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Another contrast is between analytic and speculative ontology. Analytic ontology examines the types and categories of being to determine what kinds of things could exist and what features they would have. Speculative ontology aims to determine which entities actually exist, for example, whether there are numbers or whether time is an illusion. [81]
The idea is that, beyond the conditions and laws can be observed or deduced, there are also hidden factors or "hidden variables" that determine absolutely in which order photons reach the detector screen. They argue that the course of the universe is absolutely determined, but that humans are screened from knowledge of the determinative factors.
With causal closure, no physical event has a cause outside the physical domain, and with physical determinism, the future is determined entirely by preceding events (cause and effect). The puzzle of reconciling 'free will' with a deterministic universe is known as the problem of free will or sometimes referred to as the dilemma of determinism ...
The word "physicalism" was introduced into philosophy in the 1930s by Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap. [6]The use of "physical" in physicalism is a philosophical concept and can be distinguished from alternative definitions found in the literature (e.g., Karl Popper defined a physical proposition as one that can at least in theory be denied by observation [7]).
Examples are a cloud, a human body, a banana, a billiard ball, a table, or a proton. This is contrasted with abstract objects such as mental objects, which exist in the mental world, and mathematical objects. Other examples that are not physical bodies are emotions, the concept of "justice", a feeling of hatred, or the number "3".
A secular example to try to illustrate predeterminism is that a fetus's future physical, emotional, and other personal characteristics as a matured human being may be considered "predetermined" by heredity, i.e. derived from a chain of events going back long before their eventual birth.
In philosophy of mind, the famous case of overdetermination is called mental-physical causal overdetermination. If we accept that a mental state (M) is realized by a physical state (P). And M can cause another mental state (M*) or another physical state (P*). Then, nomologically speaking, P can cause M* or P* too. In this way, M* or P* is both ...
Early theories of environmental determinism in Ancient China, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome suggested that environmental features completely determined the physical and intellectual qualities of whole societies. Guan Zhong (720–645 BC), an early chancellor in China, held that the qualities of major rivers shaped the character of surrounding ...