What is determinism?
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It’s a system property in which the starting state can be known and if reproduced the system will make the same state transitions every time – the same things will always happen. Many machines work this way. If you set your clock to 6:30 and check it in 30 minutes it will say 7:00; if it says 9:23 then it’s broken.
It depends on the context. In theology, determinism is the belief that God has decided before you are born whether you will ultimately go to Heaven. This is opposed to other denominations of Christianity that believe your actions while on Earth will decide that.
In non-religious philosophy, it refers to the idea that what we may perceive as free will, e.g. deciding to order soda instead of beer at dinner, is only an illusion of free will. If we are just made of atoms which follow completely predictable scientific principles, then given the exact same situation we would make the exact same “decision” every time. Others argue quantum physics allows for the existence of true free will.
It is the idea that every event is totally defined by the previous events, so it is inevitable. This view has implications in the existence of free will and also in interpretations of quantum mechanics.
Determinism is the logical consequence of accepting the premise: “There are no un-caused events.”
In other words, if every event has a cause, then determinism is true.
Determinism is the idea that the world is predetermined. Via scientific means or through the will of God.
In classical science something only happens if something happened before hand to make it happen. Something only moves if it was pushed on by something else and if I were to push it again I would get the same result again. This seems to be true for all ‘stuff’ in the universe except for living being who have this magical property called ‘free will’. But if our brains are made of the same stuff as everything else then logically we should conclude that they too would be predictable systems. We don’t just decide things for ourselves we decide them based of our past experiences, and that all things that happen today are and result of things that happened yesterday and you have an unbroken chain of cause and effect going all the way back to the starting conditions of the big bang.
And this may be true but at the end of the day it means very little to you as the individual. So your fate is predetermined, where does that leave you? Any attempt to prove it wrong is futile. So you may as well just live your life and try to enjoy it.
Think about a Rube Goldberg machine. Once set into motion, if everything is set up properly, anyone watching it unfold will be surprised by all the things that end up happening as a result … but there’s no other outcome possible.
Determinism says that the universe is basically like this down to the very fabric of existence. Everything was set in motion at some point, and from that moment on, everything that happens is entirely determined by the state of things a fraction of a moment before.
Imagine taking a two full snapshots of the exact state of the entire universe a very short time apart. Reduce that time window down to the smallest amount it can physically be where the two snapshots are still not identical.
Determinism asks: Is the later snapshot an inevitable result of the first?
If the answer is yes, that there’s no way to proceed from the first in any other way than the second, and the same is true for any two such snapshots, then all of existence is set and can only unfold along that one possible path.
If the answer is no, then a determinist viewpoint would raise the following question: What are the different possible snapshots that could have arisen from the first after that tiny moment? What accounts for the differences? Clearly these two snapshots taken so close together are related *somehow*, you can’t just have *any* state of the universe arise from *any* other state, so there are some constraints. What are they?
If determinism is wrong, there has to be some source of randomness that is present between at least some of these snapshots. Either that, or perhaps randomness manifests not between two almost impossibly close snapshots, but only over some larger window that isn’t present at some finer granularity. But how can something that doesn’t exist between any two close moments arise only after many of those moments unfold?
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