Agency (Part 3 of 8)

Determinism’s Dead End

Friedrich Nietzsche in Basel, Switzerland, c. 1875

In part 2 of this essay, we looked at determinism as one of the most enduring, and increasingly persuasive, arguments against the existence of free will. The idea, as Sapolsky and others have laid it out, is relatively simple: every thought, feeling, decision, or impulse arises within the causal order of the universe. Your beliefs, your values, your behavior – each one caused by what came before.

This view claims that nothing escapes causality. Your genetics, your childhood experiences, your hormonal levels, your cultural influences, your neurological wiring. These are the system that produces what you experience as “you.” And if that’s true, then what feels like a choice is better understood as an inevitable outcome. Given the same prior conditions, you could not have chosen otherwise.

It’s not hard to see why determinism is compelling. It’s clean. It’s logical. It satisfies our deep desire for explanation and order. It’s especially comforting in a time when the world can feel unpredictable and overwhelming. Determinism offers a kind of metaphysical reassurance: that everything has a reason, even if we can’t always see it. Nothing is random. Nothing escapes the flow of cause and effect. It’s an elegant, self-contained framework.

And while this framework isn’t new, it has re-entered our cultural bloodstream with renewed authority, in part because science continues to reinforce it. As predictive systems, such as AI, grow more accurate, and as we observe ourselves through data, diagnostics, and algorithms, we begin to wonder if that inevitable outcome is all we really are.

And determinism is increasingly shaping how we explain ourselves, often without even realizing it. We talk about behavior in terms of inputs and outputs. We describe our habits as if they’re programmed. Our preferences are categorized, our personality traits typed, our attention tracked, and our desires anticipated by systems that seem to know us better than we know ourselves.

We’re told that our emotional responses are driven by hormones and neurotransmitters, that our self-image is largely shaped by early childhood experiences, and that our decision-making is guided by a combination of cognitive bias, social conditioning, and evolutionary inheritance. And these claims are true. They’re grounded in real observations about how we function. Reality exists within constraints. That’s real. But taken together, and followed to their logical end, they leave little room for agency. Instead, they suggest that we are responding to forces, not creating from them.

If you follow this logic far enough, a strange shift occurs: we stop feeling like the author of our actions and start feeling like a product of them. And worse, we begin to act like it. You didn’t choose your mood, it’s your cortisol level. You didn’t decide to check your phone, it was a habit formed by dopamine reinforcement. You didn’t actually select oatmeal for breakfast, it was a chain of causes, starting with how you slept, what was in your fridge, and whether your parents used to eat oatmeal when you were a kid.

The picture becomes clear: you didn’t initiate anything. You reacted. And determinism suggests that this is true for every moment throughout time. In other words, you are no better than a machine.

This is where the confusion often begins. Many philosophers are quick to point out that determinism is not the same thing as fatalism. And technically, they’re right.

Fatalism is the belief that certain outcomes will happen no matter what you do. In this view, causes are irrelevant. The result is fated, regardless of how you act or react. There is no intervention, no participation. Your choices don’t shape the future; they merely decorate it.

Determinism, on the other hand, holds that outcomes happen because of what came before. Your actions do matter, but only insofar as they were determined by previous causes. The key difference is causality: determinism is a story of unbroken cause and effect, while fatalism is a story of inevitable outcomes, disconnected from your actions.

Philosophers will often argue that it’s a mistake to conflate these two. And from a purely logical standpoint, that distinction holds. But what matters here is not the ontological difference. It’s the psychological experience.

Because if you believe that every choice you make was already baked into the system before you made it – that there was never any true alternative – then your experience of that choice starts to feel like fate. Because what you did, or what you will do, was always going to happen.

From the inside, the effect is the same: the sense of real possibility begins to collapse. The imagined alternatives: what you might have said, done, chosen – start to feel like illusions. Even if you can explain how they could have occurred in a counterfactual universe, the fact that they didn’t, and couldn’t, flattens the experience of agency.

This is where determinism, in lived experience, begins to collapse into fatalism. The “you” who might have done otherwise disappears. And with that disappearance, something else begins to dissolve: the motivation to choose at all.

If fatalism begins as resignation: the belief that your choices don’t really matter – then it often ends in something more corrosive: nihilism.

The term nihilism comes from the Latin nihil, meaning “nothing.” It gained philosophical weight through Friedrich Nietzsche, who used it to describe the spiritual condition that emerges when the foundational stories of a culture (religion, morality, meaning) collapse under scrutiny. In Nietzsche’s time, the question was whether a society that no longer believed in God could still believe in purpose. Today, the question might be more personal: if I don’t believe in my own agency, can I still believe in meaning at all?

