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It appears to me that randomness could or could not produce something meaningful but either way hard determinism seems a better bet. Is there a writer who explores this territory?

C. Stroud
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    Determinism and randomness do not exhaust the options, and the territory is called compatibilism. It is too broad to be covered here, see SEP – Conifold Nov 29 '18 at 19:25
  • @Conifold I did not mention compatibilism as a possible approach to meaningfulness, true. But I did mention two other things in relation to meaningfulness. Is it possible to discuss meaningfulness relating to either randomness or hard-determinism? – C. Stroud Dec 01 '18 at 12:28
  • I used compatibilism loosely, the idea is mostly explaining how determinism (hard or not) is not so bad after all. Other options include varieties of partial determinism/constrained randomness or schemes where the dichotomy does not make sense in the first place (which are most compatible with modern physics). – Conifold Dec 02 '18 at 02:04
  • I find "randomness" to be incredibly tricky to define well. There's some advantage to Conifold's approach of looking at the wider territory of compatabilism to avoid having to pin down the pesky details of what randomness really means. – Cort Ammon Dec 19 '18 at 02:51
  • Are you equating "randomness" with the concept of freewill, as your question seems to imply? If so, it makes no sense to me. Because determined actions don't require any forethought, they're actually more random than the intentional actions of freewill. Even just simply choosing to be carefree and thoughtless is more predictable than the laissez faire approach of leaving it all up to the most basic 'human nature'. – Bread Dec 19 '18 at 04:26
  • @Bread It appears to me that randomness is something that philosophers talk about, so whether or not it exists I am interested in reading what they have to say about it. In particular vis-a-vis meaning and other ways of looking at things. – C. Stroud Dec 22 '18 at 18:33
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    To answer directly; Spinoza maintained that randomness or what he termed 'free will' is an imaginary misconception. He espoused not hard determinism but rather the notion of necessity acting on laws of nature wherein everything which occurs is sourced in a chain of causality which removes any possibility of randomness. He addresses the topic of 'freedom' as a recognition of the role of the 'necessity of one's nature' in every human life. Freedom consists in understanding the workings and operation of the causality which forms us and has us conform to certain types of 'choices'. see his Ethics. –  Apr 02 '19 at 15:38
  • @Charles M Saunders Spinoza Ethics good lead. Up vote. – C. Stroud Apr 04 '19 at 11:21

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