#determinism

Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will. ↗

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

#creation #determinism #evidence #free #free will

Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will. ↗

— Jawaharlal Nehru

#dealt #determinism #free #free will #game

The world changed from having the determinism of a clock to having the contingency of a pinball machine. ↗

— Heinz R. Pagels

#clock #contingency #determinism #having #machine

For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference. ↗

— Jared Diamond

#environment #environmental-determinism #history #societies #environmentalism

The idea of determinism combined with complete human responsibility struck me as very hard to reconcile with an idea of justice, let alone mercy. ↗

— Ken MacLeod

#combined #complete #determinism #hard #human

You can’t change the past. You can’t even change the future, in the sense that you can only change the present one moment at a time, stubbornly, until the future unwinds itself into the stories of our lives. ↗

— Larry Wall

#change #determinism #fatalism #free-will #change

Life calls the tune, we dance. ↗

— John Galsworthy

#determinism #fate #free #freedom #will

Losing a belief in free will has not made me fatalistic—in fact, it has increased my feelings of freedom. My hopes, fears, and neuroses seem less personal and indelible. There is no telling how much I might change in the future. Just as one wouldn’t draw a lasting conclusion about oneself on the basis of a brief experience of indigestion, one needn’t do so on the basis of how one has thought or behaved for vast stretches of time in the past. A creative change of inputs to the system—learning new skills, forming new relationships, adopting new habits of attention—may radically transform one’s life. ↗

— Sam Harris

#determinism #free-will #inspiration #philosophy #self-improvement

In fact, if you are faced with the prospect of running across an open field in which lightning bolts are going to be a problem, you are much better off if their timing and location are determined by something, since then they may be predictable by you, and hence avoidable. Determinism is the friend, not the foe, of those who dislike inevitability. ↗

— Daniel C. Dennett

#free-will #indeterminism #freedom

If God created our will, then he's responsible for every choice we make... So-- as I recall, the official philosophical answer is that free will doesn't exist. Only the illusion of free will, because the causes of hour behavior are so complex that we can't trace them back. If you've got one line of dominoes knocking each other down, one by one, then you can always say, look, this domino fell because that one pushed it. But when you have an infinite number of dominoes that can be traced back in an infinite number of directions, you can never find where the causal chain begins. So you think, That domino fell because it wanted to... Even if there is no such thing as free will, we have to treat each other as if there were free will in order to live together in society. ↗

— Orson Scott Card

#dominoes #freedom #philosophy #want #freedom