Quotes About Determinism

Our wills are simply not of own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have

Speaking from personal experience, I think that losing the sense of free will has only improved my ethics—by increasing my feelings of compassion and forgiveness, and diminishing my sense of entitlement to the fruits of my own good luck.

No human being us responsible for his genes or his upbringing, yet we have every reason to believe that these factors determine his character.

No human being is responsible for his genes or his upbringing, yet we have every reason to believe that these factors determine his character.

How can we make sense of our lives, and hold people accountable for their choices, given the unconscious origins of our conscious minds?

It solves the problem of "free will" by ignoring it. How can we be "free" as conscious agents if everything

Without free will, sinners and criminals would be nothing more than poorly calibrated clockwork

We prattle about free will, but we're nothing but response . . . mechanical reaction in prescribed grooves.

It is his incurable illness to regard the accidental as necessary.

We all have choices. But our decisions are already known.

There have always been arguments showing that free will is an illusion: some based on hard physics, others based on pure logic.

Show me one neuron that has some cellular semblance of free will. And there is no such neuron.

I used to very politely say that if there is free will then it's in all sorts of boring places, like whether you're going to pick up this or that fork as you begin your meal. There really is none: It's all biology.

make the determinism certain.

Determinism in relativistic quantum mechanics is called unitarity. Determinism in all forms of physics is concerned with time evolution.

we can think of determinism as working backward as well as forward in time.

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

Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will." Jawaharlal Nehru

La pregunta que nos asalta es: ¿sólo podemos escapar del determinismo gracias al azar de una vida sin sentido?

Si la vida de una persona está sujeta a sus circunstancias, sus memorias, sus aptitudes y sus tendencias, es difícil encontrar un espacio para la libertad, pues parece sometida a una estructura determinista. Pero si la persona, para tomar decisiones libres, pudiera ser insensible a su entorno y a su pasado, entonces viviría una vida sometida al azar. ¿Sería una vida basada en la libertad o más bien una existencia sumergida en el absurdo?

En una carta al mismo interlocutor, Einstein hizo unas afirmaciones que han sido citas con frecuencia por los deterministas. Dijo que si la Luna fuese dotada de autoconsciencia estaría perfectamente convencida de que su camino alrededor de la Tierra es fruto de una decisión libre.

The cultural past is rigidly deterministic to the extent that the individual is unaware of it. An analogy, of course, is found in any psychoanalytic treatment: the patient is rigidly determined by past experiences and previously developed patterns to the extent that he is unaware of these experiences and patterns.

Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.

Could a machine ever be said to have made its own decisions? Could a machine have beliefs? Could a machine make mistakes? Could a machine believe it made its own decisions? Could a machine erroneously attribute free will to itself? Could a machine come up with ideas that had not been programmed into it in advance? Could creativity emerge from a set of fixed rules? Are we – even the most creative among us – but passive slaves to the laws of physics that govern our neurons?