#determinism

We all are characters in a movie. ↗

— Vivake Pathak

#determinism #fate #movies

In one sense I feel that my book is a one-woman argument against determinism. ↗

— Susan Griffin

#argument #book #determinism #feel #i

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

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

The physical universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one casual and the other teleological, both valid, neither one disqualifiable no matter how much context was available. ↗

— Ted Chiang

#determinism #free-will #time #life

Our desires are guided by what we believe to be good or bad; our beliefs are directed by our knowledge; our knowledge, in turn, is again a manipulation of our desires. Our Will, during this inexorable revolution, serves as the force, increasing, decreasing, or at worst, maintaining the pace. ↗

— Raheel Farooq

#determinism #free-will #knowledge #life #life

...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

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