
	Where results make sense

Topic: Causal determinism

Related Topics

Marquis de Laplace Pierre Simon

Probability theory

Applied mathematics

Probability

Financial mathematics

Georg Ohm

In the News (Fri 27 Nov 09)

Northern Trust

Marvin Harrison

Peter Chernin

Gary Locke

Match Play

Penelope Cruz

Mickey Rourke

AR Rahman

Danny Boyle

Hugh Jackman

	Becoming: A Problem for Determinists?
		The causal determinist maintains that the future relative to any moment is fully determinate at that moment and is predictable on the ground of natural regularities by any perfect knower of the initial conditions and relevant laws.
		Since the question of whether causal determinism requires his metaphysics of time is not at all a threat In his metaphysics, that issue does not attract his attention very much.
		Determinism is considered to be one of several if not ‘the chief metaphysical pitfall which must be ruled out for the process system to succeed.
	www.religion-online.org /showarticle.asp?title=2440 (5985 words)

	Does Determinism Imply Absolute Predictability?
		Causal determinism is the thesis that all events are causally necessitated by prior events, so that the future is not open to more than one possibility.
		Suppose that causal determinism is true and that there exists a foolproof means by which you can predict the future with absolute accuracy.
		Since that is undeniable, it seems possible that one could arrive at a prediction of the state of the world at t2 based on the conditions prior to one’s own act of prediction, and thus not have to concern oneself with the effects of the state of the world at t1.
	members.aol.com /kiekeben/predict.html (2376 words)

	The Scientific Philosophy of Mario Bunge
		I take sides with the minority that regards causal determinism as a special form of determinism, namely, that kind of theory that holds the unrestricted validity of the causal principle to the exclusion of every other principle of determination.
		The rational ground for regarding causality as a form of determinism, and not conversely, is that modern science employs many noncausal categories of determination or lawful production, such as statistical, structural, and dialectical, though they are often couched in causal language.
		The chief result of the above-mentioned examination is that the causal principle is neither a panacea nor a superstition, that the law of causation is a philosophical hypothesis employed in science and enjoying an approximate validity in certain fields, where it applies in competition with other principles of determination.
	www.formalontology.it /bungem.htm (6466 words)

	Derk Pereboom - Living Without Free Will - Reviewed by Erik Carlson, Uppsala - Philosophical Reviews - University of ...
		This is the position that moral responsibility is incompatible with determinism, as well as with the kind of indeterminism implied by the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics.
		Compatibilists concerning determinism and alternative possibilities will deny, however, that our decisions are therefore produced by factors that are beyond our control, in the sense that we cannot prevent their obtaining.
		If the causal powers of agents were not constrained by deterministic or statistical microphysical laws, there would almost certainly be observable deviations, in the course of natural events, from what can be predicted on the basis of these laws.
	ndpr.nd.edu /review.cfm?id=1287 (1516 words)

	Against Compatibilism: Compulsion, Free Agency and Moral Responsibility
		So long as Gandhi's choice to fast is determined by his desire to force the British out of India and his belief that fasting may produce the desired result, his act is free (though causally determined) and is an expression of his internal psychological states.
		Given that the agent's will is causally determined by antecedent conditions and laws of nature, the agent is ultimately compelled to will, to choose, to deliberate, etc. as the antecedent conditions and laws of nature have determined.
		Causal determination of externally observable behavior by an act of will, does not preclude prior causal determination of the act of will by conditions that originate in the external world.
	www.sorites.org /Issue_15/ferraiol.htm (2492 words)

	Arguments for Incompatibilism
		For more on theological determinism, see the entries on fatalism and divine foreknowledge.) Although there are instructive comparisions to be made concerning logical, theological, and causal determinism, these are outside the scope of this article.
		Determinism is a thesis about the kind of laws that govern a world; it says nothing about whether these laws are knowable by finite beings, let alone whether they could, even in principle, be used to predict all future events.
		Determinism (without these additional assumptions) does not imply that our “journey” through life is like moving down a road; the contrast between determinism and non-determinism is not the contrast between traveling on a branching road and traveling on a road with no branches.
	plato.stanford.edu /entries/incompatibilism-arguments (9931 words)

