Ted Chiang Quotes

But I don't actually adopt the point of view that our subjective impression of free will, which is a kind of indeterminacy behavior, comes from quantum mechanical indeterminacy.

Free will is to mind, what chance is to matter

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

We have to believe in free will. We’ve got no choice.

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road

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

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.

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.

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.

I wonder whether being a scientist's daughter makes you so conflicted about free will and fate.

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

We must believe in free will, we have no choice.

I don't believe in luck. I believe 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.

As far as I can see, it's not important that we have free will, just as long as we have the illusion of free will to stop us going mad.

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

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

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

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

I think everything is pretty well preordained - even your mistakes.

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.

We are unable to recognize the laws of necessity if we believe we are free

Intellectually, I believe there's no free will.