What is determinism?

Determinism is like having a recipe that tells you exactly what will happen next, no surprises.

Imagine you have a toy train track. Every time you push the train, it goes exactly where it’s supposed to go: around the loop, through the tunnel, and back to start. There's no randomness, just one path the train can take. That’s like determinism: everything that happens is decided by what happened before.

Think of a ball bouncing on a smooth floor. If you drop it from the same height each time, it will always bounce to the same height and land in the same spot. No matter how many times you do it, the ball doesn’t choose where to go; it just follows the rules.

Now imagine you are the train. If everything around you is set, like the track, the time of day, even what you ate for breakfast, then everything you do is also decided by those things. Just like the train has no choice but to follow its path, you might have no choice but to say "hello" when someone says "hi."

So determinism means: if we know all the starting points and rules, we can figure out exactly what will happen next, just like a train on a track.