	Stoics on fate and determinism
		For if the theory of causal determinism is true, no one can ever choose to do A rather than B, or B rather than A. No one ever chooses to do anything.
		Should the theory of causal determinism be true, and should fate thereby be a fact concerning the world, it does not follow that acting is never to any avail.
		So again, the theory of causal determinism is unviolated – and it is ‘up to’ the agent, and ‘in their power’ to assent to impressions and to act as they see fit.
	www.wku.edu /~jan.garrett/stoa/seddon1.htm (2482 words)

	SSRN-Resurrecting the Causal Theory of the Excuses by Anders Kaye (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-22)
		Causal theory is one of several competing explanations of the criminal law's excuse doctrines.
		The law grants these defenses, causal theory says, because (1) it presumes that the excused conduct is caused by forces beyond the actor's control, and (2) such conduct is not blameworthy.
		Having shown that the causal theory of the excuses is not untenable, this article shifts focus and takes another approach to resurrecting the causal theory: in order to reawaken interest in causal theory, it sets out some of the most disturbing features of the currently-favored alternative to causal theory.
	papers.ssrn.com /sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=598543 (614 words)

	Block-Universe Determinism vs. Causal-Chain Determinism
		The model and idea of determinism one has before the mystic state and enlightenment is the egoic, unenlightened model, which is causal-chain determinism; afterwards, the emphasis is placed instead on block-universe determinism.
		Tenseless-time block-universe determinism as a model and a mystic-state experience and perspective is the main argument for no-free-will, and causal-chain determinism is a minor footnote next to the argument from sentence-truth (the sea-battle argument).
		Compared to vertical causality, or the vertical chain of causality, the horizontal in-time chain of causality has a relatively strong characteristic of practical freedom and is not far from the freewillist mode of thinking, which is also in-time and grounded in the sphere of practical experiencing.
	www.egodeath.com /BlockUnivVsCausalChainDeterminism.htm (4850 words)

	Philosophy 3: Determinism
		We will understand Causal Determinism, or Determinism for short, to be the thesis that all of the laws of nature that govern our world are deterministic laws.
		Determinism is the view that we have laws of nature which permit only one possible future for any given past.
		So it's already true, but not causally determined to be true, that my box will emit a positively charged particle when I press the button.
	www.princeton.edu /~jimpryor/courses/intro/notes/determinism.html (2314 words)

	Resources about Determinism in Religion
		This book, like most determinism books is fairly conventional and unimaginative -- it seems to lack awareness of the new theory of tenseless time and the B series of time slices (Nathan Oaklander) without a time-journeying continuant agent.
		Determinism is always defined to include predictionism and reductionism, which I reject as irrelevancies and distractions that can only lessen the credibility of determinism, in basically the same way Double warns about in long-shot free-will theories that are married to supposed quantum indeterminacy and thus cast into doubt.
		Such conventional determinism, practically based on reductionism and predictionism, is really every bit as doubtful and ridiculous as free will theories that are based on quantum indeterminacy.
	www.egodeath.com /ResourcesDeterminismReligion.htm (2336 words)

	Untitled Document
		Recently, commentators have argued that Leibniz was a causal compatibilist, that with respect to human agency, he held that human choices are both causally determined (and so causally/physically necessary) and free.
		I argue that Leibniz was a causal determinist, and thus a compatibilist, and I suggest that logical consistency requires him to adopt compatibilism given some of the concepts at work in his physics.
		As I hope to make clear, the pressures to adopt causal determinism in Leibniz’s system are perhaps more severe than those facing the contemporary libertarian, pressures that stem from empirical considerations about the behavior of bodies in the physical world, and the "well-founding" of those bodies in simple substances.
	www.uwosh.edu /faculty_staff/carlin/paperexamples.html (889 words)

	Brainstorms: Teleology: bottom>up or top>down?
		Scientific determinism, by contrast, is an assumption, supported by past experience, that the relationship between cause and effect observed in the past will be repeated in the future (or was repeated in the unobserved past).
		There are many observable causal relationships which are useful in scientific analysis and which satisfy the scientific determinism criteria, but which do not satisfy the hard determinism -permanent and universal causal process requirement.
		Hard determinism: the view that there are no free actions—because all things that happen (or at least because all human actions) are causally determined.
	www.iscid.org /boards/ubb-get_topic-f-6-t-000493.html (1813 words)

