Adequate determinism

Adequate determinism is a metaphysical theory about the nature of causality.
Adequate determinism is distinguished from some other varieties of determinism in that it does not hold a strict predeterminism by which every event has a cause that is part of a causal chain going back to the origin of the universe. In this view, strict determinism is seen as a philosophical idealization and an unprovable hypothesis given observational and experimental errors.
Adequate determinism is consistent with the determinism of held by some physiologists who think that quantum uncertainty is generally insignificant in the macromolecular structures of cell biology. Although cells are extremely small compared to rocket ships and planets, they are enormous compared to atoms. An average cell contains of the order of a trillion trillion atoms.
Scientists and philosophers mostly agree that quantum indeterminacy is for the most part negligible in the macroscopic world. The two-stage model of free will assumes they quantum effects are negligible when considering the causally determined will and the causally determined actions set in motion by decisions of that will.
In particular, adequate determinism is all that determinist philosophers ever wanted or needed for moral responsibility.
Chance is not a direct cause of human actions.
Adequate determinism gives compatibilists the kind of free will that they need and that they say they want.
However, quantum mechanics is not negligible in some important cases. We know that quantum uncertainty exists in the world and so there have been unpredictable and uncaused events that have broken the causal chain of strict determinism.
Such new "uncaused causes" (causa sui) have not resulted in the collapse of reason or stopped the progress of science, as some philosophers and scientists feared. The Stoic Chrysippus, warned in the third century B.C.E.

"Everything that happens is followed by something else which depends on it by causal necessity. Likewise, everything that happens is preceded by something with which it is causally connected. For nothing exists or has come into being in the cosmos without a cause. The universe will be disrupted and disintegrate into pieces and cease to be a unity functioning as a single system, if any uncaused movement is introduced into it."

Certain "thought experiments" magnify microscopic quantum uncertainty to macroscopic levels. Perhaps the most famous is Schrödinger's cat. Perhaps the most common are simple Geiger counters, which record the spontaneous radioactive decay of unstable atoms, much of it driven by cosmic radiation, a major source of genetic variation that drives natural selection.
None of these totally random events normally interferes in any significant way with adequate determinism in the macroscopic world.
But these random events do drive the creation of new species and they underlie all creativity, all actions that bring new information into the universe, whether the formation of stars and galaxies or the writing of a new play.
Adequate determinism is one of the critical requirements for free will.
 
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