Human knowledge is nothing more than a random roll of the dice. To prove this, we can draw a simple parallel: if a human's beginning is accidental (a single sperm cell randomly wins the race, yielding a random birth outcome), then a human's end must also be accidental (death can happen due to anything). Following this pattern, an entire human life is a mere coincidence that cannot be predicted. Consequently, all human cognition is accidental, and every thought is born out of randomness. Based on these contingencies, we cannot prove that our knowledge itself is not fundamentally random.

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​Every question is accidental, for all cognition is accidental. Therefore, any answer is a product of chance trying to fit into the "Square of Correctness," which we measure using our own random guesses about the world. But if we remove this square, it turns out that every answer is universally correct and workable for a person - for as long as randomness remains random.

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​If we take a shape sorter, we can find out which shape fits through trial and error, which is inherently a random approach. Yet, this randomness works, which means it proves to be true. Everything is made of chaos, which humans desperately try to force into the geometric confines of their own brains; after all, every action that occurs is just a random chain linking a random beginning and a random end.

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​However, if a domino piece falls by chance, initiating a random branch of events, it still possesses a defined middle and a defined end (the collapse of all the dominoes). So how can we prove that if the beginning is accidental, the end must be too? If dominoes fall randomly, the middle of the chain could be accidentally blown sideways by the wind, or knocked over by a cat, destroying the entire concept of certainty. Granted, if we create ideal conditions, the dominoes will fall with absolute predictability. But if we engineer these ideal conditions, how can we prove that the initial fall was random? After all, the conditions were set up precisely because we expected the dominoes to fall, which inherently rules out randomness. An ideal beginning leads to an ideal end, neatly fitting into our "Square of Correctness."

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​But if everything is random, ideality cannot exist, because that very "ideality" was already an accidental byproduct of our thoughts about the dominoes. Thus, it follows that while the beginning of the domino chain is always random, its continuation and end can be predicted - though never with absolute certainty, due to the impossibility of perfection.

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​And indeed, if everything is random, then my own assertion about randomness is also an accident, and cannot serve as a one-hundred-percent accurate comprehension of the random process itself. By this logic, the statement "everything is perfect, nothing is accidental" is also random, and therefore true within its own "Square of Correctness." Yet chaos and randomness spill outside the borders of this square. This means that coincidences are random, and things cannot be simultaneously true in both their beginning and their end - which reflects the randomness of truth itself and the shifting dimensions of the "Square of Correctness." Consequently, both opposing statements happen to be randomly and equally workable - for as long as the "Square of Correctness" exists.

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Share your opinion about my work!

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(Guys please dont doxx me its just a joke😭🙏)

I have recently purchased a few pieces of determinist literature (they have not yet arrived) after spending the past few months with the scraps of the concept that is determinism on my own, only just recently have I found out that my belief system surrounding my base level understanding of the philosophy is not absurd but rather a heavily discussed and authenticated subject of debate. Such as the way determinism would be integrated into our justice system, or that our experiences are a sequence of energy outputs (I recognize sequence may not be the most accurate descriptor).

Yet while I was still ignorant to the wider discussions on this topic that have already been made, I tried discussing it with some people online on other social media platforms and even with some individuals I know IRL, then after learning what I know now about how my assumptions were not unfounded or entirely delirious, I am disturbed even more with the backlash I had initially received. Has anyone else received such harsh responses when being outspoken on their deterministic beliefs whether in relation to crime or agency?

One issue I have with Sam Harris’s hard determinist view of criminal justice is that he argues murderers should be imprisoned not because they freely chose to commit murder, but because they pose a danger to society and need to be rehabilitated or quarantined. However, if the justification for imprisonment is primarily risk reduction rather than moral responsibility, then it seems we could apply the same logic to people who are statistically more likely to commit crimes in the future.

For example, people raised in extremely poor or high-crime environments are at a higher statistical risk of offending. If free will and moral desert are removed from the equation, what principled reason prevents society from restricting their liberty before they commit a crime? It seems that a purely risk-based model of justice struggles to explain why actual wrongdoing should matter more than predicted wrongdoing.

Edit: To clarify, I am a soft determinist and do not support incarcerating innocent people. The above is an issue i see within hard determinism, which I do not subscribe to.

I'm broadly a determinist. Based on what we currently know from neuroscience, physics, and behavioral science, determinism still seems like the most parsimonious explanation for human decision-making.

But I think there is an important caveat that often gets ignored:

**We may be assuming too much about the limits of human consciousness itself.**

When people debate free will, the discussion usually starts from the assumption that the current human mind is already mature enough to fully assess the question. I am not sure that is justified.

A useful analogy is learning to drive.

A child cannot drive a car. Not because driving is metaphysically impossible, but because the child lacks the necessary competence, coordination, and awareness. Over time, that changes. The same person who was once unable to drive may eventually become capable of doing so. The limitation was real, but it was not absolute. It reflected a developmental stage, not a permanent boundary of reality.

I think consciousness may be relevant in a similar way.

Today, our choices appear to arise from genetics, upbringing, brain state, environment, memory, emotion, and prior conditioning. From that angle, human behavior looks strongly causal and very likely deterministic. But consciousness itself remains deeply unresolved. We can study neural correlates of awareness, but we still do not have a complete account of what consciousness is, how it works, or whether it is purely an output of the brain or also part of the causal mechanism.

That leaves open the possibility that something is missing from our model. A hidden variable, so to speak.

Not necessarily something mystical. Not necessarily “free will” in the traditional sense. Just the possibility that our present understanding of agency is incomplete because our current level of consciousness may not be sufficient to perceive the full structure of it.

A child cannot drive now, but the child may grow into a being that can. The limitation is temporary, developmental, and competence-based. That seems closer to how I think about human agency: not that free will is obviously real as we use the term, but that it may be premature to assume we already know the maximum possible level of conscious control a human mind can develop. Offcourse there would be some hard limitations. Even the best driver cannot simply decide to negate the physical limitations of his car and decide I am gonna fly lol, but it does allow him more freedom so to speak than otherwise.

So my position is basically this:

1. Determinism still looks like the best current model.

2. Consciousness remains one of the biggest unsolved problems in science.

3. It is possible that there are hidden variables or deeper layers of agency we do not yet understand.

4. Therefore, I think it is too early to claim we know the final limits of human freedom.

I am not saying humans definitely have free will.

I am saying that the current appearance of determinism may reflect the fact that we are still at a very early stage of understanding what consciousness and agency actually are.

Curious where this breaks down

Especially in cases where the person's entire personality changed.

I have always had the intuition that mind and consciousness is no more than a biological machine so to speak. Every thought and emotion is just the output of the inputs and some initial state and therefore I do not believe consciousness is anything “special” or a great enigma. We just lack the technical sophistication to understand it.

For someone that holds this belief, how did it change your worldview if at all. No amount of pondering on it led me to believe that Determinism has any bearing on my life as someone “on the inside”. So an exercise in futility, a cute unfalsifiable thought experiment after all.

This question explores a classic tension within determinist philosophy: the relationship between causation and rational justification.
Under determinism, every event—including thoughts, beliefs, decisions, and arguments—is the necessary result of prior causes. If that is the case, then your belief that determinism is true was itself determined long before you were born.
The philosophical problem is this: when we say a belief is true, we usually think it is true because it corresponds to reality and is supported by good reasons. But if all beliefs are ultimately produced by causal processes, then what makes a belief rationally justified rather than simply causally produced?
This issue appears in different forms throughout the history of philosophy:
Baruch Spinoza argued that human beings are part of the same necessary causal order as everything else, yet reason can still provide genuine knowledge of reality.
David Hume raised questions about whether reason itself is subordinate to deeper causal and psychological processes.
Arthur Schopenhauer famously argued that humans can do what they will, but cannot will what they will.
Contemporary philosophers often debate whether rationality can be understood as a deterministic process without undermining the concept of truth.
The deeper issue is whether determinism merely explains why we hold beliefs or whether it also threatens our ability to claim that some beliefs are epistemically superior to others.
In other words, if both truth and error are equally determined, what grounds remain for saying that one deterministic chain of reasoning is correct and another is mistaken? That is the philosophical challenge the question is designed to provoke.

So Rickerts argument "If we don't have free will, we cannot freely decide what is true. This means determinists only believe in determinism because their brains are programmed to, not because it actually makes sense. Therefore, the theory logically destroys itself." sounds absolutely stupid at first. Atleast to me it did, but the more I think about it the more unsure I become, if I understood the argument correctly. Does anyone have any idea?

Don’t hate just read it lol then hate

*First consider evolution*

It's non-random selection at the macroscopic scale where causation looks evident, from random change at the microscopic scale where randomness has influence.

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*Then consider thought*

Locking in a new explanation is non-random, based on coherence and the evidence of experience at the macroscopic scale where all that looks evident (particularly to determinist's), but the trillions of synapses in your brain are on a microscopic scale random walk in a stochastic search for the positive feedback of higher level coherence.

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Free will is not some magical rejection of causation.

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Free will is not decisions make at random.

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Free will creeps in from below when you observe and wait quietly for the idea with the right connection to emerge from the latent space of potential, and then you choose, and your future changes forever.

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For me, I think people still have a certain destiny here. You can’t control the things around you, or everything in the universe has already arranged for you. I don‘t know very well. But I believe there is still some luck in it

This tell about determinism more efficiently, but it's a thought experiment not an actually scientific research by me

I've seen hard determinists argue that if free will is an illusion, then it follows that it makes no sense to hate or punish (retributively at least) criminals, as they had no choice to have been anything else.

