reduce to the workings of physical law. Every act of volition is, like the creation of the universe, a first cause.

Because I think there are events of another category that are likewise not fixed in a causal chain: acts of volition. Free will is a kind of miracle; when we make a genuine choice, we bring about a result that cannot be reduced to the workings of physical law. Every act of volition is, like the creation of the universe, a first cause.

Free will is a kind of miracle; when we make a genuine choice, we bring about a result that cannot be reduced to the workings of physical law. Every act of volition is, like the creation of the universe, a first cause.

We like the idea that there's always someone responsible for any given event, because that helps us make sense of the world. We like that so much that sometimes we blame ourselves, just so that there's someone to blame. But not everything is under our control, or even anyone's control.

The existence of free will meant that we couldn't know the future. And we knew free will existed because we had direct experience of it. Volition was an intrinsic part of consciousness.

In discussions about free will, a lot of people say that for an action of yours to be freely chosen—for you to bear moral responsibility for that action—you must have had the ability to do something else under exactly the same circumstances.

All our choices, decisions, intuitions, other mental events, and our actions are no more than effects of other equally necessitated events.

Men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.

History does not teach fatalism. There are moments when the will of a handful of free men breaks through determinism and opens up new roads.

Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will.

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.

This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination.

Today I: smoke/am overweight/have a shitty attitude/am depressed because: my mom died of cancer/my uncle put his thumb up my butt/my dad hit me with a razor strop" seems kind of overly deterministic to Randy; it seems to reflect a kind of lazy or half-witted surrender to bald teleology.

And it was the same with many of his habits; elegance was a sign of caste, and he chose to be one of the "workers"—although he had never worked at anything but making pictures and speeches. He chose to believe that everything the workers did was right and that everything the rich did was wrong, this being in accordance with the doctrine of economic determinism as he understood it.

Embrace determinism and you're chained all the way back to the beginning. Of the universe. Of everything.

God plays dice with the universe," is Ford's answer to Einstein's famous question. "But they're loaded dice. And the main objective of physics now is to find out by what rules were they loaded and how can we use them for our own ends.