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Originally Posted by LadyShea
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Determinism is the philosophical idea that every event or state of affairs, including every human decision and action, is the inevitable and necessary consequence of antecedent states of affairs. Determinism
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Determinism thus stated is incompatible with quantum indeterminism.
It is also incompatible with the
regularity or neo-Humean conception of the laws of physics: that there are no laws of physics. What we call the laws of physics are merely descriptive, and never prescriptive. No law "determines" the way planets orbit stars, for instance. They just do happen to orbit stars in a certain manner, which can be mathematically described, and hence the laws are merely descriptive and never prescriptive. As Norman Swartz has pointed out in his writings on this subject, if this is true, then the problem of free will v. determinism never even arises.