Quotes About Determinism

Man is defined as the choices he must make. Very well. Above all else, he exists in the present moment, and beyond natural determinism; he does not define himself prior to his existence, but does so according to his individual present.

In ancient times, determinism rested on a belief in an omniscient God. Today, it is not old-time religion but, rather, our culture's newfound faith—science—that challenges the belief in free will.

T]he cascade of discoveries in neuroscience and genetics has created an image of individuals as automata, slaves to their genes or neurotransmitters, with no more free will than a child's windup toy.

In ancient times, determinism rested on a belief in an omniscient God. Today, it is not old-time religion, but, rather, our culture's newfound faith - science - that challenges the belief in free will.

I got involved in cultural studies because I didn't think life was purely economically determined. I took all this up as an argument with economic determinism. I lived my life as an argument with Marxism, and with neoliberalism. Their point is that, in the last instance, economy will determine it. But when is the last instance?

If there was any sin, it was that these people wanted to keep having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but, as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was far too great, and I prefer to think of it only in a Greek or morally neutral way, as mere science, as deterministic impartial cause-and-effect. I loved them all.

If there was any "sin," it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but, as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was far too great, and I prefer to think of it only in a Greek or morally neutral way, as mere science, as deterministic impartial cause-and-effect.

The wave function of this situation is going to collapse quite soon.

Nothing is predetermined for us, and yet all our possible choices are threads in the vast weave of things, so that we have free will even though the consequences of our will are predictable.

Le hasard pur n'engendre que le chaos. Le déterminisme pur ne crée rien de nouveau. C'est l'association de ces deux facteurs qui donne naissance à la richesse et à la variété des formes de la Nature.

The cause-effect sequences in our brains are just as determining, just as inescapable, as anywhere else in Nature.

Keynesianism, if you add its flexible, muscular form during the Depression to its more rigid postwar version, lasted forty-five years. Our own Globalization, with its technocratic and technological determinism and market idolatry, had thirty years. And now it, too, is dead.

I would say that all traditional philosophies up to and including Marxism have tried to derive the 'ought' from the 'is.' My point of view is that this is impossible; this is a farce.

Wyndham Lewis is basically a pessimist, thinking of human beings as doomed animals or determinist machines. His theory of satire is based on this view, and he finds plenty of evidence to support it in contemporary practice.

God's will determines all the choices and circumstances of his creatures, so that nothing is up to man's "free will." In fact, because God is completely sovereign, man has no free will:

The Bible denies that man has "free will." Although the will of man exists as a function of the mind, it is not "free" in the sense that it can operate apart from God's constant and complete control.

Although even Christians often assume that human beings possess free will, it is a pagan notion that finds no support from the Bible.

If the human mind makes decisions based on factors, causes, and influences not chosen by the mind itself, then these decisions are not free.

Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.

Deus sive Natura: God or Nature. The phrase encompassed Spinoza's radical notion that God and nature might be one and the same. It was the springing-off point for Spinoza's mind-bending contentions about extension, determinism, and more.

In a universe in which past, present, and future came into existence all at once, complete from beginning to end, with all possible outcomes of every life woven through the tapestry, there is no chance, only choice, no luck, but only consequences.

if Prigogine and Stengers are right and chance plays its role at or near the point of bifurcation, after which deterministic processes take over once more until the next bifurcation, are they not embedding chance, itself, within a deterministic framework? By assigning a particular role to chance, don't they de-chance it?

Creer en el determinismo entrañaría una aterradora pérdida de los conceptos con que discutimos la moral, por ejemplo, el elogio, la censura, el lamento o el perdón.

If behaving as though we had free will or God exists gets us results we want, we will not only come to believe those things; they will be, pragmatically, true.