Questions tagged [determinism]
The doctrine that every event has a cause. The main philosophical interest of determinism has been in assessing its implications for free will.
34 questions from the last 365 days
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The Time Traveler’s trip. Will the weather stay, but the lottery change? [closed]
Imagine a time traveler who jumps exactly one week into the future.
Upon arrival, he observes two specific data points:
Micro-Event -- The winning lottery numbers in US lottery 6/49 game are: 4, 8, ...
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How can materialist philosophers reconcile free will and determinism aka adopting compatibilism?
Compatibilism is the belief that free will and determinism are both true ("compatible").
The defenders of the soul's existence argue that without the soul a person is just a mechanical being ...
user110570
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Free will from emergentism?
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?
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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What are the problems with a nearly deterministic world that is devoid of free will, yet slightly random due to its underlying quantum structure?
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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The Paradox of Meaning in a Seemingly Meaningless Universe
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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Why is predictive capacity so forceful for Hard Determinists?
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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How can blind deterministic rules explain the origin of life? [closed]
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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How to understand the reasoning behind modern Fatalism?
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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Hard determinists believe all events are caused by prior conditions. Is physical determinism an ontological belief system within epistemology?
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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Why does truth seem to lack compelling power? Why can we rarely convince anyone to change their mind?
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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If God knows the future, including His own actions, does this mean that he has solved the halting problem? [closed]
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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If we have no free will, wherein lies the illusion?
It's a very prominent line of thought today, that free will is an illusion, with many proponents such as Sabine Hossenfelder and Stanford Prof. Robert Sapolsky. It seems they are arguing from a ...
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Have any philosophers believed in hard determinism?
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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How do you solve the epistemic problem of "recognizing the truth" under hard determinism?
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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