{"quotes":[{"text":"Free will, determinism, meaning, existence, etc. Are academic problems, not problems in life.","author":"Marty Rubin","tags":["academic-problems","determinism","existence","free-will","meaning","philosophy","problems-in-life"],"id":2967,"author_id":"Marty+Rubin"},{"text":"[L]ife is more than just steering a course around pain.","author":"Stephen King","tags":["courage","determinism","life","philosophy","religion","stephen-king"],"id":4808,"author_id":"Stephen+King"},{"text":"Not only are there meaningless questions, but many of the problems with which the human intellect has tortured itself turn out to be only 'pseudo problems,' because they can be formulated only in terms of questions which are meaningless. Many of the traditional problems of philosophy, of religion, or of ethics, are of this character. Consider, for example, the problem of the freedom of the will. You maintain that you are free to take either the right- or the left-hand fork in the road. I defy you to set up a single objective criterion by which you can prove after you have made the turn that you might have made the other. The problem has no meaning in the sphere of objective activity; it only relates to my personal subjective feelings while making the decision.","author":"Percy Williams Bridgman","tags":["decisions","determinism","ethics","experiment","falsifiability","falsifiable","feelings","free-will","meaning","nobel-laureate","objective","philosophy","proof","questions","religion","science","scientific","subjective"],"id":7513,"author_id":"Percy+Williams+Bridgman"},{"text":"If being is many, it must be both like and unlike, and this is impossible, for neither can the like be unlike, nor the unlike like.","author":"Zeno of Citium","tags":["determinism","elea","eleatic","greek","hinduism","metaphysics","philosophy","vedanta","zeno"],"id":8701,"author_id":"Zeno+of+Citium"},{"text":"We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes. The perfection that the human mind has been able to give to astronomy affords but a feeble outline of such an intelligence.","author":"Pierre-Simon Laplace","tags":["analysis","astronomy","certainty","comprehension","data","determinism","eyes","formula","free-will","human-mind","intelligence","lack-of-free-will","mind","motion","naturalism","nature","omniscience","past","perfection","physics","present","science","space","time","universe"],"id":9799,"author_id":"Pierre-Simon+Laplace"},{"text":"My destiny plays with me in such a wayI feel I play with my destiny.","author":"Vivake Pathak","tags":["choice","destiny","determinism","fate","free-will","freedom"],"id":11151,"author_id":"Vivake+Pathak"},{"text":"They say your hardcore's not yours, and it's not fate. Nobody's gonna tell you what shit like that means.","author":"Noah Wareness","tags":["destiny","determinism","determinismo","determinismus"],"id":15470,"author_id":"Noah+Wareness"},{"text":"...Any object functioning within the physical laws of any particular universe does not have free will ... In terms of human beings, all behavior and cognition cannot appear out of thin air. Behavior and cognition must be the result of prior causes. This is because our brains obey the same laws of a cause and effect physical universe just like any other physical object. All events that occur in the universe are caused by antecedent events.Quantum indeterminacy, which maintains that the state of a system does not determine a unique collection of values for all its measurable properties, is not a valid argument for free will and has been used incorrectly to justify beliefs of independent decision-making. Logically speaking, notions of randomness and indeterminism are actually additional arguments against free will. All events that occur at random in the universe are, by definition, not caused by antecedent events. Or to say it a different way, any random event cannot also be a willed event.By the process of elimination, events that are “willed freely” are events that are neither determined nor random. In other words, in all likelihood events that are “willed freely” are events that simply do not exist.","author":"Mark J. Solomon","tags":["determinism","free-will","metaphysics","science"],"id":18953,"author_id":"Mark+J.+Solomon"},{"text":"If God created our will, then he's responsible for every choice we make... So-- as I recall, the official philosophical answer is that free will doesn't exist. Only the illusion of free will, because the causes of hour behavior are so complex that we can't trace them back. If you've got one line of dominoes knocking each other down, one by one, then you can always say, look, this domino fell because that one pushed it. But when you have an infinite number of dominoes that can be traced back in an infinite number of directions, you can never find where the causal chain begins. So you think, That domino fell because it wanted to... Even if there is no such thing as free will, we have to treat each other as if there were free will in order to live together in society.","author":"Orson Scott Card","tags":["determinism","dominoes","freedom","philosophy","want"],"id":21462,"author_id":"Orson+Scott+Card"},{"text":"Determinism gives you the freedom to do whatever you like.","author":"Raheel Farooq","tags":["destiny","determinism","fatalism","fate","free-will","predetermined-endings"],"id":27621,"author_id":"Raheel+Farooq"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":90,"pages":9,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}