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, of course, philosophers are always coming up with new ways to justify belief in determinism and / or free will—so there are lots of debates to be had and the jury is still out! One promising idea for allowing free will into natural law comes from the theory of complex systems – the idea of emergence . Emergence is when something new appears in nature, something which could not have been predicted due to its complexity, like weather events. Your brain might be deterministic (at least to a quantum degree) yet nevertheless unpredictable due to its complexity. Whether this makes free will possible or not is still an open question. IV. Controversies about Determinism
Does quantum mechanics necessarily mean that the universe is non-deterministic? The laws of quantum mechanics (QM), the most thoroughly proven theory of all time, deny that specific events are predictable or determined at the quantum scale (smaller than an atom). According to QM, only the probabilities of events are determined, while specific events are random. Whether an atom will decay at a certain time, or where on a photographic plate a photon will hit, can never be predicted, no matter how much you know about previous events, except statistically.