Determinism.

Determinism is the philosophical proposition that every event, including human cognition and behavior, decision and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences.

From, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism

I am a determinist, at least at the present I hold to the morally difficult, emotionally depressing, bummer of a philosophy of determinism. I think that every meaningful action in the macro-world (anything bigger than a couple of molecules) is determined, it must happen based on prior circumstances. This means that there is no choice about anything that you or anyone else has ever done in their lives throughout all of recorded history. Any action we take must be taken based on the environment. I think there are no random actions beyond the actions of the very, very tiny (and even then I'm not certain). Why do I think this?

I think this for two reasons. The Laws of Physics are universal and effect the very large and the very small and everything in between. These Laws are predictable, in that they occur in the same way every time. If x happens, y must result every time. When the electrical charge and chemical concentration in a synapse reach a certain point the synapse must fire. All thoughts, ideas and actions are electro-chemical events in the brain, and electro-chemical events happen because of the pre-existing conditions. At no point in this change is there an "I" that alters the event separate from the event. If, in a hypothetical world, we understood exactly how the brain works, and we had every single piece of informaton about the conditions of a brain, we could predict with absolute certainty what a person would decide in every situation. There is no actual free will.

A response to this position is often the solace in particle physics, in that the position and speed of very tiny particles can only be known statistically as probablilities. The location of an unimaginably small particle is a random event. This suggests to those wanting free will in the world (almost everybody, including myself) that this doubt is the area where free will comes into play. Somehow our will decides for the particle where it is. The experimental data that demonstrates that observation does actually make a decision for a particle on its location seems to back this up. When a conscious entity views a tiny, tiny particle it changes from having been a random distribution of possibilities to having a location. However, the macro-world, the world in which we live is made up of billions of these tiny particles. And all of these particles have statistical probabilities to them. With things that have very large numbers of actions with fixed probablities we can extremely accurately predict what will happen. If you roll a fair die a billion times you can very accurately predict what the outcome will be overall. One sixth of the time, to a very high degree of certainty, a six will be rolled. Any action in the macro-world is like rolling a fair die a billion times, we know what the result will be.

A further nail in the coffin of free will is that these mathematical equations in physics work just as well in either direction of time. In physics there is no reason to believe any more that causes produce results than results produce causes. If we believe that the past is fixed, that there was a history and nothing can be done to change it, in terms of physics the same can be said about the future. The future is as fixed as the past because it folows identical rules. Everything that happens in the Universe must happen.

What does this mean? In terms of our daily lives it means almost nothing because we never will have adequate data to accurately predict all actions of people. As such, an excellent approximation is the concept of free will. With limited information good estimations are made through application of the concept of free will. So that although we know that people have no choice in their actions, including ourselves, the best way to act is as if they have free will. Acting as if people have free will produces an environment in which people will behave in ways we wish, approximately.

However, it does put a complete end to the silly nonsense that any Creator would create the Universe, and give people free will, not knowing that everything in the Universe was decided by the very act of creation. A Creator that made the Universe decided every action that we will take. Complete proof that Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and any other judgement-based religion is at the core completely false.