Determinism is not just causality. Determinism goes far beyond causality, and certainly much farther than psychological science requires. Many scientific psychologists embrace determinism without ...

(This article was coauthored with Kathleen D. Vohs and first published in Dialogue, the newsletter for the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, alongside a companion piece by John Bargh and ...

Explore Laplace's Demon and the clash between determinism and free will. Can our choices be predicted by physics? * There are probably many notions of what determinism means, but let's distinguish two ...

Is nature inherently random? According to some interpretations of quantum mechanics, it is, explaining why we can’t precisely predict the motions of single particles. In the famous double-slit ...

On the basis of three physical axioms, we prove that if the choice of a particular type of spin 1 experiment is not a function of the information accessible to the experimenters, then its outcome is ...

Our last Insights puzzle explored how a smooth, random distribution of objects arises in a classic, deterministic machine called a Galton board or bean machine. We examined the inner workings of this ...

Geomancy and environmental determinism, respectively Eastern and Western concepts which accord "nature" a primary role in shaping human life, show striking similarities and differences. Both ...

HBO’s “Westworld” recently promoted the tagline, “Free will is not free,” in its season three poster above a robot’s silhouette drowning in sand. Over on Hulu, Nick Offerman spouts platitudes about ...