Yes...

But only when we understand 'determines' within the emerging context of nonlinear dynamics



Decoupling Determinism from Necessity

One of the dominant debates within philosophy since the emergence of classical mechanics has been that between determinism and free will. As Karl Popper (1983:xix) elucidates

Common sense inclines, on the one hand, to assert that every event is caused by some preceding events, so every event can be explained or predicted… On the other hand… common sense attributes to mature and sane human persons… the ability to choose freely between alternative possibilities of acting.

This contradiction is known as the dilemma of determinism; how can humans possess the ability to act creatively and spontaneously in a world governed by strictly deterministic laws of physics, without recourse to a dualist ontology, whereby humans occupy a mode of being distinct from the rest of the biosphere? Using recent developments in the field of dynamical systems, writers such as Prigogine and DeLanda, claim that the dilemma of determinism can now be resolved. This, they allege occurs through a fundamental reconceptualization of the status of determinism itself.
Under the Newtonian paradigm of classical mechanics, ‘Once initial conditions are given, everything else is determined. Nature is an automaton, which we can control, at least in principle. Novelty, choice and spontaneous action are real only from a human point of view.’ (Prigogine, 1997:12) Determinism, then, has conventionally been conceived as congruent to necessity – through a series of linear casual chains any system will develop down a fixed pathway, a completely calculable, predictable, and repeatable trajectory. As we have seen, chaotic systems problematise this description, as they are determined, yet probabilistic rather than quantifiable.
Thinking in terms of attractors and bifurcations however, leads to a radically distilled understanding of what it means to be deterministic, allowing an incorporation of chaotic and mechanistic determinism under the same term. As DeLanda (2002:15) notes,

Attractors are fully deterministic, that is, if the dynamics of a give population are governed by an attractor, the population will be strongly bound to behave in a particular way. Yet this is not to go back to the clockwork determinism of classical physics.

A phase portrait, governed by a single attractor, situated in a single basin of attraction has a singular and definite end state for the systems evolution, an example again being a pendulum (with friction), whose trajectory ends at the point attractor which governs it. Unlike this simple linear example, natural systems - from neural networks to cloud formation - involve multiple attractors and multiple basins of attraction. Concentrating on the simplified and atypical examples of linear phenomena

Can mislead us into thinking that determinism implies a single necessary outcome. On the other hand, a space involving multiple attractors breaks the link between necessity and determinism, giving the systems a ‘choice’ between different destinies and making the particular end state a system occupies a combination of determinism and chance.
DeLanda 2002:35

As we saw, many nonlinear dynamical systems display extreme sensitivity at certain points, as processes of positive feedback repeatedly iterate upon the system, vastly altering its trajectory and the composition of its phase portrait. In these circumstances, ‘Attractors may disappear or change into one another, or new attractors may suddenly appear.’ (Capra 1996:136) These systems are described as being ‘critically unstable,’ and the exact points of critical instability are called bifurcation points. Bifurcations then, are ‘Points in the system’s evolution where a fork suddenly appears… Mathematically bifurcation points mark sudden changes in the system’s phase portrait. Physically they correspond to points of instability at which the system changes abruptly and new forms of order suddenly appear.’ (Capra 1996:137) These points of critical instability are unique to nonlinear systems which operate far from equilibrium.

Along with attractors, bifurcations provide a source of indeterminacy within systems governed by strictly determinate, differential equations.

When a bifurcation leads to two alternative distributions, only one of which can be realized, a deterministic system faces further ‘choices.’ Which alternative obtains… will be determined by chance fluctuations in the environment.
Delanda 2002:35/36

Thinking in these terms, determinism is no longer synonymous with necessity and certainty. Decoupling these terms creates a new sense of a deterministic world – one which is no longer governed by fixity, linearity and necessity, but instead by a non-linear network of causal attractors, which contains a constantly evolving potentiality for change, spontaneity and increased complexity through bifurcations.
Within this new, nonlinear form of a deterministic world, the traits which have traditionally been designated as human – creativity, spontaneity, the ability to ‘choose’ from multiple alternative options – become an integral part of the living and nonliving parts of the universe. It is in this context that Stuart Kauffman (1995:1) describes the processes of self-organisation and complexity theory as placing humanity ‘At home in the Universe.’

As such, technological determinism and social relations interact to form our social reality. They are essentially inseparable, as social relations will guide technology and technological determinations will guide social relations. Both work by forming the boundaries and parameters within which social systems function.