Murray Gell-Mann Quotes

There have always been arguments showing that free will is an illusion: some based on hard physics, others based on pure logic.

Free will is to mind what chance is to matter.

No inanimate object is ever fully determined by the laws of physics and chemistry.

Free will is to mind, what chance is to matter

The fact that the underlying laws of physics are deterministic and impersonal does not mean that at the human level we can't talk about ideas about reasons and goals and purposes and free will.

Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.

Further conceive, I beg, that a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing, that it is endeavoring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavor and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.

In the mind there is no absolute or free will.

God does not play dice.

The will is not free - it is a phenomenon bound by cause and effect - but there is something behind the will which is free.

Do yourself a favor. Don't ever say to me, 'Everything happens for a reason.'

The intuition of free will gives us the truth.

Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.

Man is pre-eminently endowed with the power of voluntarily and consciously determining his own point of view.

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.

I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world.

Is anything accidental?

Desire and force between them are responsible for all our actions; desire causes our voluntary acts, force our involuntary.

I don't believe in providence and fate, as a technologist I am used to reckoning with the formulae of probability.

All theory is against freedom of the will, all experience for it.

If a motive affects me, and I am compelled to act on it because it proves to be the 'strongest' of its kind, then the thought of freedom ceases to have any meaning. How should it matter to me whether I can do a thing or not, if I am forced by the motive to do it?

I used to very politely say that if there is free will then it's in all sorts of boring places, like whether you're going to pick up this or that fork as you begin your meal. There really is none: It's all biology.

Chance is the fool's name for Fate

There is no such thing as chance or accident; the words merely signify our ignorance of some real and immediate cause.

Honestly, I cannot understand what people mean when they talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a feeling, for instance, that I will something or other; but what relation this has with freedom I cannot understand at all. I feel that I will to light my pipe and I do it; but how can I connect this up with the idea of freedom? What is behind the act of willing to light the pipe ? Another act of willing?