And deceivingly, the descent into nihilism usually begins with plausibility. If I accept that my actions are just the result of neurochemistry, habit, and social conditioning… if I accept that my beliefs were installed, not chosen… then what moral weight can those actions or beliefs really carry? What does it mean to be “good,” or “just,” or even “honest,” if every choice I make was inevitable? If my love was determined, is it still love? If my courage was programmed, is it still brave? If my morality is mimicry, is it still meaningful?

These aren’t rhetorical questions. They are the seeds of existential erosion. If all values are inherited or constructed, if all motives are caused, then the line between meaning and performance begins to blur. And when enough of those lines blur, you’re left with something that feels vacant. One in which it might seem easy to simply give up.

This is the core of nihilism: the inability to believe in any authentic form of meaning.

And nihilism is everywhere. You don’t have to read Nietzsche to see it referenced all around us. We hear it in the language we use when we feel powerless, stuck, or numb.

• “It is what it is.”

• “Things happen for a reason.”

• “What will be, will be.”

And these are more than passive turns of phrase. They’re attempts to make peace with inevitability. To surrender to the current. Sometimes they reflect an important wisdom: an acceptance of what we cannot control. However, they can also reflect something else: a learned helplessness, dressed in language that might sound stoic but feels hollow.

This fatalistic tone shows up in our habits, too. In the way we default to the same decisions. In the way we assume our limitations are fixed. In the way we explain ourselves not in terms of effort or reflection, but in terms of type, trauma, wiring, or role. Instead of saying, “I’m working on it,” we might say, “That’s just how I am.”

And when we shift from intention to identity, from effort to inevitability, we reduce more than our sense of responsibility. We reduce our sense of possibility. We start to live as if the future has already happened. And if we are merely a product of our circumstances, then so is AI. And if it’s getting smarter faster than we are, then its easy to rationalize giving in to our future overlords.

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I’ve tried, at times, to live inside the framework of determinism. To see myself not as a chooser, but as a result. As an expression of causes and conditions stretching back to the beginning of time. There’s something strangely comforting about it. It explains a lot. It removes the pressure. But the more I tried to inhabit that worldview, the more it began to feel like wearing shoes that didn’t quite fit. I could walk in them for a while, but eventually something ached.

Because if I really believed that my actions were inevitable – that my thoughts, impulses, and responses were always going to unfold just as the deterministic view of the universe predicted – then my experience of being alive would start to feel pointless. As if I were observing myself from behind a pane of glass: still going through the motions, but without any sense of inner participation.

For me, that’s where the tension lands. Not in denying that I’m shaped by causes, but in refusing to believe that those causes are all there is.

Because when I imagine living entirely from that lens, something inside me withers. Gradually, I feel the slow pull of disassociation.

However, I don’t believe determinism is the full picture. But I do think it names something that’s deeply real: that we are shaped, often unconsciously, by genetics, conditioning, environment, and biology. These forces influence us far more than we like to admit. They narrow the field of options. They lay grooves in the mind that make certain paths easier to follow. And to ignore that is to ignore something fundamental about what it means to be human.

But the danger arises when we treat that influence as all there is. When we let the language of determinism become the architecture of our self-perception. When every reaction, every decision, every pattern is chalked up to causes beyond our reach, something fades.

For me, that fading shows up in subtle ways. When it happens, I refer to it as a form of forgetting. I forget to push into discomfort. I forget to pause before reacting. I assume that what’s happening inside me is just a system running its code. And over time, I become less present, less willing to intervene, less likely to ask whether another response might be possible.

It’s not that determinism removes morality or effort outright. It just makes them feel less necessary. It dissolves the urgency to engage. And that, to me, is where the real danger lies – in what it disincentivizes. And if I keep following that logic, I arrive somewhere that unnerves me. If the universe is fully mechanistic and determined – if every event from the Big Bang to this very moment was inevitable – then the future is already fixed. There are no real alternatives. Only the illusion of choice, unfolding exactly as it must.

And if that’s true, for me, meaning itself evaporates. Why make an effort? Why pursue growth, or virtue, or compassion, if those outcomes are already predestined? That’s the slide into fatalism. And beneath it, the long shadow of nihilism. Because when meaning stops feeling like something you participate in, it becomes another thing that happens to you.

So what do we do with that?

If determinism is all there is, then we never had agency to begin with. And why bother practicing it? Instead, let’s turn over everything to the algorithms that are learning symbols and patterns faster than we are.

Well… hold that thought. Because maybe we’re looking at a puzzle without all the pieces.

… A whole lot more on that next time.

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