Laplace... wrote Mécanique céleste discussing the motion of the planets. ...[O]ne ...reason why ...determinacy got its ...impetus from the development of science, was that Newton's theory of gravitation ...was entirely deterministic. It left no room for freedom. ...Laplace, who did a lot of work on Newtonian ...theory says ...An intellect ...[or] intelligence, which knew ...where all the particles were at some moment and how fast they were moving, and so on, that every single thing could be known to that intelligence, provided a ...good calculator. ...It could reason out exactly what was going to happen in the future. ...It's the strongest ...assertion of determinism in the scientific literature. I don't believe it for one moment..!
English mathematician (1937–2020)
John Horton Conway (26 December 1937 – 11 April 2020) was an English mathematician, and Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Princeton University in New Jersey. He was active in the theory of s, , number theory, and . He also made contributions to many branches of , most notably the invention of the with . Born and raised in , Conway spent the first half of his career at the University of Cambridge before moving to the United States, where he held the John von Neumann Professorship at Princeton University for the rest of his career. He died of complications from COVID-19 at age 82.
From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Alternative Names:
John H. Conway
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JHC
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John Conway
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Conway
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[L]ots of philosophical discussions about free will are concerned with the question of assigning moral responsibility. ...If the judge is a determinist, I might argue it was all determined. I just had to do it. I'm not responsible. ...We're not concerned with assigning moral responsibility... I want you to think of free whim...
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There are many varieties of . ...It says that there's nothing incompatible about determinism... and free will. ...This is from a dispute between Hobbes and.... Archbishop Bramhall... "A man was free, in those things... were in his power, to follow his will, but... he was not free to will..." The will was determinate, but that he was free. ...It's not contradictory, although it looks it at first sight...
Descartes... his type of determinism is only partial. I call it disconnected... that the physical world and... our bodies, but not our minds operate mechanically... We're robots, but the mind is different... that "The will is by its nature so free that it can never be constrained." This is normally called Descartes' dualism... mind, soul or spirit, and matter... [M]atter operates according to one set of laws, and mind or spirit... to another.
Lucretius... was an atomist, a follower of Epicurus. The original people who invented the atomic theory were and Democritus. ...Lucretius is discussing ...atoms ...he says, "at quite indeterminate times and places they swerve" ...because it allows for human free will... and "if the atoms never swerve... what is the source of the free will possessed by living things throughout the earth?" He says, "Although many men are driven by an external source, and often constrained involuntarily to advance or rush headlong, yet there is in the human breast something that can fight against it and resist it... So also in the atoms you must recognize the same possibility. Besides weight and impact, there must be a third cause of movement, the source of this inborn power... due to the slight swerve of the atoms... since nothing can come out of nothing." And then he goes on to say, "the fact that the mind itself has no internal necessity to determine its every act, this is due to the slight swerve of the atoms at no determinate time and place."