Time, Determinism & Free Will

Hard Determinism

alternative Classical Ancient atomism (Democritus, 5th century BCE); classical statement via Laplace's demon, 1814; modern defense by Derk Pereboom, 2001

Holds that determinism is true — every event, including every human decision, is the fixed consequence of prior causes and the laws of nature — and that this is genuinely incompatible with free will, which therefore does not exist.

Proponents

Democritus, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Derk Pereboom

Evidence For

Grounded in the classical-physics picture that a complete description of a system's state, plus the laws of nature, fixes every later state, leaving no gap for an uncaused choice to intervene.

Evidence Against

Quantum mechanics introduces genuine indeterminacy at the micro level, undermining a strictly Laplacian universe — though most philosophers agree raw indeterminism alone doesn't automatically restore meaningful free will either, it just replaces determination with randomness.

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