	Exchange with T. P. Uschanov on Determinism
		Determinism means that, strictly speaking, there are no ad rem arguments, which means that an ad rem argument for determinism is itself paradoxical.
		Determinism itself is very much a species of "metaphysical concepts" and so is no more to be recommended to natural reason or common sense than Aristotle's less reductionistic system.
		Spinoza's determinism, indeed, is in the service of God: as part of his purpose to erase the self and its egocentric conceptions, so that we can be lovingly absorbed into the Perfection of God.
	www.friesian.com /uschanov.htm (8301 words)

	Notes on Free Will and Determinism - Prof. Norman Swartz
		Logical Determinism may appear to pose a threat to the existence of free will, but that is only because it misrepresents the nature of the relation between a true proposition and the state-of-affairs in the world that accounts for that proposition's being true.
		According to Laplacian Determinism, in principle (although not always in practice) whatever happens (whether physical, chemical, biological, social, economic, psychological, geological, etc.) is to be accounted-for by citing the natural laws of the universe and antecedent (and sometimes prevailing) conditions.
		The way out of the puzzle about free will and causal determinism is to adopt a thoroughly modern view of natural laws, removed once and for all from its supernatural, theistic, origins.
	www.sfu.ca /philosophy/swartz/freewill1.htm (8039 words)

	Causal Fallacies
		The boy jumped off the top of the building during one of his parents arguments, and would have been killed by the fall except that by sheer coincidence the fire department was on the ground that day practicing with their new net.
		A much better way to understand the fallacy of Causal Determinism is to realize that there are two different ways of using the concept of causation.
		In the latter case when we say that A is a cause of B we do not mean that A absolutely determines B, but (roughly) that, all other things being equal, B is more probable when A occurs than when A does not occur.
	www.csus.edu /indiv/m/mayesgr/phl4causalfallacies.htm (2223 words)

	[No title]
		Determinism implies that you can tell someone you are going to predict their behaviour, at least stochastically, and then succeed in doing so, but does not claim that you can control the actions of a sufficiently stubborn subject.
		Determinism predicts that you could play a game of scissors, paper, stone and no matter what you did, the computer would predict your final choice and the neurophysiologist would be sure to win, at least on average.
		The compatibilist holds that causal determination is compatible with moral responsibility, and since free will is a necessary condition for having moral responsibility, it follows that free will is compatible with moral responsibility.
	www.gmu.edu /departments/economics/bcaplan/free2 (13116 words)

	Accidental Necessity and Logical Determinism
		Of course, a causal determinist might contend that it is now causally necessary that Socrates drank hemlock, where p is causally necessary at t just in case, for some q (relevant causal conditions), q is true at t and it is physically, but not logically, necessary that if q is true, then p is true.
		Roughly speaking, the truth or falsity of an immediate proposition is temporally (as opposed to, say, logically or causally) independent of what has been or will be true, while the truth conditions of a non-immediate proposition involve an essential reference to what has been true at past moments or will be true at future moments.
		In short, the argument for determinism from divine foreknowledge is, contrary to what some have claimed, more difficult to contend with than is the argument for logical determinism.
	www.nd.edu /~ndphilo/papers/accnecdet.htm (8616 words)

	ipedia.com: Causal determinism Article (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-22)
		Put simply, causal determinism expresses the belief that every effect has a cause, and therefore science, pursued diligently enough, will explain all natural phenomena and thus produce a TOE (Theory of Everything).
		Scientists and skeptics may implicitly favour causal determinism because it does not allow for any supernatural explanations of reality.
		As Pierre-Simon Laplace noted around 1814, such a theory would also (in theory) grant a sufficiently powerful being the ability to determine any future state of the universe, thus making the future as readily accessible as the past (at least from that powerful being's frame of reference).
	www.ipedia.com /causal_determinism.html (171 words)

	Foreknowledge and Free Will [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
		Causal determinism is the thesis that all events (occurrences, processes, etc.) are the result of Laws of Nature and of antecedent conditions and of nothing else.
		Of the three deterministic arguments, the most difficult to engage is the third, that of causal determinism.
		The upshot is that the premises of the argument for Epistemic Determinism (i.e.
	www.iep.utm.edu /f/foreknow.htm (11234 words)

