Determinist Quotes

“It is important to distinguish 'pure chance' from 'chance' or 'accident.' Things may happen by chance or accident in a purely deterministic universe...Now there is perhaps a sense of 'could not have done otherwise' in which whether or not a person could or could not have done otherwise depends on whether or not the universe is deterministic.”

“[On Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz]The answer is unknowable, but it may not be unreasonable to see him, at least in theological terms, as essentially a deist. He is a determinist: there are no miracles (the events so called being merely instances of infrequently occurring natural laws); Christ has no real role in the system; we live forever, and hence we carry on after our deaths, but then everything — every individual substance — carries on forever.”

“A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.”

“Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.”

“Stupidity is choice we make ourselves not hereditary though it could sometimes be environmentally deterministic. Repress your sinful DESIRES and see, if your stupidity will NOT reduce drastically”

“it struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism. The system is deterministic, but you can’t say what it’s going to do next.”

“The cultural past is rigidly deterministic to the extent that the individual is unaware of it. An analogy, of course, is found in any psychoanalytic treatment: the patient is rigidly determined by past experiences and previously developed patterns to the extent that he is unaware of these experiences and patterns.”

“I'm all for past influences the question is whether they are deterministic. Freud and the behaviorists argue that what we are at any given moment is billiard balls whose past determines our future course. That doesn't take into account that we are forever generating internal representations of positive futures and choosing among them. ”

“The Alchemical world view, in stark contrast to the scientific world view, where rational deterministic man is completely separated from both Nature and the Self, in fact the Self does not even exist. In the alchemical world view, all three are inextricably woven together and in "synchronistic" or "archetypal" events & occurrences in one's life, all distinctions between them blur and almost disappear.”

“In comparison with capitalism, which reconstituted man as an economic animal; in comparison with Marxism, which found man an object made up of organized matter; in comparison with catholicism, which saw him as the unwitting plaything of an imperious unseen power (the Divine Will); in comparison with dialectical materialism, which saw him as unwitting plaything of the deterministic evolution of the means of production- existentialism made man a god”