
A Google-generated definition of indeterminism, referring to the doctrine that not all events are wholly determined by antecedent causes; the state of being uncertain or undecided.

A Google-generated definition of indeterminism, referring to the doctrine that not all events are wholly determined by antecedent causes; the state of being uncertain or undecided.

In terminology, indeterminism, as compared to determinism, refers to things or events said to be not determined a priory.

Overview
In 1927, Werner Heisenberg published his uncertainty principle, which, in the view of some, claimed to overthrow: the principle of causality (Heisenberg, 1930), thereby seemingly inserting "indeterminism" into science; the idea that natural phenomena obey exact laws (Heisenberg, 1930); and Laplacian determinism (Compton, 1935).

In 1927, Canadian-born American physiologist Ralph Lillie published his “Physical Indeterminism and Vital Action”, wherein he used the uncertainty relation to argue for a neurological based free will, namely that deliberate actions of the organism, in particular humans, are non-deterministic at the neurological level and hence subsequently at the psychic-choice level. [6]

In 1977, Ilya Prigogine, in his Self-Organization in Non-Equilibrium Systems: from Dissipative Structures to Order through Fluctuations, argued that that animate nature was a heat-fluxed system, similar to Bernard cells, and that order structures, e.g. humans, formed according to the logic that up to the bifurcation point, things were deterministic, but at the bifurcation point, things became indeterministic. This theory allowed for a semblance of belief in free will, choice, and thereby a form of physics based creative evolution.

In 1977, Werner Ehrenberg, in his Dice of the Gods: Causality, Necessity and Chance, discusses how Aristotle compared atoms to the letters of the alphabet”, and discusses the pros and cons of the indeterminism argument, statement such as: [2]

“… proof of indeterminism. It has been argued that strict causality is not incompatible with moral judgment and true statements. Other others have considered free will and truth utterly problematic.”

This last publication may have been some type of ontic opening stylized attempt to stylize “soul” in scientific terms.

In 1992, Rush Dozier, in his Codes of Evolution, argued that the randomness of uranium 238 decay yields indeterminism allowing for free will, following collapse of the wavefunction of the universe, or something along these lines. [3]

Quotes
The following are related quotes:

“A number of contemporary physicists and philosophers are ‘indeterminists’, who claim that genuine causality, strict regularity, actually does not exist in nature, but is merely an illusion created by the operation of certain rules which are never of an exact universal validity, even though they often come very near to it.”
— Max Planck (c.1946), “The Concept of Causality in Physics” [4]

“This [1988] study is the fourth, and most ambitious [45-years work], to issue from a challenge I received as an undergraduate in 1943 to take Leslie White's course 'The Mind of Primitive Man', diverting my attention from a possible career in academic philosophy to a more direct concern for the human process. Its purpose is, simply enough, to see whether human social evolution can be described, mapped, or cast in terms common to the other sciences, most specifically in terms of energy process. It reflects a conviction that for all its uniqueness and indeterminism, our understanding of the human trajectory will be unsatisfactory until it is framed in dynamics that are common to all of nature.”
— Richard Adams (1988), The Eight Day (pg. ix)

References
1. Lillie, Ralph S. (1927). “Physical Indeterminism and Vital Action”, Science, 46: 139-44.
2. Ehrenberg, Werner. (1977). Dice of the Gods: Causality, Necessity and Chance (indeterminism, 4+ pgs; quote, pg. 13). Birkbeck College.
3. Dozier, Rush W. (1992). Codes of Evolution: the Synaptic language Revealing the Secrets of Matter, Life, and Thought (nested evolution, pg. 6; thermodynamic pulse, pg. 198; deck of cards, pg. 208; thermodynamics, 11+ pgs). Crown Publishers Inc.
4. Planck, Max. (c.1946). “The Concept of Causality in Physics”; in: Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers (translator: Frank Gaynor) (§5:120-50; pg. 125). Philosophical Library, 1949.

External links
● Indeterminism – Wikipedia.