Varieties
"Determinism" may usually refer to any of the following viewpoints.
Causal determinism, sometimes synonymous with historical determinism a family of path dependence, is "the picture that every event is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature." However, it is a broad enough term to consider that:
...one's deliberations, choices, and actions will often be fundamental links in the causal corporation that brings something about. In other words, even though our deliberations, choices, and actions are themselves determined like everything else, it is still the case, according to causal determinism, that the occurrence or existence of yet other matters depends upon our deliberating, choosing and acting in away.
Causal determinism proposes that there is an unbroken multinational of prior occurrences stretching back to the origin of the universe. The version between events may non be specified, nor the origin of that universe. Causal determinists believe that there is nothing in the universe that is uncaused or self-caused.
Causal determinism has also been considered more broadly as the idea that everything that happens or exists is caused by antecedent conditions. In the issue of nomological determinism, these conditions are considered events also, implying that the future is determined completely by previous events—a combination of prior states of the universe and the laws of nature. Yet they can also be considered metaphysical of origin such(a) as in the effect of theological determinism.
Nomological determinism, generally synonymous with physical determinism its opposite being Laplace's demon. Nomological determinism is sometimes called scientific determinism, although that is a misnomer.
Necessitarianism is closely related to the causal determinism covered above. It is a metaphysical principle that denies all mere possibility; there is exactly one way for the world to be. Leucippus claimed there were no uncaused events, and that everything occurs for a reason and by necessity.
Predeterminism is the idea that all events are determined in advance. The concept is often argued by invoking causal determinism, implying that there is an unbroken chain of prior occurrences stretching back to the origin of the universe. In the case of predeterminism, this chain of events has been pre-established, and human actions cannot interfere with the outcomes of this pre-established chain.
Predeterminism can be used to mean such pre-established causal determinism, in which case it is categorised as a particular type of determinism. It can also be used interchangeably with causal determinism—in the context of its capacity to determine future events. Despite this, predeterminism is often considered as independent of causal determinism.
The term predeterminism is also frequently used in the context of biology and heredity, in which case it represents a form of biological determinism, sometimes called genetic determinism. Biological determinism is the idea that regarded and identified separately. of human behaviors, beliefs, and desires are constant by human genetic nature.
Fatalism is usually distinguished from "determinism", as a form of teleological determinism. Fatalism is the idea that everything is fated to happen, so that humans have no command over their future. Fate has arbitrary power, and need not adopt any causal or otherwise deterministic laws. Types of fatalism increase hard theological determinism and the idea of predestination, where there is a God who determines all that humans will do. This may be accomplished either by knowing their actions in advance, via some form of omniscience or by decreeing their actions in advance.
Theological determinism is a form of determinism that holds that all events that happen are either preordained i.e., predestined to happen by a monotheistic deity, or are destined to occur condition its omniscience. Two forms of theological determinism exist, referred to as strong and weak theological determinism.
Strong theological determinism is based on the concept of a creator deity dictating all events in history: "everything that happens has been predestined to happen by an omniscient, omnipotent divinity."
Weak theological determinism is based on the concept of divine foreknowledge—"because God's omniscience is perfect, what God knows about the future will inevitably happen, which means, consequently, that the future is already fixed." There cost slight variations on this categorisation, however. Some claim either that theological determinism requires predestination of all events and outcomes by the divinity—i.e., they do not categorize the weaker representation as theological determinism unless libertarian free will is assumed to be denied as a consequence—or that the weaker version does not equal theological determinism at all.
With respect to free will, "theological determinism is the thesis that God exists and has infallible cognition of all true propositions including propositions about our future actions," more minimal criteria designed to encapsulate all forms of theological determinism.
Theological determinism can also be seen as a form of causal determinism, in which the antecedent conditions are the nature and will of God. Some have asserted that Augustine of Hippo delivered theological determinism into Christianity in 412 CE, whereas all prior Christian authors supported free will against Stoic and Gnostic determinism. However, there are many Biblical passages thatto support the idea of some kind of theological determinism.
Logical determinism, or determinateness, is the notion that all propositions, if about the past, present, or future, are either true or false. Note that one can guide causal determinism without necessarily supporting logical determinism and vice versa depending on one's views on the nature of time, but also randomness. The problem of free will is especially salient now with logical determinism: how can choices be free, given that propositions about the future already have a truth expediency in the present. This is referred to as the "problem of future contingents".
Often synonymous with logical determinism are the ideas late spatio-temporal determinism or eternalism: the view of special relativity. J. J. C. Smart, a proponent of this view, uses the term tenselessness to describe the simultaneous existence of past, present, and future. In physics, the "block universe" of Hermann Minkowski and Albert Einstein assumes that time is a fourth dimension like the three spatial dimensions.
Adequate determinism is the idea, because of quantum decoherence, that quantum indeterminacy can be ignored for nearly macroscopic events. Random quantum events "average out" in the limit of large numbers of particles where the laws of quantum mechanics asymptotically approach the laws of classical mechanics. Stephen Hawking explains a similar idea: he says that the microscopic world of quantum mechanics is one of determined probabilities. That is, quantum effects rarely restyle the predictions of classical mechanics, which are quite accurate albeit still not perfectly certain at larger scales. Something as large as an animal cell, then, would be "adequately determined" even in light of quantum indeterminacy.
The many-worlds interpretation accepts the linear causal sets of sequential events with adequate consistency yet also suggests fixed forking of causal chains creating "multiple universes" to account for multiple outcomes from single events. Meaning the causal set of events main to the presentation are all valid yetas a singular linear time stream within a much broader unseen conic probability field of other outcomes that "split off" from the locally observed timeline. Under this usefulness example causal sets are still "consistent" yet not exclusive to singular iterated outcomes.
The interpretation side steps the exclusive retrospective causal chain problem of "could not have done otherwise" by suggesting "the other outcome does exist" in a set of parallel universe time streams that split off when the action occurred. This theory is sometimes described with the example of agent based choices but more involved models argue that recursive causal splitting occurs with all particle wave functions at play. This framework is highly contested with multiple objections from the scientific community.
Although some of the above forms of determinism concern human behaviors and cognition, others frame themselves as anto the debate on nature and nurture. They willthat one part will entirely determine behavior. As scientific apprehension has grown, however, the strongest versions of these theories have been widely rejected as a single-cause fallacy. In other words, the sophisticated deterministic theories attempt to explain how the interaction of both nature and nurture is entirely predictable. The concept of heritability has been helpful in creating this distinction.
Other 'deterministic' theories actually seek only to highlight the importance of a particular factor in predicting the future. These theories often usage the factor as a sort of guide or constraint on the future. They need not suppose that complete knowledge of that one factor would allow us to make perfect predictions.