The principle of determinism PDF

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The principle of determinism...

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Introduction Determinism is the philosophy that all events, whether involving inanimate matter or conscious beings like humans, are completely determined by previous events. In other words, determinism claims that if you knew the physical state of the universe completely at any given moment, and all physical laws, you could (in principle) predict the future perfectly - including the so-called ‘free’ actions of human beings. Determinism is one of the biggest issues in both philosophy and physical science; most people, including scientists, want to believe in free will, and most also feel that science implies determinism; meanwhile, modern physics has complicated the issue terribly because quantum mechanics has non-deterministic elements - and it doesn’t justify belief in free will either. So, at present, determinism remains an unresolved and controversial hypothesis. Is personal psychology determined by nature and or nurture, or is there something like ‘spirit’ which is free? If not, how can we hold people responsible for their actions? How can we punish people for their actions if they don’t have free will? If we are like machines, does morality have any meaning? And if determinism is not true, then what becomes of science? If some events are not determined completely by causality, where do they come from and how can we prove anything? History of determinism Determinism was developed by the Greek philosophers during the 7th and 6th centuries BC by the Pre-Socratic philosophers Heraclitus and Leucippus, later Aristotle, and mainly by the Stoics. Western tradition: Determinism in the West is often associated with Newtonian physics, which depicts the physical matter of the universe as operating according to a set of fixed, knowable laws. Newtonian mechanics as well as any following physical theories are results of observations and experiments, and so they describe ‘how it all works’ within a tolerance. However, old western scientists believed if there are any logical connections found between an observed cause and effect, there must be also some absolute natural laws behind. Belief in perfect natural laws driving everything, instead of just describing what we should expect, led to searching for a set of universal simple laws that rule the world. Eastern tradition: the concept of determinism appeared in the East in the Buddhist doctrine of Dependent Origination. This is Buddha’s theory of the cause of all things. The theory posits that all action in the universe is dependent upon a complex of causes, none of which can be removed without also removing the action. No effect exists independently of multiple causes. These causes are not random, nor are they necessarily predetermined; they result from a complex of other causes. In Buddha’s words, ‘Because of this, that becomes; because of that, something else becomes…’

Versions of determinism At first, Leucippus and Democritus considered determinism as everything what moves in exactly the way it does out of necessity; free will is an illusion. Later comes Baron Henri d'Holbach’s point of view: the material brain is determined by physical laws, so thought itself is determined; and in the end Pierre-Simon Laplace says: if we knew all the laws of nature and had a complete description of the universe at one moment, we could predict and retrodict all events. Casual determinism (or physical determinism) which is normally associated with two positions: Nomological determinism – the claim that all events are caused by previous events according to rigid laws, such that all events are, in a sense, inevitable. Necessitarianism - that there are no real possibilities; the world could only be as it is. Predeterminism is the idea that all events are pre-determined, not merely by their immediate causes, but since the beginning of time. This seems to be implied by causal determinism, since whatever happened at the beginning of time would determine the chain of cause and effect ever after. Fatalism is the non-scientific version of predeterminism, claiming that we all have unavoidable fates, but not ones which are necessarily based on natural law, allowing for other sources of fate, such as God. Theological determinism - the idea either that God has determined our fates, or that God knows what they are, which would also imply that they cannot be changed. Adequate determinism is probably the operating philosophy of most scientists today - the idea that although quantum reality is partly non-deterministic, it is deterministic enough, for all practical purposes, because the unpredictability averages out at the human scale. Biological determinism, Cultural determinism, and Environmental determinism: these three ideas are about determinism in a different sense than in most of this article; they each claim that one thing, either biology, culture, or environment, determines who a person becomes, psychologically. Determinism against free will You may think that these are opposites; however, philosophers recognize four possible points of view regarding these two - both true, both false, and one or the other. Compatibilism, the theory that they can both be true at the same time, is popular because most people want to believe both. On the other hand, the theory that they are both false is also popular, because that is what modern science seems to imply: • if the quantum theory is correct, then determinism is probably false

• if neurology is correct, then free will is probably false One of the promising ideas for including free will in natural law comes from the theory of complex systems-the idea of emergence. Emergence is when something new appears in nature that could not be predicted due to its complexity, such as weather events. Your brain may be deterministic (at least to a quantum degree), but it is still unpredictable because of its complexity. Whether this makes free expression of will possible remains an open question. The debates about determinism Does quantum mechanics necessarily mean that the universe is nondeterministic? The laws of quantum mechanics (QM), the most thoroughly proven theory of all time, deny that specific events are predictable or defined on a quantum scale (smaller than an atom). According to QM, only event probabilities are determined, while specific events are random. Whether an atom will disintegrate at a certain time or where a photon will hit on a photographic plate can never be predicted, no matter how much you know about previous events, except statistically. Chaos theory shows that quantum effects can make a difference at the scale of the brain's neurons, meaning that quantum indeterminism can be relevant to the question of whether our choices are determined or not. However, this does not make quantum uncertainty a source of free will, because randomness is no more free will than determinism, is it?! And while quantum indeterminism, if true, may be relevant to human cognition, there are still alternative theories that try to bring determinism back into quantum theory. According to these ‘hidden variable theories’, quantum events seem random only because we can't see the hidden processes that define them. Conclusion There are still many issues in this discussion that we cannot present here. We only summarize that quantum mechanics seems to prove that the world is only statistically or probabilistically deterministic and profoundly random on the smallest scales, but quantum mechanics itself is full of debates that may one day change this conclusion, and in any case it does not seem to provide a basis for free will....