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: 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?! And while quantum indeterminism, if true, may be relevant to human cognition, there are still alternative theories trying to put determinism back into the quantum. According to these ‘hidden variable theories,’ quantum events only appear random because we cannot see the hidden processes which determine them. However, at the present time, most physicists believe that hidden variable theories have been ruled out by experiments on ‘quantum entanglement’ which seem to show that any such hidden processes would need to operate faster than the speed of light. There are many more issues in this debate that we cannot present here. So, we shall only summarize, that quantum mechanics seems to prove that the world is only statistically, or probabilistically deterministic, and deeply random at the smallest scales, yet quantum mechanics itself is full of debates which might someday change that conclusion, and either way, it doesn’t seem to provide a basis for free will.