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The doctrine that every event has a cause. The main philosophical interest of determinism has been in assessing its implications for free will.

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So I recently saw this video about emergentism that allows space for freewill. I can't get my mind around it. If your fundamental description of reality is deterministic wouldn't every other layer be ...
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Are there any general expectations for the outputs of a deterministic process? By a deterministic process, I mean a process that involves a set of initial conditions/states and laws that govern the ...
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I’ve always been very interested in the discussion about determinism and its implications on free will, but feel that the worldview I find most sensical is rarely talked about. In my mind the universe ...
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If the physical world (including the brain and its chemical processes) is entirely governed by causal and random laws with no pre-ordained purpose, how can we have authentic experiences such as 'free ...
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I used to play American Football. For those who know, it’s much harder to be a cornerback than a wide receiver, largely because you need to anticipate/predict what route the receiver will run/what ...
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Whether or not quantum mechanics ends up being "truly" indeterministic or deterministic, the universe seems to obviously behave according to certain deterministic rules on a large scale. ...
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Richard Taylor’s fatalism But foreknowledge of the truth would not create any truth, nor invest your philosophy with truth, nor add anything to the philosophical foundations of the fatalism that ...
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EDITS Ontological belief is a conviction concerning what exists. Hard determinism asserts the existence of a deterministic physical universe. Apparently, some philosophers claim that determinism ...
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You have surely noticed that it's very hard (sometimes it feels impossible) to convince anyone differently from what they already believe, and some conversations are constant loops ending in stalemate....
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The halting problem is the name for a class of unsolvable problems in computability theory. It essentially states that there does not exist an algorithm or program which can predict the behavior of ...
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Have any philosophers believed in hard determinism? I am not asking who has discussed it; I am asking if anyone has believed it. Like solipsism, it strikes me as leading to the conclusion that one ...
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If what we desire and do is not up to us, and we cannot will and act otherwise, because the previous state of the universe entirely determined the subsequent states, this also applies to what we think ...
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I'm exploring a conceptual framework I've been developing called Field-Topology Probability Theory (FTPT). It proposes a reinterpretation of probability - not as an abstract, epistemic measure, but as ...
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Very few people fully grasp this idea, so I’ll lay it out as plainly and briskly as possible. Start with determinism. Every neuron fires because of what happened just before it. What we feel as “...
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The simple definition of emergence, in which a system exhibits a different - emergent - behaviour than each of its constituent parts, regularly raises questions. For example, it is certainly not the ...
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Determinism holds that every event is the necessary result of preceding causes and laws of nature. If all our actions are determined by prior states of the universe—genes, environment, neural ...
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My definition of determinism: An event is determined if it is predictable. If it is not predictable, we cannot know that it is determined. The claim is then not falsifiable and therefore unscientific. ...
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If nature is entirely deterministic, how can any philosopher—including Nietzsche—justify the existence of true free will? I struggle to understand where the chain of determinism breaks. Animals, trees,...
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I have this doubt. I have a physicalist viewpoint, but I'm not sure how it's even compatible with free will regardless of whether the universe is determisitic or not. If it's deterministic, anyone's ...
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If the interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, which is indetermistic, then the strong principle of sufficient reason, isn't true, because there contingency is based upon no explanation/brute fact. But ...
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Quantum Mechanics show an indetermistic world, at least with the specific definition. Thus determinism is false. Now because of this there is contingency in what the result will be. Thus ...
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I believe that free will is present(unless there is medical blackout or serious medical disprder) in every voluntary action that we do and it certainly have a consequence. Furthermore, I think ...
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Existentialism is duty bound to a belief in free will. The problem of free will being that it struggles to accommodate determined aspects of nature, as well as ignoring Aristotle’s argument for a ...
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I'm not a philosopher or even aspiring to be one, just someone who got (unfortunately) caught in the Free will vs Determinism/Indeterminism debate. But something has been bugging me about the ...
