Absolute determinism: philosophical foundations and implications

Absolute Determinism

Questions about place and role of reason puzzle generations of philosophers as they are among the fundamental questions of philosophy. In case it appears that everything is planned and all events are mutually connected it may witness for the divine origin of the universe and man. Laplace proposed the theory of absolute determinism which stated that every process which took place in the universe had a reason so that the next or previous stage of this process could be predicted and described in the absolute form.

Determinism of Laplace had a lot of strong points at the time when he developed this theory. First of all Laplas was a mathematician and physicist and the principle of sufficient reason corresponded to all dynamic processes he studied: motion, oscillations, etc. This principle laid in the fundamentals of classic mechanics and was applied for any dynamical system on the hand with the laws of conservation. In fact we can say that the principle of sufficient reason follows from the conservation of energy, momentum and impulse. In general, it shows the unity of all visual dynamic processes in macro-world which are processes of "reason and consequence."

But at the same time it is clear that absolute determinism leads to fatalism and obtains attributes of mysticism . This weak point of Laplace's theory was noticed by his contemporaries and was always used in arguments against him. From the other side, nature of processes in the organic world also failed to be explained correctly as the principle of sufficient reason was not evidently observed. Even in physics of macro-particles where the principle of sufficient reason was considered to be absolute, the phenomenon of temperature balance between bodies remained to be unsolved (as according to classic mechanics principles body's temperature during cooling has to fall to absolute zero). Today it's obvious that the theory of absolute determinism is false as principles of sufficient reason are not observed in quantum physics. Nature of quanta behavior can be only explained by statistic regularities of a special Boze-Einstein statistics. All the processes which occur with quanta have random character so their behavior can not be predicted and regularities from classical mechanics can not be applied. Uncertainty principles of Heisenberg only proved the false of absolute determinism in the world of micro-particles. So if the absolute determinism can not be applied to physics of micro world it can not be applied to nature in general and can not postulate absolutism of dynamic processes according to Laplace's initial definition.

Making a conclusion I would like to say that Laplace's absolute determinism was a philosophical conclusion made on the base of existing contemporary knowledge of mathematics and mechanics: