Title: Determinism: Examples and Definition | Philosophy Terms
Headings: Determinism
Determinism
I. Definition
II. Types of Determinism
III. Determinism versus Free Will
IV. Controversies about Determinism
Does quantum mechanics necessarily mean that the universe is non-deterministic?
V. Quotes about Determinism
Quote #1:
Quote #2:
VI. Determinism in Pop Culture
Example #1: The Matrix
Example #2: Minority Report
VII. The History of Determinism
Quiz

Content: You can say approximately how many photons out of 100 will hit a certain spot, but not which ones. And the uncertainty is not just a matter of human knowledge; the photons do not follow specific paths, and have no specific locations, until they are observed, and there is no way to predict exactly where they will be. Most philosophers do not worry much about quantum theory because they have been told that it doesn’t matter at the human scale; although quantum events may be non-deterministic, their probabilities average out to give precisely the predictions of Newtonian physics for events much larger than atoms. But, although this is true in principle, it’s not really true. For one thing, quantum theory operates at every scale, even if its randomness averages out at large scales, and for another thing, it has now been shown that quantum effects are amplified up to the biological scale by chaos; some biological processes—such as the formation of proteins–even rely on quantum indetermninacy! Chaos theory shows that quantum effects can matter at the scale of neurons in the brain, which means that quantum indeterminism could be relevant to the question of whether our choices are determined or not. However, this does not make quantum indeterminacy a source of free will because randomness is no more free will than determinism, is it?!