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Determinism is the philosophical doctrine which claims that every physical event, including human cognition and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. The principal consequences of this doctrine are that free will is an illusion, and that the outcomes of all future events have already been determined. Determinism is associated with, and relies upon, the ideas of Materialism and Causality. Some of the philosophers who have dealt with this issue are David Hume, Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, and, more recently, John Searle.
The exact meaning of the term "determinism" has historically been subject to various interpretations. Some view determinism and free will as mutually exclusive, whereas others, labelled "Compatibilists", believe that the two ideas can be coherently reconciled. Most of this disagreement is due to the fact that the definition of "free will," like determinism, varies. Some feel it refers to the metaphysical truth of independent agency, whereas others simply define it as the feeling of agency that humans experience when they act. For example, David Hume argued that while it is possible that one does not freely arrive at one's set of desires and beliefs, the only meaningful interpretation of freedom relates to one's ability to translate those desires and beliefs into voluntary action.
The doctrine of a deterministic universe has been articulated in both Western and non-Western religion, philosophy, and literature. In the West, determinism is often associated with Newtonian physics, which argues that the physical matter of the universe operates according to a set of fixed, knowable laws. The "billiard ball" hypothesis, a product of Newtonian physics, argues that because the initial conditions of the universe have already been established, it is theoretically possible, with complete knowledge of physical matter and the laws governing that matter, to predict the time and place of every event that will ever occur. In this sense, the basic particles of the universe operate in the same fashion as the rolling balls on a billiard table, moving and striking each other in predictable ways to produce only slightly-less predictable results.
In the East, determinism has to a certain extent been expressed in the Buddhist doctrine of Dependent OriginationDependent Origination (Sanskrit: pratitya-samutpda Pali: paticca samuppada The doctrine of pratitya-samutpada is the Buddhism's primary contribution to metaphysics. Common to all schools of Buddhism, it states that all phenomena are the result of mutually, which states that every phenomenon, exclusive of NirvanaThe following article is about the term Nirvana in the context of Buddhism. See Nirvana (disambiguation) for other meanings. In Buddhism, nirva (from the Sanskrit Pali: Nibbna Chinese: Nie4 Pan2 ), literally "extinction" or "extinguishing", is the culmina and space-timeIn special relativity and general relativity, time and three-dimensional space are treated together as a single four-dimensional manifold called spacetime . A point in spacetime may be referred to as an event . Each event has four coordinates t x y z ; or, is conditioned by, and depends on, the phenomena that it is not. In Buddhism, this teaching is used to demonstrate that to ascribe value to any one thing is to ignore the interdependence of all things.
Some critics of determinism argue that if people are incapable of independent choice there can be no basis for moralityMorality is a complex of principles based on cultural, religious, and philosophical concepts and beliefs, by which an individual determines whether his or her actions are right or wrong. These concepts and beliefs are often generalized and codified by a c, and therefore some aspects of criminal and civil jurisprudence and legislation are left without their necessary foundation. Others, more recently, have interpreted the developing field of quantum mechanicswavefunctions of an electron in a hydrogen atom possessing definite energy (increasing downward: n 1,2,3,. and angular momentum (increasing across: s p d . Brighter areas correspond to higher probability density for a position measurement. The angular mom as being consistent with the argument that some basic events may be truly random and non-deterministic.
Determinists have responded to the first critique by distinguishing between normativeIn positivist philosophy, normative is contrasted with its antonym, positive when describing types of theories, beliefs, or statements. A positive statement is a falsifiable statement that attempts to describe ontology. A normative statement, on the other and objective claims, arguing that statements of fact can and should be made independently of their consequences. Thus, even if determinism is inconsistent with the idea of a moral universe, that does not necessarily invalidate its conclusions.
With respect to the second critique, there are two main counter-arguments:
1) Quantum mechanics has been misinterpreted, and the idea of "randomness" has wrongly been interpreted to mean the occurrence of something entirely uncaused by prior events. The "random" movements of sub-atomic particles are random in the sense that no human measurement can account for or predict them. They are not random in the sense that they have no prior cause. These events occur according to probability and may have an as-of-yet-unknown cause.
2) If non-deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics are correct, and uncaused events occur, these events are not the products of human cognition. Rather, the actions of a person influenced by these events would be attributable to a truly independent quantum mechanism, not the person's own free will.
Intrinsic to the free will vs. determinism debate is the issue of first causesFirst Cause is a phrase used alternately to refer to the Cosmological argument for the existence of God, or as an alternate noun for God itself among individuals uncomfortable with the historical and religious meanings associated with the term. Using "Fir. Either the entirety of space-time came into existence at some point without any prior cause, in which case the determinist argument fails, or else space-time has always existed, leaving both sides to contemplate the problem of infinity.
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