I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will. The Jews believe in free will. They believe that man shapes his own life. I reject that doctrine philosophically. In that respect I am not a Jew… I believe with Schopenhauer: We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must. Practically, I am, nevertheless, compelled to act is if freedom of the will existed. If I wish to live in a civilized community, I must act as if man is a responsible being.

I claim credit for nothing. Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human being, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to an invisible tune, intoned in the distance by a mysterious player.

– Albert Einstein
From a 1929 interview with George Sylvester Viereck.

The idea here (and what Einstein and Schopenhauer are after) is that what we perceive from the point-of-view of our human experience is limited by our biomechanics and our ability to process the information we are given. From our human-animal points-of-view, much of the world is random, spontaneous and free, but what we perceive as randomness is only a reflection of our limitations in observing that true complexity.

This is not to say that we are incapable of understanding reality, only that we are incapable of experiencing it as it is, and that our own physical observations tell us there is an infinity complex series of causal events that dictate everything, even how and when our neurons fire. Our inability to perceive this complexity is what we call free will.

I think the key to discussing determinism is understanding that that there are many levels to our perception. On the primary level we “feel” free, we interact with the world, respond to new things and make daily choices which effect the trajectory of our lives, and this is all very real and important to us; these actions have real consequences which affect us. However, our experiences are perceived by our physical human unit, our evolved system of electrobiology tuned by our 200 Hz of brain power to be a hyper-aware pattern recognition machine. This is the space where all our human experience lie, and where all the laws of human interaction take place, like society, reason, meaning, belief and free will. But even in this “free” realm we are beholden to the physics of our bodies and our environments, we eat because we are hungry and sleep because we are tired. Even in this realm, much of what we think we choose is dictated by our primal instincts, everything else we simply call free-thought. But what if even those free-thoughts we so egotistically prize are generated by a process for which there could never have been any other conclusion?

The idea of determinism, like with many existential subjects, suffers from the same human fear that often keeps true logic and reason from prevailing. The arguments against determinism stems not from logic, but from our human need to feel purpose, and from our fear that we are not in control.

I might try to explain the science behind this at some point but if you are curious check out this fantastic explanation about the current thinking on the science from Sabine Hossenfelder (one of my favorite researchers):

Einstein believed in determinism: that the randomness in anything could be explained and predicted if only we knew the “hidden variables” involved.

His “spooky-action-at-a-distance” statement came from observing that entangled particles seemed to be linked in a way physics could not explain by causality, hence the “spookiness”.

We perceive randomness only as a reflection of our inability to observe the true complexity.

Randomness is synonymous with the unknown, or the unexpected. If something is ranmdom, by definition it cannot be compressed since it does not contain a pattern. Real randomness requires an infinite amount of information.

Randomness exists as a concept. But as an observation, we can’t say anything at this stage.

A system is what it appears to be. For instance, feelings are a concept. But our experience of feelings allow us to consider them as real.

butterfly effect. For infinitesimal differences in the initial conditions, the results are totally different, generally making any prediction impossible over time.

In any given collection, there can be astonishingly long patterns.

It is in quantum physics, we are familiar with true random phenomena. What was thought to be a vacuum in space is actually composed of subatomic particles that are magically appearing and disappearing. These particles generate random noise. The sound of silence.

But quantum physics has proven its effectiveness where the great principles of today have failed. This introduces a new paradigm. Statistical physics, which at the same time explains the possibility of predictions and the residual gap between predictions and observations. Randomness can imitate determinism.

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The conventional explanation is that there is randomness inherent in the quantum universe.

According to the Bohm theory, however, this uncertainty arises from interactions between the measuring device and the particle: it is not inherent in the universe.

She favours an idea known as superdeterminism, that what we ultimately see on measuring a quantum object is somehow predetermined by factors we can’t observe.

Even nexperiemtn like Bells Therom that seem to show a photon taking an undefined random left or tight, is probably simply our unrealised understanding of quantum physics.

Chaos theory is the science which seeks to establish the patterns that govern apparently random processes like weather patterns.

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In the 1980s, John Stewart Bell discussed superdeterminism in a BBC interview:[7][8]

There is a way to escape the inference of superluminal speeds and spooky action at a distance. But it involves absolute determinism in the universe, the complete absence of free will. Suppose the world is super-deterministic, with not just inanimate nature running on behind-the-scenes clockwork, but with our behavior, including our belief that we are free to choose to do one experiment rather than another, absolutely predetermined, including the “decision” by the experimenter to carry out one set of measurements rather than another, the difficulty disappears. There is no need for a faster than light signal to tell particle A what measurement has been carried out on particle B, because the universe, including particle A, already “knows” what that measurement, and its outcome, will be.

Nobel Prize winner Gerard ‘t Hooft discussed this loophole with John Bell in the early 1980s. “I raised the question: Suppose that also Alice’s and Bob’s decisions have to be seen as not coming out of free will, but being determined by everything in the theory. John said, well, you know, that I have to exclude. If it’s possible, then what I said doesn’t apply. I said, Alice and Bob are making a decision out of a cause. A cause lies in their past and has to be included in the picture”.[10]

According to the physicist Anton Zeilinger, if superdeterminism is true, some of its implications would bring into question the value of science itself by destroying falsifiability:

[W]e always implicitly assume the freedom of the experimentalist… This fundamental assumption is essential to doing science. If this were not true, then, I suggest, it would make no sense at all to ask nature questions in an experiment, since then nature could determine what our questions are, and that could guide our questions such that we arrive at a false picture of nature.[11]

Physicists Sabine Hossenfelder and Tim Palmer have argued that superdeterminism “is a promising approach not only to solve the measurement problem, but also to understand the apparent non-locality of quantum physics”.[12]

Wiseman and Cavalcanti argue that any hypothetical superdeterministic theory “would be about as plausible, and appealing, as belief in ubiquitous alien mind-control”.[13]

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By 1935, it was already recognized that the predictions of quantum physics are probabilistic. Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen presented a scenario that involves preparing a pair of particles such that the quantum state of the pair is entangled, and then separating the particles to an arbitrarily large distance. The experimenter has a choice of possible measurements that can be performed on one of the particles. When they choose a measurement and obtain a result, the quantum state of the other particle apparently collapses instantaneously into a new state depending upon that result, no matter how far away the other particle is. This suggests that either the measurement of the first particle somehow also interacted with the second particle at faster than the speed of light, or that the entangled particles had some unmeasured property which pre-determined their final quantum states before they were separated. Therefore, assuming locality, quantum mechanics must be incomplete, as it cannot give a complete description of the particle’s true physical characteristics. In other words, quantum particles, like electrons and photons, must carry some property or attributes not included in quantum theory, and the uncertainties in quantum theory’s predictions would then be due to ignorance or unknowability of these properties, later termed “hidden variables”.