Quotes About Determinism

Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.

To exempt themselves from action, oppressed peoples entrust themselves to "fate," a negative salvation as well as a means of interpreting events: a philosophy of history for daily use, a determinist vision on an effective basis, a metaphysic of circumstance . . .

Eventually the United States became the latter arsenal and bank of the allies, and acquired a direct interest in allied victory that was to bemuse the post war apostles of economic determinism for a long time.

Nothing in Nature is random. A thing appears random only through the incompleteness of our knowledge.

Chaos is not randomness. Chaos refers to extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. If we change the initial point by a little bit in a chaotic system, we end up on different paths. Many chaotic systems are completely deterministic. If you know the current state, then you know all future states. When we speak of randomness, we often mean the exact opposite: complete unpredictability. The next flip of the coin does not depend in any way on the current flip of the coin.

This is not a universe that is advancing toward a goal; it is one that is caught in the grip of an unbreakable pattern.

The physical notion of determinism is different from destiny or fate in a subtle but crucial way: because Laplace's Demon doesn't actually exist, the future may be determined by the present, but literally nobody knows what it will be.

The punch line is that our notion of free will, the ability to change the future by making choices in a way that is not available to us as far as the past is concerned, is only possible because the past has a low entropy and the future has a high entropy. The

Spinoza says that if a stone which has been projected through the air, had consciousness, it would believe that it was moving of its own free will. I add this only, that the stone would be right. The impulse given it is for the stone what the motive is for me, and what in the case of the stone appears as cohesion, gravitation, rigidity, is in its inner nature the same as that which I recognise in myself as will, and what the stone also, if knowledge were given to it, would recognise as will.

The only freedom that exists is of a metaphysical character. In the physical world freedom is an impossibility.

Under presupposition of free will each human action would be an inexplicable miracle - an effect without cause. And if one dares the attempt to make such a liberum arbitrium indifferentiae imaginable to oneself, one will soon become aware that here the understanding quite genuinely comes to a standstill: it has no form for thinking of such a thing.

Could the completed life course of such a man turn out in any respect, even the smallest, in any happening, any scene, differently from the way it did? – No! is the consistent and correct answer.

He demonstrated that there was no such thing as free will, since men's creative impulses were determined, as all else, by the economic structure of the epoch in which they lived.

If there really is a complete unified theory that governs everything, it presumably also determines your actions. But it does so in a way that is impossible to calculate for an organism that is as complicated as a human being. The reason we say that humans have free will is because we can't predict what they will do.

Einstein never accepted that the universe was governed by chance; his feelings were summed up in his famous statement "God does not play dice.

It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law, so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.

Quantum physics might seem to undermine the idea that nature is governed by laws, but that is not the case. Instead it leads us to accept a new form of determinism: given the state of a system at some time, the laws of nature determine the probabilities of various futures and pasts rather than determining the future and past with certainty.

The uncertainty principle signaled an end to Laplace's dream of a theory of science, a model of the universe that would be completely deterministic: one certainly cannot predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely! We could still imagine that there is a set of laws that determine events completely for some supernatural being, who could observe the present state of the universe without disturbing it.

God does not play dice.

The uncertainty principle signaled an end to Laplace's dream of a theory of science, a model of the universe that would be completely deterministic: one certainly cannot predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely!

it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.

Given the state of a system at some time, the laws of nature determine the probabilities of various futures and pasts rather than determining the future and past with certainty.

The basic assumption of science is scientific determinism.

Laplace suggested that there should be a set of scientific laws that would allow us to predict everything that would happen in the universe, if only we knew the complete state of the universe at one time.