#determinism

Not that chance dominated events in the early Solar System, for scientific determinism was also functioning. But chance is an essential factor in all evolutionary events, and the birth and development of our planetary system were not exceptions. ↗

— Eric Chaisson

#determinism #evolution #planet #solar-system #age

...if in the heat of the dispute he insists and asks, 'Am I not the master of throwing myself out of the window?' I shall answer him, no; that whilst he preserves his reason there is no probability that the desire of proving his free agency, will become a motive sufficiently powerful to make him sacrifice his life to the attempt: if, notwithstanding this, to prove he is a free agent, he should actually precipitate himself from the window, it would not be a sufficient warranty to conclude he acted freely, but rather that it was the violence of his temperament which spurred him on to this folly. Madness is a state, that depends upon the heat of the blood, not upon the will. A fanatic or a hero, braves death as necessarily as a more phlegmatic man or a coward flies from it. ↗

— Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach

#free-will #madness #mental-illness #death

We all are characters in a movie. ↗

— Vivake Pathak

#determinism #fate #movies

It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset. ↗

— Arthur Eddington

#because #deals #determinism #impossible #into

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

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