Determinism Beyond Time Evolution

TL;DR

This paper generalizes the concept of determinism beyond traditional time-evolution, introducing a constraint-based framework that accommodates non-temporal laws and offers new insights into objective chance.

Contribution

It proposes a novel, non-temporal framework for understanding determinism, expanding the philosophical and physical implications beyond traditional models.

Findings

Distinguishes between strong, weak, and delocalised holistic determinism.

Provides a new perspective on the debate about objective chance.

Shows implications for laws outside traditional time evolution.

Abstract

Physicists are increasingly beginning to take seriously the possibility of laws outside the traditional time-evolution paradigm; yet our understanding of determinism is still predicated on a forwards time-evolution picture, making it manifestly unsuited to the diverse range of research programmes in modern physics. In this article, we use a constraint-based framework to set out a generalization of determinism which does not presuppose temporal directedness, distinguishing between strong, weak and delocalised holistic determinism. We discuss some interesting consequences of these generalized notions of determinism, and we show that this approach sheds new light on the long-standing debate surrounding the nature of objective chance.