Determinism

Determinism has affected our thinking since ancient times. It is a doctrine which holds that all human actions are determined by their previous states, i.e. by causality. The will cannot change anything in this determination. Determinism rests on perfect symmetries. It is the very negation of free will and freedom. Neither religion, nor economic or social theories, nor science have escaped this fatalistic view. Having assumed the existence of perfectly informed market participants, of perfectly cyclical markets, economic theories were elaborated on the basis of this overly perfect referential system – theories which seemed reasonable on the relatively small scales of nations, but proved to be aberrant on the larger scales of globalization.

Determinism is incompatible with free will and moral responsibility. Historically it was a kind of uncompromising belief that the quantum revolution has finally defeated. Werner Heisenberg and his uncertainty principle (or principle of indetermination) drove the first nail in the coffin of determinism. Whilst Albert Einstein still maintained a highly deterministic vision of the universe, his interpretation of quantum mechanics was finally caught out when the physicist John Bell wrote the famous equations called “Bell inequalities”. Arguably, J. Bell rang the death knell of determinism and Alain Aspect became its gravedigger when, in 1982, he experimentally demonstrated the validity of Bell’s inequalities.

Now we know that the world is changing in an indeterminate way, even though many local systems evolve following an apparent determinism. According to the mathematician David Ruelle  one should not be confused with the laws of physics which are deterministic i.e. invariant or symmetric with initial conditions which are not. A small uncertainty in the initial condition will result in greater uncertainty in time or space, and the result will not be predictable. Both nature and individuals make rational or random choices that contribute to determine our uncertain future without any possibility of turning back.

With this knowledge accumulated up to the late 20th Century, we can now consider building a new ethical system.

Hasard et chaos