free will

anybody out here believe in determinism?

i'm guessing if you believe in the bible (or any religion, for that matter), then you pretty much have to believe in free will.

 

elaborate on determinism.

 

The opposite of free will. Everything is determined ahead of time. All things are fated or "meant to be," and unchangable.

 

Presbyterians are determinists, aren't they?

 

Does determinism = predestination?

 

determinism is basically the belief that there is no chance in the universe -- nothing is random or indeterminable from the given state of things.

imagine a closed system -- something that isn't influenced by outside factors. given the current state of that system (position of things, velocties, accelerations, energies, etc) there is only one possible resulting subsequent state. that is, state A yields state B -- always.

in reality, it's impossible to measure a closed system completely (if for no other reason than you'd be violating the closed nature). so it's not something that can be proven thru experimentation. it's just a belief of how things work.


i don't like to think of it as predestiny or fate or anything because there's an over-emphasis on the end result that's conotated by those words. determinism is microscopic and uncaring. predestiny and fate imply macroscopic organization and orchestration to a goal. determinism is guided solely by physical laws.

determinism isn't "no matter what you do, you can't escape your fate" it's more "because of what you do, you are creating your fate".


free will, tho, has no place in determinism. determinism would suggest that our consciousness is a manifestation of our brain chemisty (which is a physical process). thus we humans are just really complex pachinco balls bouncing around our lives. our decisions are based on our current state, which is based on our previous state, which is based on our previous state, etc.

 

Ah. Then determinism = causality, no?

 

oui.


another way to think of it is that flipping a coin will yield a predicatable result if you factor in every aspect of the coin, how it was flipped, the environment, etc. this can be expanded to all things in the universe -- ample knowledge of the circumstances would yield a perfect prediction. however, you can't have that much knowledge so the prediction aspect is moot, tho the theoretical ability to predict isn't.

 

i'm too narrow minded to believe this.

 

This sounds a lot like the chaos theory Jeff Goldblum's character was explaining in Jurassic Park.

I think we had a pretty lengthy debate on this a while back, didn't we?