Title: Hard Determinism
Headings: Hard Determinism Explained
Hard Determinism Explained
Everything is predetermined and we have no free will
Arguments for hard determinism
What about quantum mechanics?
What about the feeling that we have free will?

Content: Hard determinists look at this record of successful prediction and conclude that the assumption it rests on–every event is causally determined–is well-established and allows for no exceptions. That means that human decisions and actions are as predetermined as any other event. So the common belief that we enjoy a special sort of autonomy, or self-determination, because we can exercise a mysterious power we call “free will,” is an illusion. An understandable illusion, perhaps, since it makes us feel that we are importantly different from the rest of nature; but an illusion all the same. What about quantum mechanics? Determinism as an all-encompassing view of things received a severe blow in the 1920s with the development of quantum mechanics, a branch of physics dealing with the behavior of subatomic particles. According to the widely accepted model proposed by Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr, the subatomic world contains some indeterminacy. For instance, sometimes an electron jumps from one orbit around its atom’s nucleus to another orbit, and this is understood to be an event without a cause. Similarly, atoms will sometimes emit radioactive particles, but this, too, is viewed as an event without a cause.