ryan_m_b said:
Because of causality. The determinist principle is that cause and effect are absolute. Therefore everything that happens is contingent on the past, in other words every atom of your and your environment's existence is governed by physical laws through time.
This is the answer I had hoped for.
I believe there is a grave mistake in this type of view.
Causality is the relationship between physical events. But what are such relationships? This can only be answered by referring to physical models. But models are descriptions, with built-in rules for inference. (e.g. Newtons laws of mechanics) The inferences are logical. Thus causality is simply a logical connection between descriptions of events, but has no fundamental connection to the physical world (other than that it is what that is described).
Models need not be mathematical models; the physical models we are familiar with. They can be simple (even primitive) forms of expressing relationships between events.
Just as the only necessity that exists is logical necessity, so too the only impossibility that exists is logical impossibility.
- Wittgenstein
You mention as an explanation (or example) of causality as the interaction between atoms. This is certainly correct, but in the proper manner of in the context of the models we have for atoms. I don't propose that we "just haven't got deep enough in the physics", nor that "causality is found at the "deepest" level of natural laws".
However, it seems to be very clear that what happens is inevitable. But this does not depend on causality. Rather, what is the meaning of the word inevitable? When do we use it, and why? If an event has happened,
of course it is inevitable. This is actually a tautology. But can we ever say that an event is inevitable if it has not happened? Not by far. (We can predict the future to a certain degree, but the predictions are interpretations of the logical implications within a model for the phenomena we are describing, not carrying any fundamental connection with the actual physical phenomena).
The use of the word inevitable is misplaced in this context. "Everything that happened
was inevitable" is meaningless (unless it is used in the fashion that we expected it to happen with great certainty, which is not what is meant by inevitability here). It is a linguistic error, it seems obvious since it always is obvious whenever used correctly. But a subtle change in the logical place of the word (unnoticably) lead us into believing it with absolute certainty.
Don't interpret this as me saying that everything is random (or worse: stochastic). I'm saying that determinism as a stance is an error of language, not of ontology (and that it is meaningless as an ontological fact).
The only reasonable use of the word deterministic as I can see is "a deterministic model".
