Doctrine Of Determinism Research Articles

Mathematical Metaphysics: Modelling Determinism and Free-Will Along the Lines of Theological Compatibilism

In this paper, an attempt is made to lay a systematic framework that helps answer a deeply perplexing philosophical question: “Can blind obedience to a set of immutable laws of nature pose a sufficient explanation for all phenomena in the world?” From the perspective of the human person, this question can be re-phrased as follows: “Do the events in a person’s life happen because they are pre-determined to do so, or is there some role for free-will to operate?” More succinctly stated, “Is the principle of determinism or the faculty for free-will responsible for the occurrence of an event?” An acceptable answer to these difficult questions must first require a better understanding of what precisely the terms determinism and free-will mean. In religion and mythology, the doctrine of determinism is embodied in an equivalent notion called destiny, which may be defined as a pre-ordained, inescapable, inevitable event. An accident, on the other hand, is a purely random and unpredictable event with neither intent nor design backing its occurrence. Religion holds that there are no such things as accidents and that every event is infused with divine purpose. Paradoxically, religion (Christianity, in particular) holds dear man’s capacity for free-will, which is in direct contradiction to the idea of destiny. How can free-will be truly free, if everything is already determined? Science too, is in a similar muddle on the problem of free-will, because it is still unsure whether the universe, the human mind included, runs on a deterministic or an indeterministic basis. After exploring the opinions gathered from diverse fragments of human knowledge (Philosophy, Physics, Neuroscience, Literature, Religion), two novel frameworks that are grounded in mathematical rigor are forwarded which fits both determinism and free-will into a single, indivisible philosophical paradigm.

Can Determinism Give a Causal Explanation of Intentional Behaviour? Revisiting the Concepts of Determinism, Fatalism and Rational Agency

In this short piece of work, an attempt has been made to revisit the skepticism about free will, which has historically been directed to it due to certain mistaken assumptions about determinism and iron it out. Determinism is often conflated with fatalism, and this is where the skepticism about the possibility of agential autonomy and control begins. If fatalism is true with respect to volitional actions of agents, then there is no point in planning or choice making as fatalism dissolves the idea of control. The main argument proposed in this work consists in showing that even though deterministic causation involves the possibility of a single unique outcome as a necessary consequence of the antecedent conditions and the governing laws of nature, the history of rational behaviour of every agent can be explained within a global deterministic kind of causal framework. If rightly interpreted, it provides a glimpse into how different courses of action remain feasibly open to an agent at a given time. The concept of free will has been outlined first to enable the reader to see later that looking at the doctrine of determinism with the right kind of mindset only reveals its pro-free will nature.

XI-Fresh Starts

The paper argues that a proper response to the absurdities which seem to be entailed by the doctrine of determinism requires that we find a way to make sense of the idea that there might be such things as ‘fresh starts’ in nature—times and places where the world in a sense begins itself anew by rolling forwards in ways that are not wholly attributable (given the laws) to the way it was previously. It considers three powerful orthodoxies which seem to stand in the way of an acceptance of the existence of such things—fundamentalism, empiricist agnosticism and the ontology of events—and examines the prospects for overturning these orthodoxies.

La objetividad del azar en un mundo determinista

This paper deals with the notion of objective randomness in classical deterministic theories. After the introduction, section 2 establishes an important distinction between a strictly metaphysical thesis of determinism (as characterized in the Montague-Earman definition, for example), and the doctrine of determinism, which can be roughly characterized as a methodological set of principles. The doctrine of determinism is associated with the idea that probability assignments can only reflect our ignorance of facts, and it also grounds the (ontological) thesis of separability: A system or process can be characterized completely in terms of the properties that a system has when in a given state, independently of the properties of other systems, The key notions of "completeness" and "independence" are only briefly discussed, as they are examined more in depth elsewhere.
 Section three examines attempts to characterize a notion of objective randomness in ergodic theory. The characterization can be seen to be equivalent to the formulation of a notion of a "physically impossible process". One way of expressing this idea is grounded on the thesis of the "coarse graining" of our measuring instruments. This leads to the problem of distinguishing "objective" from "apparent" randomness. The problem seems to be intrinsic to any attempt of characterizing the required notion of physical impossibility (and thus of objective randomness) in terms of an ideal observer. The alternative of trying to characterize physical impossibility in terms of a theory of algorithms suffers from the difficulty that it is not clear what would be the required notion of (non-epistemic) computability.
 The "coarse graining" approach, as well as the alternative in terms of a theory of algorithms seem to share the usual confusion between a strictly metaphysical thesis of determinism and the (methodological) doctrine of determinism. In section four an alternative approach is suggested. It is noticed that a denial of the thesis of separability is compatible with a strict deterministic theory, and thus that at least some classical systems (the "statistical" ones) can be described in terms of non-separable states. We do not have to think that the impossibility of preparing a classical state is too only possible explanation for physical (objective) randomness in deterministic theories. This proposal is an elaboration of an idea of Blatt (1959), although Blatt was still trying to understand objective randomness within an ideal-observer framework.[S.M.]

Is Determinism a Vacuous Doctrine?

The question as to whether the world is strictly deterministic has continually been of the highest interest to all thinking people. Some have insisted that future scientific developments are going to vindicate their belief in complete Laplacean determinism; others have argued that in the light of the results of contemporary physics, full determinism on a microscopic level can no longer be held to be true, while yet others have gone further and maintained that the universe is replete with random events on any level. As we know, however, Russell has argued that regardless what our universe is actually like, it is quite a trivial task to construct functions that will describe the behaviour of all the physical systems we have observed. All we need to do is compile a list of the corresponding values of any two variables of a given system and this will automatically furnish a mathematical function-which of course is likely to be rather complicated containing as many terms as the results to be accounted for, but which will be satisfied by all our data (Russell [19631). Are we thus to conclude that the doctrine of determinism, which does not rule out any conceivable state of affairs, is vacuous and therefore that the hundreds of papers debating its status are pointless? Or are we justified in believing that the questions of determinism is a substantial one, for we may-as apparently have hundreds of people who have written on the subject-simply ignore Russell on the assumption that he is wrong?

DETERMINISM IN CLASSICAL PHYSICS

IN 1951 Professor Popper published two papers1 m which he argucd that classical physics is mdetermmistic in perhaps no less fundamental a sense than is quantum physics. Popper's argument was m two stages, the first being a purely philosophical preliminary to the second, which was a technical exercise m physics and logic. Firstly, he substituted for' the metaphysical doctrine of determinism ' the more precise and testable notion of complete, though ' finite ', scientific predictability. Secondly, he tried to show that even in a universe which is 'prima facie determimstic', that is m one which is completely describable in classical terms, there can exist certain physical systems which are unpredictable. This paper is divided into two main parts. In the first part (D?I-3) two possible scientific explicata of Determmnsm are analysed and assessed: predictability is found wanting and scientific lawfulncss is shown to be satisfactory and replete. In the second part (?4) Popper's technical thesis is examined and rejected. Although the two parts of this paper correspond in content to the two stages I have distinguished m Professor Popper's argument, only the second part is directly contrary to what he was concerned to establish. In taking predictability as a testable rendering of the determimst thesis, Popper was not necessarily committed to its adequacy, nor was he necessarily preferring it to scientific lawfulness. Rather, the intention was to attempt to meet the Copenhagen school of quantum theorists on their own ground by adopting without argument a philosophical orientation similar to their own, and thus to make more profitable comparison of classical physics with quantum physics.2 However, if the argument of the first part of this paper is correct and incomplete predictability is allowed to be not necessarily incompatible