	Philosophical Dictionary: Cause-Cixous
		Distinction between the events involved in a causal relationship, where the occurrence of one (the cause) is supposed to bring about or produce an occurrence of the other (the effect).
		Contemporary philosophers often suppose that a causal relationship is best expressed in the counterfactual statement that if the cause had not occured, then the effect would not have occured either.
		Also see Rudy Garns, SEP on causal processes, medieval theories of causation, counterfactual theories of causation, causal determinism, probabilistic theories of causation, the metaphysics of causation, backwards causation, causation and manipulability, and causation in the law, ColE, and CE.
	www.philosophypages.com /dy/c2.htm (990 words)

	Freedom Cancellation and Determinism
		Compatibilists believe that our intuitions that free will and determinism are incompatible can be explained by the fact that we have an unjustifiable tendency assimilate determinism to situations that are genuinely freedom canceling.
		This is close to incompatibilism, except that it leaves open the possibility that a human-like person might be free in a deterministic universe where the determinism is non-causal: where it is not the case that later states are deterministically caused by earlier ones.
		That said, it would be a strange kind of a view on which non-causal determinism is compatible with free will but causal determinism is not.
	www.georgetown.edu /faculty/ap85/papers/FreedomCancellation.html (3345 words)

	Theological Determinism
		The second kind of theological determinism follows from the concept of divine preordination: if God is the ultimate cause behind everything, then He has preordained all that will ever occur, and once again there can be no deviation from the future's pre-set pattern.
		The preordination of the future is by definition a kind of determinism, so there is no arguing against it if one accepts the premise.
		Theological determinism is nevertheless important in that it reveals an inconsistency between the orthodox notions of foreknowledge and free will.
	members.aol.com /kiekeben/theological.html (816 words)

	Determinism & Will (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-22)
		(6) Determinism is the fundamental premise upon which all modern science is founded, including the cognitive sciences which deal with mental processes such as Will, for reasoned explanation cannot pertain to objects and events without referring to consistent relations between causes and effects.
		Causality is " The principle of or relationship between cause and effect", Will is "the deliberate choice of a course of action", since a course can only be deliberately chosen based on the causes necessary to bring about the desired effect, Will is dependent upon causality's actual existence.
		For, Determinism decentralizes the source of personal behavior to causes outside the individual's 'control', and renders ones 'self conception', their 'identity', as being continuous with ones habitat, rather than 'separate' from and 'higher' than it.
	www.iserv.net /~merriman/determin.htm (4892 words)

	SoloHQ: Forum
		"'causal determinism' (inevitability), is in fact COMPLETELY A-causal, in that it effectively isolates events from their inter-relation to OTHER events."
		Could you clarify how something causal can be acausal.
		The notion that a given outcome is "destined" to occur (and thus, that no alternatives are possible), denies causality in the most basic sense.
	solohq.com /Forum/ArticleDiscussions/0184_3.shtml (620 words)

	compatibilism -- Britannica Concise Encyclopedia - The online encyclopedia you can trust!
		Thesis that free will, in the sense required for moral responsibility, is consistent with universal causal determinism.
		It is important to distinguish the question of the logical consistency of belief in universal causal determinism with belief in free will from the question whether the thesis of free will (or that of causal determinism) is true.
		Among incompatibilists, some maintain the existence of free will and accordingly deny universal causal determinism, while others uphold universal causal determinism and deny the existence of free will.
	www.britannica.com /ebc/article-9361284?tocId=9361284 (220 words)

	Open Directory - Society: Philosophy: Metaphysics: Free Will and Determinism (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-22)
		The Determinism and Freedom Philosophy Website - A comprehensive collection of important papers on the philosophy of free will, freedom and determinism.
		Determinism as True, Compatibilism and Incompatibilism as Both False, and the Real Problem - A critique of the view that quantum theory disproves determinism, and an argument that freedom is simultaneously compatible and incompatible with determinism.
		Norman Swartz - Discusses the various problems raised by different concepts of determinism, and presents an argument that physical determinism is compatible with free will.
	dmoz.org /Society/Philosophy/Metaphysics/Free_Will_and_Determinism (343 words)

Try your search on: Qwika (all wikis)