Determinism Quotes

“Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic universe. In this match, surprises are expected.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“The problem, of course, with the idea of nature versus nurture was that it posed a choice between determinisms.”
― James S.A. Corey, Babylon’s Ashes

“I... I had a dream,’ said Mario through a pained expression, ‘that my life was not my-my-my own. That I didn’t create my own destiny. That my fate was predetermined. Amanita, you don’t think—’
‘Shush,’ she whispered, placing a finger over his lips, ‘they might hear you...”
― Louise Blackwick, The Underworld Rhapsody

“You never really choose anything. It's all presented to you, and then you have alternatives.”
― Edward Gorey, Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey

“STOP DIGGING.' The letters on the mirror were etched in my memory. Now, as I finished my make-up with a swipe of lip-gloss, I huffed on the mirror, and wrote in the steam obscuring my reflection one word: 'NO'.”
― Ruth Ware, The Woman in Cabin 10

“How can one tell if a being has free will? If one encounters an alien, how can one tell if it is just a robot or it has a mind of its own? The behavior of a robot would be completely determined, unlike that of a being with free will. Thus one could in principle detect a robot as a being whose actions can be predicted. As we said in Chapter 2, this may be impossibly difficult if the being is large and complex. We cannot even solve exactly the equations for three or more particles interacting with each other. Since an alien the size of a human would contain about a thousand trillion trillion particles even if the alien were a robot, it would be impossible to solve the equations and predict what it would do. We would therefore have to say that any complex being has free will—not as a fundamental feature, but as an effective theory, an admission of our inability to do the calculations that would enable us to predict its actions.”
― Stephen Hawking, The Grand Design

“Events fall into a pattern that we can only discern retrospectively. We credit ourselves with far more agency than we actually possess. Things happen because they happen.”
― Neel Mukherjee, The Lives of Others

“Individual free choices” can only be the expression of an “individual free will”.
The notion of an “individual free will” generating “individual free choices” creates a much needed consequence: personal accountability.
Personal accountability is vital for a primitive, immature human organization based on reprehension or praise.
The permanent interaction of a unique inherited Nature (and maybe a unique “soul”) with a unique nurture (environment), will always determine all our “individual free choices”, from cradle to grave.
It is impossible for the individual to be sentient before birth and choose these two or three unique factors.
The logic of holding someone personally accountable for a “non-chosen” choice eludes me.
The notion of individual free will can at best be a “gut felt” illusion, but can never have logical relevance.
What sort of human (and divine!) organization can be based on the consequence of a “gut felt” illusion?
-Our current one; primitive, illogical, unstable and permanently conflictual.

Be it for all individual choices or all differences, the definitive ban of the illusionary notion of personal accountability is the missing step that will lead to human maturity.

How’s your “gut” now?”
― Haroutioun Bochnakian

“A conscious being without free will is simply a metaphysical absurdity.”
― Raymond M. Smullyan, The Tao Is Silent: A Whimsical and Sophisticated Guide to Eastern Philosophy and Inner Serenity

“So long as we trace the development from its final outcome backwards, the chain of events appears continuous, and we feel we have gained an insight which is completely satisfactory or even exhaustive. But if we proceed in the reverse way, if we start from the premises inferred from the analysis and try to follow these up to the final results, then we no longer get the impression of an inevitable sequence of events which could not have otherwise been determined.”
― Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

“Though we feel that we can choose what we do, our understanding of the molecular basis of biology shows that biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets. Recent experiments in neuroscience support the view that it is our physical brain, following the known laws of science, that determines our actions, and not some agency that exists outside those laws. For example, a study of patients undergoing awake brain surgery found that by electrically stimulating the appropriate regions of the brain, one could create in the patient the desire to move the hand, arm, or foot, or to move the lips and talk. 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.”
― Stephen Hawking, The Grand Design

“Reality has no arbitrary professional boundaries.”
― Peter Ulric Tse, Neural Basis of Free Will: Criterial Causation

“We are naturally grieved over the fact that a just God and a kindly providence do not guard us better against such influences in our most defenseless age. We thereby gladly forget that as a matter of fact everything in our life is accident from our very origin through the meeting of spermatozoa and ovum, accident, which nevertheless participates in the lawfulness and fatalities of nature, and lacks only the connection to our wishes and illusions.”
― Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood

“Until now, human organization could only be based upon something negative which could not be conquered: SCARCITY, and something false: PERSONAL ACCOUNTABILITY... No wonder instead of producing stability, it produced the exact opposite.
The current human organization based upon dealing with the consequences of scarcity and being considered responsible for our individual characteristics which we could never have chosen (our nature, our nurture, our “soul”, and all the choices they engender), will always lead to an irrational, hence unstable human organization causing perpetual conflicts, which is no organization at all.

