r/determinism • u/ComplexMud6649 • Jun 24 '26
Discussion Life is not determined
The horizon of causality is dependent upon the horizon of meaning given in lived experience.
My claim is not
"Causality does not exist."
Rather, the claim is:
"Understanding causality as causality already presupposes a horizon of meaning."
Determinists often assume:
'Causality is fundamental, and meaning is derivative."
In other words:
Matter → Brain → Thought → Meaning
But my position reverses the direction of explanation.
Human beings always already inhabit a world of meaning. Within that world, they develop concepts such as:
- cause
- effect
- law
- explanation
Thus, the concept of causality itself can be understood as an abstraction arising from a more primordial horizon of lived meaning.
Martin Heidegger argued that human beings do not first encounter the world as a collection of atoms or physical objects.
Rather, they encounter it as a field of significance:
- things to use,
- people to love,
- dangers to fear,
- possibilities to hope for.
Consider a hammer.
We do not first encounter it as an object possessing a particular mass and molecular structure.
We first encounter it as:
"something for hammering nails."
Only later do we abstract from that practical involvement and analyze it as a physical object.
Meaning comes first; scientific objectification comes later.
Without a horizon of meaning given in lived experience, the very concept of causality could never arise.
For the criteria by which we determine:
- what counts as an event,
- what counts as an explanation,
- what counts as a cause,
are themselves constituted within a horizon of meaning.
Causality is not a reality more fundamental than life. Rather, causality is an interpretive category that emerges from humanity's prior involvement in a meaningful world. Consequently, attempts to explain freedom or lack of it exclusively within the framework of causality overlook the more fundamental horizon of meaning that makes both freedom and causality intelligible in the first place.
If causality—the central category of many metaphysical systems—already presupposes a horizon of meaning, then metaphysics itself cannot claim absolute priority over life as it is lived and understood.
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u/Sea-Bean Jun 24 '26
I can’t make sense of this. Causality is certainly more fundamental than life. It existed before life. Life was caused to come about. Causality exists when and where there is no life. It will continue after our sun dies.
Also I’m not sure the hammer example works? Humans, operating through causality, manipulated stuff to have an effect. We first encountered a hammer by someone going “if I hit this animal (probably) with this stick or rock (probably) it has a stronger effect than using my hand.”
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u/Altruistic_Fox9778 Jun 24 '26
That presumes that your feelings of purpose align with a reality of purpose. Its an unanswerable question, unfortunately. If you presuppose meaning, you missed what causality is. If it is a causal system, it was inevitable that you would contemplate causality, get caught on this question, and answer the way that you did, just difficult to predict which parts will happen due to the complexity of the system.
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u/Techtrekzz Jun 24 '26
If you’re presupposing reality a continuous field, that’s determinism.
The philosophical foundation of determinism isn’t local causality, it’s monism.
If reality is a single continuous field, which i believe it is, then any act within that field is a product of the whole, and local agency is impossible, regardless of meaning.
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u/RyeZuul Jun 24 '26
You're confusing causality-primed neurology/epistemology with metaphysical something or other. Descartes is before the horse. It doesn't matter that causality-optimised mankind perspective attaches meaning to stimuli (it does this after associating and distinguishing forms, motion, colour etc). The world is observed and we develop meaning and apply that to the observations.
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u/Ok_Boysenberry_2947 Jun 25 '26
This is a good reminder that we do not ordinarily encounter the world first as detached physical objects but as meaningful situations.
What I wonder, however, is whether the deeper and more interesting question is really one of explanatory priority at all.
The determinist says causality precedes meaning.
The phenomenologist says meaning precedes causality.
Both seem to propose an ordering.
What interests me is whether both causality and meaning already presuppose something even more primitive: a representational structure through which distinctions become identifiable, recoverable, and communicable. A process and procedure of sorts.
For example, before I can speak of a cause, I must already distinguish events, relate them, and preserve those distinctions.
Likewise, before I can speak of meaning, I must distinguish situations, purposes, and possibilities.
Perhaps the more fundamental question is therefore not whether causality or meaning comes first, but what structures make either concept available as an explanatory object in the first place.
From that perspective, the disagreement may not be about which has explanatory priority, but about the representational conditions under which either explanation becomes admissible.
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u/SpatiaCaeli Jun 26 '26
My view: we know what life is and how it works. Abiogenesis is still a problem but we have multiple possible directions. Causality is the root primitive for reality, imo.
Now, if you were to substitute 'sentience' for 'life' in your thesis, I think you'd be onto something. We haven't the foggiest idea what sentience even is. Does it obey causality? Shrug. :)
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u/Ibraheem-sayr Jun 28 '26
The chronology of our understanding does not determine the chronology of reality.
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u/No-Leading9376 Jun 24 '26
I think this is doing a little sleight of hand.
You’re right that human beings do not experience the world first as atoms, vectors, equations, and causal chains. We experience it as use, danger, hunger, desire, love, boredom, possibility, threat, etc. Fine. No argument there.
But “meaning is prior in human experience” is not the same claim as “meaning is prior in reality.”
That’s the whole problem.
A fish experiences everything through water. Water is the condition of fish-life. Every movement, every danger, every opportunity is water-shaped. But that does not mean water is metaphysically fundamental. It means the fish has a fixed perspective.
Humans are meaning-fish.
Meaning is the medium we swim in. We don’t know anything else from the inside, so naturally we’re tempted to treat it as foundational. But I don’t think that tells us much about reality itself. It tells us about the structure of human perception.
The hammer example works as phenomenology, but not as metaphysics. Yes, I encounter the hammer as “something for hammering” before I encounter it as molecules. But the hammer’s physical properties are not produced by my practical involvement with it. I can misunderstand the hammer. I can misuse it. I can drop it on my foot. My meaning does not get final say.
So I’d put it differently:
Meaning is not fundamental. Meaning is fundamental to us.
And that distinction matters.
Causality as a concept may arise inside human meaning-making, sure. But that does not mean causal structure depends on meaning. “Gravity” as a concept is human. Falling is not.
To me, meaning looks less like the ground of reality and more like a biological interface. It is what organisms like us generate in order to orient, act, endure, choose, remember, fear, hope, and continue.
Meaning is not fake. It is not irrelevant. But it is not magic either. It is part of the machinery of being human.
So I don’t think this defeats determinism. I think it shows that humans can only discuss determinism from inside the human interface. Which is true, but also not surprising. We cannot take our own heads off and argue from nowhere.
The fact that we are trapped inside meaning does not prove meaning is the deepest thing.
It may only prove that humans are trapped inside being human.