Neal Stephenson Quotes

Before the discovery of quantum mechanics, the framework of physics was this: If you tell me how things are now, I can then use the laws of physics to calculate, and hence predict, how things will be later.

In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.

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.

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

If we knew exactly the laws of nature and the situation of the universe at the initial moment, we could predict exactly the situation of the same universe at a succeeding moment.

Free will is to mind, what chance is to matter

In the fabric of human events, one thing leads to another. Every mistake is in a sense the product of all the mistakes that have gone before it, from which fact it derives a sort of cosmic forgiveness; and at the same time every mistake is in a sense the determinant of all the mistakes of the future, from which it derives a sort of cosmic unforgivableness.

Political history is not a sequence of incoherent and haphazard events but a chain of causes and effects.

Of causes, some are complete and primary, others auxiliary and proximate. Hence, when we say that all things come about through fate by antecedent causes, we do not mean this to be understood as 'by complete and primary causes,' but 'by auxiliary and proximate causes.'

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.

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?

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.

Is action merely the incidental product of thought, or is thought the consequential product of action?

Everything that is not forbidden is compulsory.

The first dogma which I came to disbelieve was that of free will. It seemed to me that all notions of matter were determined by the laws of dynamics and could not therefore be influenced by human wills.

Every event has had its cause, and nothing, not the least wind that blows, is accident or causeless.

Mind is the cause; everything else is effect.

Every present state of a simple substance is the natural consequence of its preceding state, in such a way that its present is big with its future.

The mental never influences the physical. It is always the physical that modifies the mental, and when we think that the mind is diseased, it is always an illusion.

Every one knows that the heavenly bodies move in certain paths in relation to each other with seeming consistency and regularity which we call [physical] law. ... No one attributes freewill or motive to the material world. Is the conduct of man or the other animals any more subject to whim or choice than the action of the planets? ... We know that man's every act is induced by motives that led or urged him here or there; that the sequence of cause and effect runs through the whole universe, and is nowhere more compelling than with man.

Everything, both mental and physical, is rigidly bound by the law of causation.

Everything, including that which happens in our brains, depends on these and only on these: A set of fixed, deterministic laws.

Upon the whole, necessity is something, that exists in the mind, not in objects; nor is it possible for us ever to form the most distant idea of it, consider'd as a quality in bodies. Either we have no idea of necessity, or necessity is nothing but that determination of thought to pass from cause to effects and effects to causes, according to their experienc'd union.

In our current understanding of science, we can't find the physical gap in which to slip free will - the uncaused causer - because there seems to be no part of the machinery that does not follow in a causal relationship from the other parts.

Keep this in mind: there are no coincidences.