Quotes About Determinism

Is DNA destiny?

Our sense of free will results from a failure to appreciate this: We do not know what we intend to do until the intention itself arises. To understand this is to realize that we are not the authors of our thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose.

The moment we catch sight of the stream of causes that precede their conscious decisions, reaching back into childhood and beyond, their culpability begins to disappear.

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.

Despite our attachment to the notion of free will, most of us know that disorders of the brain can trump the best intentions of the mind.

The illusion of free will is itself an illusion.

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. If

Free will is an illusion. Humans are nothing but moist robots.

It is impossible for a Die, with such determin'd force and direction, not to fall on such determin'd side, only I don't know the force and direction which makes it fall on such determin'd side, and therefore I call it Chance, which is nothing but the want of art.

Hence the unskilful   rashly infer, that man did not sin by free choice.

Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.

For the lost are lost by nature, all your ideas of moral regeneration will make no difference, there is AN INNATE DETERMINISM, there is an undeniable incurability in suicide, crime, idiocy, madness, there is an invincible cuckoldry in man, there is a congenital weakness of the character, a castration of the mind.

El determinismo circunscribe la necesidad a otra necesidad, de manera indefinida, sin encontrar jamás algo determinante en sentido propio; de ahí que todo su sistema de lo necesario resulte ser un sistema de lo innecesario, de aquello cuya efectiva presencia no proviene de sí ni de ningún otro, sino de un tercero, respecto del cual se reproduce el mismo dilema irresuelto.

The human being is a self-propelled automaton entirely under the control of external influences. Willful and predetermined though they appear, his actions are governed not from within, but from without. He is like a float tossed about by the waves of a turbulent sea.

The lack of solutions to the Three-Body Problem is not caused by our human deficiencies as mathematicians, it is build into the laws of mathematics.

Biological determinism is a blight on science. It implies that the way things are is the way they must be. [...] This position is wrong, both empirically and morally.

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

The determinism of the physical laws simply reflects the determinism of the method of inference. This soulless nature of the scientific world need not worry those who are persuaded that the main significances of our environment are of a more spiritual character.

If the laws of physics are not strictly causal the most that can be said is that the behaviour of the conscious brain is one of the possible behaviours of a mechanical brain. Precisely so; and the decision between the possible behaviours is what we call volition.

To the question whether I would admit that the cause of the decision of the atom has something in common with the cause of the decision of the brain, I would simply answer that there is no cause. In the case of the brain I have a deeper insight into the decision; this insight exhibits it as volition, i.e. something outside causality.

All theory is against freedom of the will all experience for it.

Fischhoff calls this phenomenon creeping determinism -- the sense that grows on us, in retrospect, that what has happened was actually inevitable -- and the chief effect of creeping determinism, he points out, is that it turns unexpected events into expected events. As he writes, The occurrence of an event increases its reconstructed probability and makes it less surprising than it would have been had the original probability been remembered.

Özgür irade ile seçilen kötülük, organize güçler taraf?ndan kiÅŸiye dayat?lan deterministik iyilikten daha m? insancad?r ?

There is far less freedom and arbitrariness in mental life, however, than we are inclined to assume - there may even be none at all.