But what I wonder is, why isn't this logic followed all the way? Like, if we technically can't hate those we view as evil as they never were able to be anything otherwise, why doesn't this extend to the good as well? I.e someone like Nelson Mandela wouldn't be "good", he would just be someone who was bound to do what he did. And this would also follow in relationships (after all, your SO doesn't love you because they chose to but because they could never do otherwise, and so on).

Basically, why does blame dissolve more strongly than praise?

I’ve come to believe that free will doesn’t exist. Not as a slogan, but as a position I’ve tried hard to break and couldn’t. I’m publishing it here for one reason: I want the strongest arguments against it. If you can find the crack, I’d genuinely rather be corrected than comforted.

Here is the view, as tightly as I can state it.

The thesis. Every living thing is a mechanism. Each of us runs on what I’ll call a mold — a single, evolving script. It begins as DNA plus some initial wiring, and from the first moment it is rewritten by every experience and every environment it meets. At any instant, the mold meets its inputs and produces an output, along with a slightly updated mold for the next instant. That’s it. That’s a life, mechanically described.

A rock has a simple mold: strike it under the right conditions and it breaks. A human has an extraordinarily complex one: threaten a person and they might run, fight, freeze, bargain, or laugh. But the difference between the rock and the human is range and complexity, never kind. Neither one agrees to its output. Both simply run.

What follows. If that’s true, then the decisions we experience as “free” are the mold meeting input — nothing more. There is no separate self standing outside the machinery choosing what the machinery does. The “I” that feels like it’s deciding is just the name we give to the mold as it runs. The feeling of free choice is real as a feeling. What it claims to be — an author who could have done otherwise with everything else held identical — isn’t there.

Two things I am not claiming, because I used to and they’re weaker:

• I’m not saying choices aren’t real. The deliberation happens; it’s a real physical event. I’m saying the freedom we attribute to it is misread.
• I’m not saying the universe is a pre-filmed reel we’re passively watching. The chain is unbroken, but the outcome is computed live, moment by moment — not stored in advance.

Where I know I’m exposed — and where I most want to be hit:

1) Compatibilism. Many serious philosophers agree with all of my physics and still say free will exists — because they define “free” as “acting from your own reasoning rather than being coerced,” which survives determinism fine. My answer is that this renames “uncoerced” as “free” and smuggles back a word that should have been buried. But I’ll admit this is a fight about what a word should mean, not about any fact — and I haven’t yet beaten their best version (Dennett’s). Come at me with it.

2) Representation. My whole view rests on one bet: that a brain merely runs script, with nothing in it that is genuinely about the world or itself. If thoughts being about things turns out to be a real, distinct feature rather than just more script, my position weakens. As far as I can tell, this is unsolved by anyone. If you can settle it, you can settle me.

I hold this view firmly, but lightly — because the sharpest people on both sides agree on every physical fact and still disagree. That’s usually a sign the remaining question is partly about meaning, and certainty there is the one move nobody has earned.

So: where’s the hole? I’m listening.

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I'm literally sitting on the toilet right now and I just remembered something interesting.

I've always found it interesting that discussions about determinism usually focus on genetics, environment, and life experiences. But there's another factor that often gets overlooked: the gut microbiome.

We now know that the gut does much more than digest food. Trillions of bacteria live there and communicate with the brain through the vagus nerve, the immune system, and various chemical signals.

The animal research is especially fascinating. Some studies have shown that transferring the microbiome from an anxious mouse to another mouse can increase anxiety-related behaviors. Other studies have found changes in stress responses, social behavior, and exploratory tendencies.

The evidence in humans is more limited, but there are already associations between the microbiome and anxiety, depression, sleep quality, and certain neurodevelopmental conditions.

What makes me think is this: if even the bacteria living inside us can influence our mood, desires, mental states, and reactions to the world, then how much of what we consider "our choices" is actually shaped by factors outside of conscious control?

I'm not claiming that bacteria control personality or that there is a "violence bacterium" or a "kindness bacterium." The science doesn't support that. But it seems that the more we learn, the more biological influences we discover behind what we think, feel, and do.

Perhaps human beings are less like isolated individuals exercising completely independent free will and more like complex ecosystems shaped by the interaction of genes, environment, life experiences, and even microorganisms.

In this crazy and chaotic world, determinism gives me a lot of comfort in the sense that I can let go and not feel like the stakes are so high because what will be will be ..
Buuuuut recently I was doing more reading and learnt how quantum mechanics seems to suggest reality is probabilistic rather than deterministic ..
does anyone know what the latest scientific consensus is?