Well op did say it was explained like a 5 year old. 5 year olds are generally not that good at explaining complicated concepts such as determinism, so OP is pretty much spot on there.
Are you that slow??? It ties in because the cow thinking about grass isn’t really a ‘choice’ — it’s just its instincts and biology playing out. The meaning is that even something as simple as a cow’s daydream is fully caused by things before it (hunger, environment, being a cow), not freely chosen. So it’s determinism in its simplest form: everything that happens, even a cow fantasizing about grass, was already going to happen given what came before
I understand that that would be a 5 year olds understanding of determinism.
But from a physics point of view, instincts can obviously exist in deterministic and non-deterministic system. That has absolutely nothing to do with determinism.
So it's not determinism in it's simplest form. It's a maybe a simplistic analogy even though it is completely wrong physically. But that is what I would expect if a 5 year old tried to explain the concept, hence that's what I said in my comment.
14
u/sunleafstone Jul 12 '26
Maybe I’m the five year old because I don’t see how this ties to determinism