What if our will is not as free as we believe it to be? What if all our choices follow a predetermined course? In a deterministic world, as Classical Mechanics postulates, everything is indeed predetermined. Whatever you think you do, you are powerless to change the tiniest of details. Your belief in your own volition is merely an illusion.
And it gets worse.
Many thinkers are fond of mixing determinism and nondeterminism as if it were an alloy. Some argue that we conscious beings have freedom to choose within a boundary. Our actions can change certain things like the fortunes of our own lives, but the overall picture of the universe as a whole follows the grand plan of the Almighty Creator. Unfortunately, these thinkers haven’t thought enough. There can be no such thing as partial determinism. It’s a logical absurdity. A single instance of nondeterminism, in an otherwise deterministic system, will make the whole thing nondeterministic. So if we can conclusively show even a single instance of nondeterminism, we can safely conclude that the entire universe is non-deterministic.
In Chaos Theory (Nonlinear Dynamics) there is a famous concept called the butterfly effect. It says, in a nutshell, that little things can cause big changes in the world. We see it often in our lives. So, if nondeterminism is involved in a system, even in very small ways, it has the capability to cause an upheaval, and drastically change the subsequent state of the world. One cannot get away with the argument that nondeterminism is present merely in insignificant quantities and can be ignored. It can’t be. It’s an all-or-nothing scenario.
But if something is deterministic, there exists a way of determining it, in advance. So, theoretically, we are in a position to change it. A prior knowledge that something is going to happen (what are you going to have for dinner tomorrow night?) also gives us an option to change it. But if we succeed then the world can no longer be called deterministic.
This is a contradiction that suggests that the world, at its core, has to be inherently nondeterministic.
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