Lucy Hawking Quotes

God, our genes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code at an ancient terminal - there's no way free will can ever exist if we as individuals are the result of some external cause.

I don't believe in luck. I believe everything happens for a reason.

The conundrum of free will and destiny has always kept me dangling.

Free will is an illusion. People always choose the perceived path of greatest pleasure.

Free will is to mind, what chance is to matter

Intellectually, I believe there's no free will.

I don't believe in predestination - except for genetic predilections.

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

Everything that has been will be, everything that will be is, everything that will be has been.

All is foreseen, but freedom of choice is given.

Most people of action are inclined to fatalism and most of thought believe in providence.

Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.

Genetics play a huge part in who we are. But we also have free will.

Fact I know; and Law I know; but what is this Necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind's throwing?

From spending my decades thinking about behavior and the biological influences on it, I'm convinced by now free will is what we call the biology that hasn't been discovered yet. It's just another way of stating that we're biological organisms determined by the physical laws of the universe.

I believe in fate.

Your genetics is not your destiny.

If something were brought about without an antecedent cause, it would be untrue that all things come about through fate. But if it is plausible that all events have an antecedent cause, what ground can be offered for not conceding that all things come about through fate?

It's true that there's no such thing as free will. We can't help what we are or what we do. It's not our fault. Nobody's to blame for anything. It's all in your background ... and your glands. If you're good, that's no achievement of yours - you were lucky in your glands. If you're rotten, nobody should punish you - you were unlucky, that's all.

If you could stand back far enough and watch the whole process you'd see you are a totally determined being.

Why does an apple fall when it is ripe? Is it brought down by the force of gravity? Is it because its stalk withers? Because it is dried by the sun, because it grows too heavy, or because the boy standing under the tree wants to eat it? None of these is the cause.... Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own freewill is in the historical sense not free at all but is bound up with the whole course of history and preordained from all eternity.

Which brings me to my conclusion upon Free Will and Predestination, namely - let the reader mark it - that they are identical.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

Every individual acts and suffers in accordance with his peculiar teleology, which has all the inevitability of fate, so long as he does not understand it.

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