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Is the universe deterministic or stochastic If the universe was stochastic would we ever be able to determine this as there would be a chance that it was not? If the universe was deterministic then ...
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Is logical reasoning deterministic? That is, will every individual, when reasoning correctly, arrive at the same conclusions as every other individual? Basically, this means that everyone will arrive ...
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Free will is often defined as the ability to do otherwise at a given moment in time. The classic determinism vs. randomness dilemma claims this is impossible: if actions are determined, we couldn't ...
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In a thought experiment, suppose I am a super advanced human with a computer that gives me complete control over my biology, desires, and thoughts. I can manipulate every aspect of my brain and body ...
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On a day-to-day basis, I have the perception that I have free will. Since I "feel" like my actions are driven by my decisions, does it really matter whether or not my actions are determined ...
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Nick Bostrom has come up with an interesting argument (in my view) suggesting that it is quite possible, probable even, that we are in a computer simulation see here. But if we are in a computer ...
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I am pretty convinced by all arguments for determinism except one which I have not seen debated. If, as determinism believes, we live in a cause and effect universe and there are no effects without ...
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A metaphysical philosophy of health problems explores the nature of illness and disease beyond the purely physical realm, considering concepts like the mind-body connection, the role of spiritual ...
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Suppose we made a computer program. It is determined by programming. We programmed it in such a way that it will always say, "Free will doesn't exist," if we ask such a question. We gave it ...
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Determinists claim free will does not exist because we do not control our desires. Determinists argue that we cannot want our wants, implying a lack of control. But, who is "we" here? Isn't ...
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My question is inspired by the following thought-provoking comment by Philomath: A measurement causes a quantum system to decohere, but it doesn't determine the outcome. With radioactive decay, for ...
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If a process is fundamentally random, how can it follow a probability distribution? What "keeps track" of the statistics of the random process and "ensures" that its outcomes align ...
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It is said that in a purely deterministic world, there would be no room for objective chance. Every event would then have a probability of either 1 or 0. But isn’t chance fundamentally about X ...
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I don't know where to correctly and successfully search for this so I hope someone here can lead me the right way. (Also worth noting that my knowledge of physics is equal to zero) When the polarized ...
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Related to this question Can we have reliable deterministic reasoning processes if our universe is fundamentally non-deterministic? arise the questions about the interface between the microscopic and ...
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One argument/perspective that I don't understand with regard to determinism goes like this: "If determinism obtains then there's no point in arguing about determinism or anything else" ...
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I asked Would all disagreements vanish if everyone had access to the same information and followed the same reasoning process?. This answer I received challenged the framing of my question, stating: ...
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Precognition is usually associated as a supernatural quality. If precognition is true, then everything that follows from an event is determined by that event. If everything is determined, do we have ...
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A deterministic universe in theory where observing every interaction between particles in the universe would allow you to predict the future. A deterministic universe will be the one without any free ...
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Even if we had a full description of how the brain physically works to transform inputs into outputs, this would not be satisfying enough and we would claim it doesn't explain why there's qualia ...
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What I seem to know so far: So in a deterministic universe, pretty much everything is laid out and this means there is no free-will if this was a deterministic universe, you and I would not have the ...
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I'm unable to understand this GIF of Benjamin Libet's free will experiment. Please look at the bottom left of the diagram and you'll see the numbers 1 followed by 2 and then by 3. What I think is ...
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The philosophy of probability is a subject on which many books and papers have been written, so the subject is obviously of interest to philosophers. There are many ways in which the subject of ...
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A recent closed question asked 'What is life in a deterministic system?'. The question seems to assume that life can exist in a deterministic system, but one answer and commenter in particular ...
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In a deterministic universe, where every event is a result of preceding causes, the distinctions we make between living and non-living entities might be an illusion. Our perceptions—colors, sounds, ...
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Is the universe wholly deterministic, with every event in time being a result of a specific cause, or might some events occur independently of prior causes? I’m seeking to understand if cause and ...
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