Today, we have the luxury to initiate a rational self-organization based upon two positives:
-our HUMAN CONSENSUS; our common desires shared by all, and
-the SCIENTIFIC PROJECT to achieve them.”
― Haroutioun Bochnakian, The Human Consensus and The Ultimate Project Of Humanity

“Freedom is the content. Inevitability is the form.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“You, perhaps, will be a king. You can do nothing about it. You, on the other hand, will be unlucky, but you can do nothing about that either. Each man finds his way already marked out for him and he can change nothing of it.”
― D. T. Niane

“There is not one certain future, that much i know. Each of our lives creates what is to come. The universe is not a clock that has been set to run in one direction. It is a maze, a giant puzzle that changes and grows each time a player takes one path over another. Every time you make a choice, you make the future.”
― Brittney Ryan, The Legend of Holly Claus

“[P]eople erroneously jump to the conclusions that if I want to press it, I choose to want to. This is of course false. I don't choose my desires. I only feel them, and act accordingly.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

“But in acknowledging play you acknowledge mind, for whatever else play is, it is not matter. Even in the animal world it bursts the bounds of the physically existent. From the point of view of a world wholly determined by the operation of blind forces, play would be altogether superfluous. Play only becomes possible, thinkable and understandable when an influx of mind breaks down the absolute determinism of the cosmos. The very existence of play continually confirms the supra-logical nature of the human situation. Animals play, so they must be more than merely mechanical things. We play and know that we play, so we must be more than merely rational beings, for play is irrational.”
― Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture

“Free will is never without charge and is costliest when an individual chooses selfishness and avarice over the common good. Some think animals dumb but mark the instinctive co-operation of insects while men murder and steal and tell me we are superior.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Of course, the Shtrakenzer bride, though perfect, was not suitable; Mrs. Shpilman knew that. Long before the maid came to say that nobody could find Mendel, that he had disappeared sometime in the course of the night, Mrs. Shilman has known that no degree of accomplishment, beauty, or fire in a girl would ever suit her son. But there was always a shortfall, wasn’t there? Between the match that the Holy One, blessed be He, envisioned and the reality of the situation under the chuppah. Between commandment and observance, heaven and earth, husband and wife, Zion and Jew.”
― Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union

“Defaulting to the self in explanations of human behavior enables us to draw an abrupt stop in the chain of causality when trying to understand thoughts and actions.”
― Bruce Hood

“The interpenetration of chance and determination bears on the problem of how there can be a scientific approach to society when individual human behavior and consciousness seem unpredictable. Those who despair to point out that people are not machines, that there are subjective processes in the making of decisions, that it is not 'classes' but individuals who make choices. Terms such as "the human factor" or "subjective factors" with their implication of chance and unpredictability are invoked as the negation of regularity and lawfulness. And indeed it is true that individual behavior and consciousness are the consequences of intersection of a large number of weakly determining factors. But it does not follow that where there is choice, subjectivity, and individuality there cannon also be predictability. The error to take the individual as causally prior to the whole and not to appreciate that the social has causal properties within which individual consciousness and action are formed. While the consciousness of an individual is not determined by his/her class position but is influenced by idiosyncratic factors that appear as random, those random factors operate within a domain and with probabilities that are constrained and directed by social forces.”
― Richard C. Lewontin, Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, agriculture, and health

“Determinism is that you know you don't know what is going to happen anyway”
― Martijn Budel

“Future is predestined and unchangeable.”
― Vivake Pathak, God and Destiny

“You cannot change your future.”
― Vivake Pathak, God and Destiny

“The future is just a projection of the past.”
― Vivake Pathak, God and Destiny

“But in actuality, the assumption that there is no freedom leads to the exact opposite of order in human behavior. If we all really felt we were not free to make our own choices of how to face and deal with the conditions set for us by heredity and environment, we would also feel no responsibility for our behavior. And we would be right. We couldn’t be blamed for action over which we had no control, so we would make no real effort to act responsibly. We would give free rein to our passions on the grounds that whatever we did was part of the cause-and-effect sequence of events preordained by the conditions. Instead of orderly human conduct, there would be chaos. In fact, much of the irresponsible antisocial behavior that characterizes our modern society stems from the fact that many people have studied or otherwise absorbed this scientific doctrine of determinism. As a result, they have unconsciously excused their own behavior as well as that of others on the grounds that it is determined by factors beyond control.”
― James C. Crumbaugh, Logotherapy: New Help for Problem Drinkers

“The majority of scientist and philosophers currently believe that determinism and free will are compatible. Perhaps our world is largely deterministic; we can trace the outcome of many events to one specific cause. Equally probable is the possibility that multiple causes contribute to the outcome of a particular event, and we can link some of the causation factors to pure chance or coincidence. If the universe is not a deterministic system, then human evolution was not a foregone conclusion but a product of multiple causes including specific physical events, random mutation, and absolute chance. If the universe is not deterministic, then human beings potentially possess a modicum of free will. While there are inherent limitations on what people can will, the ability to make contemplative, conscious decisions allows us to modify whom we are and whom we are determines how we act. For instance, a person cannot will himself or herself to be a genius, but they can choose to learn as much as possible. Therefore, we are in fact responsible for our final character and the outcome of our life.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“We have (not free but) caged will.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana