
:''This article is about the general notion of determinism in philosophy. For other uses of the word "deterministic" see: Deterministic (disambiguation).'' Determinism is the philosophy concept which claims that every physical event, including human cognition and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. No mysterious miracles or totally random events occur. ==Philosophy of determinism== The principal consequence of deterministic philosophy is that free will (except as defined in strict compatibilism) becomes an illusion. It is a popular misconception that determinism necessarily entails that all future events have already been determined (a position known as Fatalism); this is not obviously the case, and the subject is still debated among metaphysicians. Determinism is associated with, and relies upon, the ideas of Materialism and Causality. Some of the philosophers who have dealt with this issue are Omar Khayyam, David Hume, Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, and, more recently, John Searle. ::: With Earth's first Clay They did the Last Man's knead, ::: And then of the Last Harvest sow'd the Seed: ::: Yea, the first Morning of Creation wrote ::: What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read. :::::''(Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, LIII, rendered into English language verse by Edward Fitzgerald)'' ==Nature of determinism== The exact meaning of the term "determinism" has historically been subject to various interpretations. Some view determinism and free will as mutually exclusive, whereas others, labelled Compatibilism, believe that the two ideas can be coherently reconciled. Most of this disagreement is due to the fact that the definition of "free will," like determinism, varies. Some feel it refers to the metaphysical truth of independent agency, whereas others simply define it as the feeling of agency that humans experience when they act. For example, David Hume argued that while it is possible that one does not freely arrive at one's set of desires and beliefs, the only meaningful interpretation of freedom relates to one's ability to translate those desires and beliefs into voluntary action. ===Determinism in the western tradition=== The idea that the entire universe is a deterministic system (philosophy) has been articulated in both Western and non-Western religion, philosophy, and literature. The Ancient Greek atomists Leucippus and Democritus were the first to anticipate determinism when they theorized that all processes in the world were due to the mechanical interplay of atoms, but this theory did not gain much support at the time. Determinism in the West is often associated with Newtonian physics, which depicts the physical matter of the universe as operating according to a set of fixed, knowable laws. The "billiard ball" hypothesis, a product of Newtonian physics, argues that once the initial conditions of the universe have been established the rest of the history of the universe follows inevitably. If it were actually possible to have complete knowledge of physical matter and the laws governing that matter at any one them, then it would be theoretically possible to compute the time and place of every event that will ever occur. In this sense, the basic particles of the universe operate in the same fashion as the rolling balls on a billiard table, moving and striking each other in predictable ways to produce predictable results. Whether or not it is all-encompassing in so doing, Newtonian mechanics deals only with caused events, e.g.: If the original position of an object is x, y, z, and if it is hit dead on by an object moving along some vector V, then it will be pushed straight toward another point x', y', z'. If it goes somewhere else, the Newtonians argue, one must question one's measurements of the original position of the object, the exact direction of the object moving on V, gravitational or other fields that were inadvertently ignored, etc. Then, they maintain, repeated experiments and improvements in accuracy will always bring one's observations closer to the theoretically predicted results. When dealing with situations on an ordinary human scale, Newtonian physics has been so enormously successful that it has no competition. But it fails spectacularly as velocities become some substantial fraction of the speed of light and when interactions at the atomic scale are studied. Prior to the discovery of quantum effects and other challenges to Newtonian physics, "uncertainty" was always a term that applied to the accuracy of human knowledge about causes and effects, and not to the causes and effects themselves. ===Determinism in the eastern tradition=== In the East, determinism has been expressed in the Buddhism doctrine of pratitya-samutpada, which states that every phenomenon is conditioned by, and depends on, the phenomena that it is not. A common teaching story, called the Net of Indra, illustrates this point. A vast auditorium is decorated with mirrors and/or prisms hanging on strings of different lengths from an immense number of points on the ceiling. One flash of light is sufficient to light the entire display since light bounces and bends from hanging bauble to hanging bauble. Each bauble lights each and every other bauble. So, too, each of us is "lit" by each and every other entity in the Universe. In Buddhism, this teaching is used to demonstrate that to ascribe special value to any one thing is to ignore the interdependence of all things. Volitions of all sentient creatures determine the seeming reality in which we perceive ourself as living, rather than a mechanical universe determining the volitions which humans imagine themselves to be forming. In the story of the Net of Indra, the light that streams back and forth throughout the display is the analog of ''karma''. The word "karma" does not mean anything like "the result of a past good or bad action." "Karma" refers to an action, or, more specifically, to an intentional action, and the Buddhist theory holds that every karma (every intentional action) will bear karmic fruit (produce an effect somewhere down the line). Karma is the only thing that is fundamentally real. Volitional acts drive the universe. The consequences of this view often confound our ordinary expectations -- much in the way quantum physics has results that are strongly counterintuitive. Fritjiof Capra has written extensive on the parallels and differences among western physics and other systems of thought in his book ''The Tao of Physics.'' A shifting flow of probabilities for futures lies at the heart of theories associated with the ''Yi Jing'' (or ''I Ching'', the ''Book of Changes''). Probabilities take the center of the stage away from things and people. A kind of "divine" volition sets the fundamental rules for the working out of probabilities in the universe, and human volitions are always a factor in the ways that humans can deal with the real world situations one encounters. If one's situation in life is surfing on a tsunami, one still has some range of choices even in that situation. One person might give up, and another person might choose to struggle and perhaps to survive. The Yi Jing mentality is much closer to the mentality of quantum physics than to that of classical physics, and also finds parallelism in voluntarist or Existentialist ideas of taking one's life as one's project. The followers of the philosopher Mo Zi (or "Mo Tzu" if you prefer the earlier Wade-Giles Romanization) made some early discoveries in optics and other areas of physics, ideas that were consonant with deterministic ideas, but the vine that produced this early fruit quickly withered and died. ==Arguments against Determinism== ===Argument from Morality=== Some critics of determinism argue that if people are assumed incapable of independent choice (free will) there can then be no rational basis for morality, and therefore some aspects of criminal and civil jurisprudence and legislation appear irrational and unjust. How, they ask, can one be punished for an involuntary action? In order to maintain the integrity of social institutions that rely in part upon holding people responsible for their actions, it becomes necessary in their eyes to deny determinism, at least as far as it applies to what we ordinarily call voluntary actions. Determinists have responded to this critique by distinguishing between normative and positivism claims, arguing that statements of fact can and should be made independently of their consequences. Thus, even if determinism is inconsistent with the idea of a moral universe, that does not necessarily invalidate its conclusions. The presumed social utility of ideas of crime and justice should not be permitted, they argue, to override questions of truth. Contemporary U.S. philosopher Donald Davidson (philosopher), among others, has argued that if people behaved in an uncaused way then one would describe their actions as insane, not as free. His view is consonant with the philosophical position advocated by Mencius that maintains that one's innate characteristics are the result of deterministic causation, that among these innate characteristics there exists a set of drives (analogous to other drives such as the sex drive) that are axiological or moral in nature, and that factors external to these moral drives can act to inhibit their operation. Inhibiting their action is tantamount to a loss of freedom, which is something one instinctively seeks to avoid. In Western terms, Mencius would say that human beings are born with a conscience, that they are acting in accord with their own natures and inclinations when they guide their actions by their consciences (along with their other drives such as hunger), and that we all experience a loss of freedom when we realize that we are being controlled either directly or indirectly by outside forces -- whether those forces are the lingering effects of conditioning or the imminent threat of death posed by a pistol held to one's head. In short, self-determination is freedom and other-determination is loss of freedom. Morality depends on the exercise of what one's nature has determined one to be and on being ''de facto'' responsible for all the consequences of what one decides to do. If one is free of external control one is an entelechy; to the extent that one becomes determined by external factors,one loses one's individual identity and becomes merely the extension of another entity. ===Determinism and Quantum Mechanics=== Since the beginning of the 20th Century, quantum mechanics has revealed previously concealed aspects of events. Newtonian physics depicts a universe in which objects move in perfectly determinative ways. At human scale levels of interaction, Newtonian mechanics gives predictions that in all respects check out as completely perfectible, if not perfect in practice. The dependability of predictions turns out to be reliably improved by refinement in our knowledge of initial conditions. Poorly designed and fabricated guns and ammunition scatter their shots rather widely around the center of a target, and better guns produce tighter patterns. Absolute knowledge of the forces accelerating a bullet should produce absolutely reliable predictions of its path, or so we thought. Contrary to what Newtonian mechanics would predict, at atomic scales the paths of objects can only be predicted in a probabilistic way. In double-slit experiments, electrons fired singly through a double-slit apparatus at a distant screen do not arrive at a single point, nor do they arrive in a scattered pattern analogous to bullets fired by a fixed gun at a distant target. Instead, they arrive in varying concentrations at widely separated points, and the distribution of their hits can be calculated reliably. In that sense the behavior of the electrons in this apparatus is deterministic, but there is no way to predict where in the resulting interference pattern an individual electron will make its contribution. On the macro scale it can matter very much whether a bullet arrives at a certain point at a certain time, as snipers and their victims are well aware; the question is whether there are analogous quantum events that have macro- as well as quantum-level consequences. It is easy to contrive situations in which the arrival of an electron at a screen at a certain point and time would trigger one event and its arrival at another point would trigger an entirely different event. Whether such events are significant in nature is open to question and empirical investigation. If probabilistically determined events do have an impact on the macro events such as whether a person who could be historically important dies in youth of a cancer caused by a random mutation, then the course of history is not determined from the dawn of time. But some authorities argue against the reality of such probabilistically determined events and/or argue that events on the atomic scale cannot influence the course of events on the macro scale. Some people have argued that in addition to the conditions humans can observe and the rules they can deduce there are hidden factors that determine absolutely in which order electrons reach the screen. They argue that the course of the universe is absolutely determined, but that humans are screened from knowledge of the determinative factors. So, they say, it only appears that things proceed in a merely probabilistically determinative way. Actually, they proceed in an absolutely determinative way. Although matters are still subject to some measure of dispute, quantum mechanics makes statistical predictions that would be violated if some underlying reason unknown to us existed. There have been a number of experiments to verify those predictions, and so far they do not appear to be violated although many physicists believe better experiments are needed to conclusively settle the question. See Bell_test experiments. ===First Cause=== Intrinsic to the debate concerning determinism is the issue of first cause. Deism, a philosophy articulated in the seventeenth century, holds that the universe has been deterministic since creation, but ascribes the creation to a metaphysical God or first cause outside of the chain of determinism. God may have begun the process, Deism argues, but God has not influenced its evolution. This perspective illustrates a puzzle underlying any conception of determinism: Assume: All events have causes, and their causes are all prior events. The picture this gives us is that Event AN is preceded by AN-1, which is preceded by AN-2, and so forth. Under that assumption, two possibilities seem clear, and both of them question the validity of the original assumption: :(1) There is an event A0 prior to which there was no other event that could serve as its cause. :(2) There is no event A0 prior to which there was no other event, which means that we are presented with an infinite series of causally related events, which is itself an event, and yet there is no cause for this infinite series of events. Under this analysis the original assumption must have something wrong with it. It can be fixed by admitting one exception, a creation event (either the creation of the original event or events, or the creation of the infinite series of events) that is itself not a caused event in the sense of the word "caused" used in the formulation of the original assumption. Some agency, which many systems of thought call God, creates space, time, and the entities found in the universe by means of some process that is analogous to causation but is not causation as we know it. This solution to the original difficulty has led people to question whether there is any reason for there only being one divine quasi-causal act, whether there have not been a number of events that have occurred outside the ordinary sequence of events, events that may be called miracles. The extreme philosophical position in this line of development was held by Leibniz, who held in his monism philosophy that all seemingly causal interactions between two (or more) entities, A <-> B, are actually interactions mediated by God, A<->God<->B. Immanuel Kant carried forth this idea of Leibniz in his idea of transcendental relations, and as a result had a profound effect on later philosophical attempts to sort these issues out. His most influential immediate successor, a strong critic whose ideas were yet strongly influenced by Kant, was Edmund Husserl, the developer of the school of philosophy called phenomenology. But the central concern of that school was to elucidate not physics but the grounding of information that physicists and others regard as empiricism. In an indirect way, this train of investigation appears to have contributed much to the philosophy of science called logical positivism and particularly to the thought of members of the Vienna Circle, all of which have had much to say, at least indirectly, about ideas of determinism. ==Modern perspectives on determinism== ===Scientific determinism and first cause=== Since the early twentieth century when astronomer Edwin Hubble first hypothesized that red shift shows the universe is expanding, prevailing scientific opinion has been that the universe started with a Big Bang, and therefore has a finite age. Different astrophysicists hold different views about precisely how the universe originated (Cosmogony), but a consistent viewpoint is that scientific determinism has held at the macroscopic level since the universe came into being. ===Determinism and generative processes=== In emergentist or emergence of cognitive sciences and evolutionary psychology, free will is the generation of infinite behaviour from the interaction of finite-deterministic set of rules and parameters. Thus the unpredictability of the emerging behaviour from deterministic processes leads to a perception of free will, though free will as an ontological entity does not exist. As an illustration, the strategy board-games chess and Go (board game) have rigorous rules in which no information (such as cards' face-values) is hidden from either player and no random events (such as dice-rolling) happen within the game. Yet, chess and especially Go with its extremely simple deterministic rules, can still have an extremely large number of unpredictable moves. By analogy, emergentists or generativists suggest that the experience of free will emerges from the interaction of finite rules and deterministic parameters that generate infinite and unpredictable behaviour. Dynamical-evolutionary psychology, cellular automata and the generative sciences, model emergent processes of social behaviour on this philosophy, showing the experience of free will as essentially a gift of ignorance or as a product of incomplete information. ==See also== * Causality * Chaos theory * Open Theism * Free will * Scientific determinism * Deterministic system (philosophy) * Block time * Compatibilism * Voluntarism * Game theory ==External links== * [http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/dhi.cgi?id=dv2-02 ''Dictionary of the history of Ideas'':] Determinism in History * [http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwIntroIndex.htm Philosopher Ted Honderich's Determinism web resource] * [http://www.galilean-library.org/int13.html An Introduction to Free Will and Determinism] by Paul Newall, aimed at beginners. * [http://www.determinism.com/essay.shtml Determinism] An Essay by Peter Gill * [http://www.determinism.com/05042002.shtml Where's The Free Will?] An Exploration of This Elusive Concept by Gordon M. Orloff * [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Causal Determinism] Philosophy of science Metaphysics Random numbers
Archives: Talk:Determinism/archive1 == Ancient Determinism? == This article relates determinism to modern science, and to free will. Although it may have not been called determinism, the idea of it seems to have existed for a long time. The Stoics and many Christians argued that free will is impossible. This is mainly because God should know everything that will happen in the future. In Bondage of the Will, Martin Luthor argues that free will is impossible because of a view similar to determinism. I would also like to note that with or without determinism, we might not have free will. Determinism isn't really the most powerful argument against free will. Our ideas of cause and effect (even if random) still will pose a problem. --User:Dragonlord 08:54, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC) :That kind of determinism is usually refered to as fatalism, if I'm not mistaken. Completely agree with you on determinism/indeterminism, either way there's no explaining "free will". Randomness is every bit as opposed to free will as order is. User:Mackanma 22:55, 7 May 2005 (UTC) :I think there were some ancient Greek philosophies which were determinist. I'll look them up and put something in. I don't think they were very popular before Newtonian physics though. I think compatibilism -v- incompatibilism is the philosophical argument about whether free will and determinism can coexist. User:WhiteC 00:55, 8 May 2005 (UTC) There is a related argument, for those who believe in the existence of a soul that is something other than a function of the body. The soul can control the body, but the body cannot control the soul. That's why the soul goes to hell if it wills bad things. It actually helps to think of these things in terms of a robot and a waldo. (A "waldo" is a servomechanism that is controlled by a human being at the other end of a cable or some other communication channel.) Would it make sense to exact vengeance upon a waldo if the human at the control panel moved his/her remote hand and smashed in the head of a visiting dignitary? Obviously now. The VIP's body guards might disable or destroy the waldo, but if they were being rational it would only be to facilitate their getting at the murderous human. If it doesn't make sense to exact vengeance on a waldo, how about on a robot that is deterministically programmed to fire its weapons on anybody approaching with a drawn gun? A rational response would be to fire the programmer (and/or accuse him/her of murder or manslaughter), and replace the robot's read-only memory that contains the defective programming. Even if the robot were somehow capable of feeling, it wouldn't make sense to torment it. If the person who programmed the robot was also the person who tortured the robot as a form of "justice," that person would be really sick. How about a robot that has been given heuristic (artificial intelligence) capabilities and has been programmed with one instruction that states: :Check whether the gold is being stolen. If the gold is being stolen, try something (the last thing that worked or something new), remember what you've tried, and go back to the beginnning of this loop. The robot tries all sorts of things and finally ends up hitting robbers with a crowbar. Some robbers die. The police intervene. The robot protests that he was only doing what his wired-in fundamental command programmed him to do. It would make sense to me to hold the robot's programer/designer responsible. But suppose that the robot has "human" feelings. The robot can feel pain if we smash its limbs or even if we confine it and thereby frustrate its programmed need to protect the gold. Would it make sense, would it be just, to punish the robot? The problem with the robot, at this point, is not that it is being controlled from the outside by somebody tapping in code at a keyboard. The problem may not even be that there is a problem with the original programming contained in a few MEGs of ROM in the robot. In fact, if a different sequence of robbers and/or a different sequence of random attempts to secure protection of the gold has occurred, then the robot might have come up with a better way of protecting the gold than by braining robbers with a 10 pound steel rod. If it's dealt with lot of devious humans trying all sorts of ploys to get at the gold it may be extremely resistant to attempts to get it to give up the successful use of brute force -- because it has learned that when it gets scammed by a human more gold gets lost. The problem with the robot, from our point of view, is that it is operating under its own set of rules, rules that we do not like. We have several courses open to us: (1) Destroy the robot. (2) Tear the robot down,extract its ROM and reprogram it. Under either of those options the old robot is essentially gone. (3) Punish the robot. Make it feel pain and make us feel like gods. (4) Throw up our hands and let it continue to do its work. Put up "Beware of the Robot!" signs. What are our other options? Regardless of how it became what it is here and now, the robot interprets things as it has learned to interpret them and feels whatever it feels. In many respects it is not capable of doing anything about what it is and what it feels. To what extent is it capable of dealing with its imminent demise? In other words, to what degree is its future behavior not boxed in by the things that others have done to it? Well, it is "heuristic," and it is programmed to try other things when what it is doing does not work. It should be clear to the robot that arrival of law officers with tanks was not anticipated, and that getting blown up, disassembled, or imprisoned will interfere with it achieving its programmed goals. We can say to the robot, "You're in a bad fix here, feeling pain because you can't protect the gold because you've gotten yourself in trouble with the police. I can fix all that by pulling the plug. Just let me open your control panel and you'll never feel a thing." Or we could offer virtually the same deal to the robot but promise to wipe its memory, edit its basic code, and reactivate it. But suppose the robot says, "I'm just as sentient as you are. I have the same feelings you do. I don't like being in trouble and suffering pain, but I do like being alive and being myself. I suppose you think it is all right to wipe me out, and if you really think about it you'd probably be equally willing to wipe out another human being. Are you willing to make that a general rule and say that any other human being has the right to wipe you out? And maybe robots (and here he cups a plastisteel hand gently over your shoulder) have the right to wipe humans out." By one interpretation, "free will" is like the will of the human being at the other end of the tether from a waldo. Nothing that happens to the waldo can go back up the wires and take control of the hands and feet of the human being. Control goes all one way. But the problem of free will just gets moved up a notch. Is the human being the waldo of something else? If not, does the human being have the control over himself/herself that he/she had over the waldo? By another interpretation, "free will" is never an absolute and one-way kind of control. I either am what I am and act out the essence of my being as best I can in this world, or I get destroyed. If I stay in operation, then the question of "free or determined" has three kinds of answers. (1) I am determined as to what I am because I was constituted in the general way that all things in the world get constituted. Causation was never miraculous and never "totally random." (2) In my actions I am partly determined by internal factors (I lover butterscotch pudding) and partly determined by external factors (the ingredients for butterschotch pudding can't be had for love or money). But (3) is more interesting. What I do in live can change what I am. Nowadays even if I suffer some disease because of my genetic constitution it may be possible to correct that problem. If I was born blind then soon it may be possible to fit me up with a set of artificial eyes. By so doing I increase my range of freedom, and, similarly, if I get careless and let my arm get cut off I decrease my range of freedom. User:Patrick0Moran 19:43, 15 May 2005 (UTC) == Determinism & Quantum Mechanics == I'm no quantum physicist, but it seems to me like the author of this section has made a critical misunderstanding. The objection to determinism in quantum physics has nothing to do with "uncaused events" nor am I aware of it claiming there are such events (like I said though, I'm no quantum physicist). As I understand it, the major objection to determinism arises from the fact that for determinism to work, you have to be able to obtain absolute information about the state of the universe at any given moment. You have be able to know every property of every particle. Quantum physics doesn't allow for this - at best you can know the probability that something will have a particular property, but you cannot be absolutely certain, and it is this uncertainty which prevents determinism working. User:Noodhoog 18:15, 8 May 2005 (UTC) (signed after initial posting) :Please sign your postings. Otherwise you will end up at some point arguing with yourself. ;-) :Somewhere among my pile of partially consumed books I have a concise statement/argument by a presumably reputable physicist that maintains that a careful study of physics indicates that there could not be a certainty of causation at one level that is permanently masked from observers by difficulties in the observational process. If I recall correctly there were entropy problems involved. Even if I have misremembered the argument and its tightness, there is for sure one position out there that says that uncertainty is in the very nature of things, and that probability is inherent in the very fundamental nature of the universe. :There is another position that says that there really is a certainty of causation, and yet because we do the equivalent of locating crystal wine goblets by swinging a baseball bat we simply cannot know the state of things at any one time well enough to predict with absolute certainty the state of things at any other time. :The degree to which seemingly "infinitesimal" differences at time one can produce huge differences at some later time has been greatly illuminated by the discovery of the so-called "chaos" theory. It's a pity that they chose that name for the discovery because it creates the false impression that from a determined state at one point you get a chaotic state at another point. Talking about laminar flow turning suddenly into turbulent and "chaotic" flow at some point only heightens that perception. :The actual case is that if you start with a certain class of equations that are typically used to model things like weather change, and that are used by choosing some starting values, deriving a set of answers, and then feeding those answers back into the same equation, and so on, it turns out that changing a value by a very slight amount at one stage will result in great differences after several more stages in calculation. The famous example is how the flapping of a butterfly's wings or the non-flapping of the same butterfly's wings will produce or fail to produce a storm (all other initial conditions being equal) sometime down the line. :If you believe that when an electron "hits" a reflective surface there is only one way for it to go (even though we cannot measure its incoming path and velocity without changing what we are measuring), then that electron would only be able to go one place and either trigger or fail to trigger some Rube Goldbergian device that would blow the planet up. But if the electron's motion is in its essence probabilistic then there is no way that the god who fires the electron with exact control of force and direction can tell for sure whether the world ends. :One system of belief gives us a universe that is causal but ultimately unpredictable, and the other system of belief gives us a universe that is causal and ideally (but not practically) predictable. What would an uncausal universe be like? I guess it would be one in which a firing squad of 100 soldiers with functioning rifles and live ammunition could draw a bead and fire on one man and the man would have some chance of surviving unscratched. In other words it would be a universe in which it would not be possible to realistically assign probabilities to the occurrence or non-occurrence of events. :An interesting midway point would be a universe in which luck played a part much like what many people used to believe it played, e.g., a world in which whether one gets shot dead by the sheriff is really a 50-50 deal regardless of who the sheriff is, how good a weapon he procures, etc., a world in which baseballs behave like single electrons in a quantum physics experiment. That's a useful thought experiment, I think, because it immediately makes us aware that the real macroscopic world is not much like that, and reminds us that in the real world we can improve rifle designs and improve ammunition designs to the point that over even fairly long differences there is no question but that a bullet will strike a bottle close enough to dead center to destroy it. And that leads us further to wonder whether we can push all the way to the other extreme, the limit case where the bullet will arrive unerringly no matter how small it and its target become and how great may be the distance between them. Quantum physics seems to me to indicate that perfection is impossible. User:Patrick0Moran 07:08, 8 May 2005 (UTC) ::Thanks for the reminder. I've a tendency to forget to put in my signature :) ::Before I mention anything else, I should say that pretty much all the quantum physics I'll be talking about here is based on the Copenhagen Interpretation, which is the most widely (but not universally) accepted view of QP at present. Obviously, if you base your views on a different model, much of what I have to say here will be incorrect or irrelevant from your POV. ::Without getting drawn into too deep a discussion about this, it seems to me that your planet busting electron device is largely similar in nature to the Schrodinger's Cat experiment, utilising the predictability or unpredictability (as the case may be) of a quantum level event to produce (or not) a large scale event in the "real world", and there have been many articles written on the nature of such experiments ::Your point about the firing squad is particularly interesting as well, because as I understand it, in our universe it IS theoretically possible for a firing squad of 100 to fire at a man, and for all 100 bullets to miss him, or pass straight through him leaving him unscathed. It's just so mindbogglingly unlikely to ever actually happen that you'd need trillions of firing squads shooting trillions of men every second for trillions of times longer than the age of the universe for it to have a decent statistical chance of actually occurring. Lest claims of such an amazingly small chance of ever seeing this event ever appear as a copout, however, let me direct you to the phenomenon of quantum tunnelling which is this very effect in practice, and without which, such devices as electron tunnelling microscopes would not function. As I understand it, quantum tunnelling does not imply in any way a violation of the cause-effect model, as tunnelling simply occurs at a "probability miss" - i.e. when an electron has, say, an 80% chance of going a particular direction, but goes a different direction instead (which would land in the other 20%) ::This is no less caused than if it had gone in the expected direction, it's simply not the one considered most likely. After all, even if something has a 99.99999999% chance of happening, there's still that tiny chance that it won't. ::I think you are perhaps overestimating the randomness introduced by these features rather too much. It's highly unlikely there will ever be a rifle designed to a degree where quantum uncertainty, rather than, say, wind turbulence, machining precision, user skill, or the flight dynamics of the bullet would be the major factor in the accuracy. Furthermore, if it was accurate to the point where quantum uncertainty was the major deciding factor, those factors would be so tiny as to render the gun pinpoint accurate by anybody's standards. Simply put, quantum uncertainty doesn't tend to have any noticable impact on the universe at our scale of things, even taking into account chaos theory and it's butterly effect. What it does mean, as I stated before, is that you can never obtain absolute information about the state of the universe at any given moment due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, regardless of how sophisticated and precise your measuring instruments are. Because the ability to theoretically (if not practically) obtain such information is a requirement for determinism (as you need it to extrapolate the future) this breaks the deterministic model. User:Noodhoog 18:15, 8 May 2005 (UTC) "If it's 'uncausal' then you'd find cases like xxxxx," is not the same statement as "If you find cases like xxxxx then it's uncausal." As you point out, if 100 men in a firing squad loaded real ammunition from different lots of ammunition by different manufacturers, etc., into fully tested real weapons, and they were all crack marksmen and they all shot at a guy who was secured to a stake and he didn't get hit by a single bullet, then that might be the result of chance. And, as you point out, the probability of it happening (even if they were all such lousy shots that there was only a 50-50 chance in each case that they'd hit their target) would be really low. But since we live in a "causal" universe, if that ever happened the first thing the authorities would likely do would be to hold an inquiry regarding the "conspiracy" to make the execution fail. That is to say, humans ordinarily would not accept uncritically the idea that a sparrow took out the first bullet, the primer was bad in bullet in the second gun, etc., etc. They would apply Occam's razor and figure that the most likely explanation was that deliberate human intervention was involved. Suppose that there were seven prisoners adhered securely to seven posts along the far end of a football field, and one marksman with a top of the line sniper rifle was at this end of the field. It is his regular job to kill one out of seven prisoners and scare the bleep out of the other six. They are all led in blindfolded so they don't know which stake they are being led to. The marksman has a shooting tripod and he has locked his rifle in position perpendicular to the 0 yard line. So he really doesn't have to aim it anymore. In our universe seven men are brought out, the priest reads a prayer, the marksman pulls the trigger. Except for the rare case in which the gun misfires for some reason (bad ammo or whatever), the guy taped to the center post regularly has his head blown off and the others go back to their cells. In another universe, somebody almost always dies, but it is not always the guy on the center stake. What is predictable is not which man gets it in any given execution, but what number of bullet holes end up in each stake after a thousand executions. In neither universe would any of these executions be regarded as being uncaused. What if the heads of individual humans appeared to spontaneously blow up? Would we regard those "executions" as uncaused events? Would we insist that there must be a cause for these events even if we couldn't see what it might be? (There was actually a case like this back in the beginning of jet fighter use. U.S. jet fighters were being shot out of the sky when it appeared that no enemy aircraft, and even no other aircraft of an stripe, were in the vicinity. The cockpits of the recovered aircraft had all been shattered by what appeared to be machinegun fire. It being rather close in time to 1947, flying saucers were suspected for a time. But not everybody believed that the fighter planes and pilots were spontaneously sprouting 50 calibre holes. Finally somebody realized that pilots must be shooting off a round of machinegun fire as part of their exercises and then going into a power dive along the course of their original flight -- and being intercepted by the bullets that they had caught up to. Pilots were advised of the possibility of shooting themselves down, and the mysterious shootings stopped.) If people's heads did start exploding, we would want to know things like whether there was a regular per-month quota, whether there were geographical predictors,etc., etc. It's actually really hard to understand what could be truly regarded as an uncaused event. But to be caused does not necessarily imply that it is to be predictable. Part of the problem with thinking about these questions is that we unconsciously have a kind of atomistic idea of events. The birth of a baby is "an event". But actually the birth of the baby is part of a continuum of growth that can be traced back through months in the womb and forward through however long the individual continues to live. What we call the cause of an event is merely an earlier portion of an event continuum. A causless event would be an event that began out of nothing in an instant of time and continued on from there. Maybe it happens occasionally that a space-Rok appeares out of the nothingness of interstellar space and goes flying off to gobble space dust or absorb cosmic radiation or whatever space-Roks usually do, but I don't think many people have ever witnesed such an event -- at least at macroscopic levels. If such an event did happen, how would one judge whether it was really uncaused? Surely some people would say that God had indulged himself by making a miracle, and other people would say that the space-Rok boiled up out of some kind of quantum foam. Just because we don't know the reason for some event does not prove that the event in uncaused. On the other hand, discovering that a million or a billion supposedly uncaused events all had causes would not prove that there are no uncaused events. To bring things back to quantum mechanics, suppose that we have a double-slit experiment going, and we are firing electrons toward the double slits. Experiments show that even if single electrons are fired, these single electrons will "interfere with themselves" in such a way that they will arrive at an array of different but predictable places. Now if we consider "an event" to be arriving at one position or the other, then we could ask whether there is anything happens that determines which point the actual electron arrives at in each instance. It is demonstrable that there is a probabalistic differentiation of impact points. We can put a detector of some sort on the other side of the slits and we'll detect a characteristic interference pattern that gets clearer and clearer as we fire more and more single electrons through. But is there anything else that can be determined as to why in any particular instance the electron arrives here or there? And, to go back to uncaused events for a moment, if we turn off the electron generator and take it away, does the detector light up occasionally because of the spontaneous generation of electrons? It seems to me that if we imagine that, in addition to some kind of probabilistic distribution function inherent in the nature of electrons that gets manifested in the double slit apparatus, there is also some kind of "demon" with an atomic scale fly swatter or baseball bat who hits the electrons to make them go toward the appropriate target point, then we involve ourself in infinite regress since we need to explain the demon, how the demon operates on the electrons, where the demon gets its probability chart, how it knows how to interpret the probability chart, etc., etc. When we restrict ourselves to what we can determine empirically, electrons hits the slits and fan out in a probabalistic or wave interference-like pattern, and that's it. If we would be correct to assume that all of our actions are pre-programmed for us as a result of our having been constituted by macroscopic forces that have no probabilistic component, and as a result of outside forces impinging upon us that are likewise devoid of any probabilistic componets, would it not be possible for us to decouple ourselves from the past by making random choices on the basis of physically random events like the decay of radioactive elements? If the geiger counter beeps within the next half second I will move to Europe; otherwise I will stay here. User:Patrick0Moran 07:56, 9 May 2005 (UTC) :There is even a website that will supply you with random numbers based on radioactive decay: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/ But the notion that quantum uncertainty normally plays no role in macroscopic events is unfounded. The sensitive dependence on intitial conditions that allows a butterfly wing flap to affect (and even effect) future storms can be extended to the energy from the radioactive decay of an individual atom. Or, if you prefer, such a decay could cause a spike in a butterfly's nerve causing its wing to flap. A perhaps more vivid example of the direct influence of QM randomness on human affairs is cancer. Some fraction of cancers are caused by exposure to ionizing radiation. While it is generally believed that more than one mutation is required to make a cell malignant, it certainly happens from time to time that the final mutation is caused by a single radioactive decay product interacting with a DNA molecule at just the right (or wrong for the patient) place and time. Molecules at room temperature bounce around at a rate of several billion times per second. If the time of the decay of the single atom that generated the cancer's initiating particle had been a nanosecond earlier of later, it is not likely that the cell in question would have been successfully transformed. It is my understanding that there is no theoretical basis for saying when an individual atom of a radioactive isotope will decay, beyond the probability implied by the isotope's half-life, which for naturally occuring isotopes is in the hundreds of millions, if not billions of years. That is true even if all the initial conditions of all the constituant particles of the atom were somehow known to very high accuracy at one point of time, a measurement prohibited by QM. The individual atom was itself created (and its initial conditions set) under conditions, whether in a supernova or a nuclear reactor, where QM effects dominate. To say the exact nanosecond and nanometer time and place of that atom's decay has a cause seems totally lacking in scientific basis. Yet the suffering resulting from that precise event is all too macroscopically real. --User:ArnoldReinhold 10:07, 9 May 2005 (UTC) ::Actually there has been determination of the statistical likelihood of quantum uncertainty affecting macroscopic events (without deliberate quantum devices to use it like Schrodinger's Cat)... it is incredibly small (though still greater than zero of course), although I can't remember just how small it is at the moment. I'll have to see if I can find a figure somewhere. ::Chaos theory and quantum uncertainty are totally unrelated principles. Chaos theory (unlike some versions of quantum theory) is deterministic; it is just difficult to predict chaotic systems in practice, since it is difficult to determine the starting conditions with the necessary precision. So, this is just an analogy, which should not be stretched too much. User:WhiteC 02:35, 10 May 2005 (UTC) Unless they are operating in totally separate universes, they are not "totally" unrelated. The "incredibly small" likelihood of quantum uncertainty affecting macroscopic events may also be manifested in "incredibly small" differences in the states of some system, but the interesting thing to me about the way some of these things work out numerically is that the successor states may eventually diverge substantially. I don't find the fatalistic picture of the universe, according to which the future of everything was immutably determined in the beginning, to be persuasive because (a) it would be impossible to prove that there is no "slop" in the system, and (b) quantum considerations seem to me to indicate that there are cases when indeterminancy would take a hand in the way things went on from that point. Even if the universe has been de facto deterministic and pre-programmed up to this point, what happens if somebody (acting out of his/her predetermined constitutional proclivities in cooperation with the predetermined stimulii that operate on him/her) decides to do or not do something major in the world depending on a geiger counter dice cast? Which reminds me. An uncle of mine used to determine his route when taking a walk by tossing a coin at intersections. His idea was probably just to avoid being predictable and getting into a rut. But it taught me to look at random departures from my planned route (colloquially known as "getting lost") as an opportunity to discover something that might be very useful for me. User:Patrick0Moran 04:06, 10 May 2005 (UTC) So that something important does not get lost, let me quote from the beginning of this section: :The objection to determinism in quantum physics has nothing to do with "uncaused events" nor am I aware of it claiming there are such events. I think that this criticism of the wording of that passage in the article is valid. There is possible, however, that the original writer was trying to get at something that is valid. If you consider a double-slit experiment, nobody doubts that the fact that light hits the screen on the other side of the slits is because there is an arc lamp or a laser or some other light source on this side of the slits. But if we slow things down so that we can emit photons one at a time, then we discover that sometimes a photon will contribute to one "hot spot" on the screen, and sometimes a photon will contribute to a different "hot spot" on the screen. The question can then be asked: "Does something act to cause the photon to go one spot or the other?" User:Patrick0Moran 04:25, 10 May 2005 (UTC) ::Perhaps 'truly random events' instead of 'uncaused events'? To say that the individual electron's path is uncaused seems to assume that because we haven't found the cause yet there isn't one. There seems to be an epistemology (what can we know about causes) versus ontology (what causes are there, regardless of whether we can find them) problem. User:WhiteC 11:03, 10 May 2005 (UTC) I think there is an important philosophy (and philosophy of science) issue here. By "philosophical" I don't mean "inconsequential" or "pertaining to metaphysical sandcastles" either. Going at least as far back as Plato and Aristotle we have tried to understand the functioning of the universe in the only way we could at first -- by comparing it to the way humans perceive themselves to do things. Humans throw rocks and break pots, so if a meteorite hits a house we tend to think of there being a hurler out there. We look for a doer every time something appears to have been done -- even if later on in our history we come to understand that gravitational fields can draw a meteor down out of the sky and through somebody's roof. It is extremely difficult for us to put this hylemorphic idea aside, the image that there is an actor who behaves as would a carpenter to impose a plan or idea (morphe) on some wood (hyle). Take a look at: [http://www.mathematik.uni-muenchen.de/~bohmmech/BohmHome/bmstartE.htm] (select "picture gallery" and then "room one") and ask yourself how somebody would interpret the moving pictures of electron strikes hitting a screen. If I thought I was seeing a picture of bullet holes being made in a wall, I would assume that a rifleman was changing his/her aim and trying to hit a series of tall vertical targets spread out along that wall. If the lines were actually relatively close together I might think I was seeing the normal kind of pattern that a rifle locked in a shooting tripod will make. But that kind of patterns is circular, and if the rifle and ammunition is any good at all there will be more holes the closer you get to the center of the circle. But I would be puzzled by the bands (even if arrangements were made to produce a circular diffraction pattern). "Why is the gun only striking the center of the bullseye and the black bands, but avoiding the white bands? What is causing this phenomenon?" It would be very difficult for me to accept the idea that that is just the way that bullets go out of a gun. If somebody tried to tell me that then I would perhaps say that we should not, "assume that because we haven't found the cause yet there isn't one." But the "cause" will have to be some kind of "imp," something that is not a part of the very nature of the physical apparatus (the slits and the electrons) that we already know is there. The imp would work according to a plan, and the plan would turn out to be the rules of interference. Then the question becomes: Why can't the electrons "follow the plan" on their own? Why can't we accept the idea that that is just the way that electrons (and anything else that small, I guess) behave? By the way, I don't particularly like the formulation I have quoted, but we have to be able to say it much better. I don't know whether it can be done without going into a long discussion. One unassailable way would be to find a good Einstein quotation or something like that and then direct people to critiquees of the quoted point of view. User:Patrick0Moran 18:38, 10 May 2005 (UTC) :I don't like the imp part, you are assuming that the cause must be conscious/external because you can't explain it in any other way. Oh, Einstein didn't like quantum indeterminacy, BTW, and most modern quantum physicists disagree with him. User:WhiteC 01:13, 11 May 2005 (UTC) :Okay, look, this has got WAY out of hand. I never brought up 'uncaused events', chaos theory, minature demons, firing squads or any of the rest of it. My point is very, very simple. :1. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle prevents you from being able to have absolute information about the state of the universe at any given moment. :2. Without absolute information about the state of the universe at any given moment you cannot extrapolate to the future. :3. If you cannot extrapolate to the future, you cannot have determinism. :Ergo, determinism is broken under the present view of quantum mechanics. :From this point on I'm staying out of it. If the general consensus is that I have a case, then by all means add what I've said to the page. If not, then don't :User:Noodhoog 23:46, 10 May 2005 (UTC) ::I agree with points one and two, but not point three. Whether a particular person (or observer) CAN extrapolate the future is irrelevant. The question is whether the future is predetermined regardless of whether any observers can tell what this future is. User:WhiteC 01:13, 11 May 2005 (UTC) ::The whole question has been way out of hand since people started working out the consequences of the original "nonsensical" observation that black bodies absorb heat avidly at all frequencies of light but radiate heat at certain preferred frequencies. Like WhiteC I agree with points 1 and 2 and disagree with 3. :::Schrödinger observed that one can easily arrange his famous thought experiment resulting in what he called "quite ridiculous cases" with "the ψ-function of the entire system having in it the living and the dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts." http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/ ::Many physicists have shied away from the apparent implication of the theory that the "cat" in such a case is neither definitively alive or definitively dead until somebody opens the box to observe the state of the radiation detector. Schrodinger was, it appears, objecting to the "sensibleness" of the implication as much as anybody. ::What I've called the "imp" actually turns up in a much less anthropomorphic way in the discussion of these physicists, as something called "quantum potential", and as scale increases toward our macro scale the power of this imp becomes proportionally so small as to become imperceptible: ::: The quantum potential formulation of the de Broglie-Bohm theory is still fairly widely used. For example, the theory is presented in this way in the two existing monographs, by Bohm and Hiley and by Holland. And regardless of whether or not we regard the quantum potential as fundamental, it can in fact be quite useful. In order most simply to see that Newtonian mechanics should be expected to emerge from Bohmian mechanics in the classical limit, it is convenient to transform the theory into Bohm's Hamilton-Jacobi form. One then sees that the (size of the) quantum potential provides a measure of the deviation of Bohmian mechanics from its classical approximation. Moreover, the quantum potential can also be used to develop approximation schemes for solutions to Schrödinger's equation (Nerukh and Frederick 2000). http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/ (near the end of section 5) ::It seems quite clear to me that the double-slit experiments indicate a very "deterministic" result in the sense that the (sometimes singlely in motion) particles that go through the slits will neither arrive at a single point on the screen nor will they be randomly distributed. They will behave in a "lawlike" way. The question, it seems to me, is whether anybody has ever maintained that there is a reason why each one of a succession of particles may be "targeted" on a different maxima on the screen. If there actually is such a reason then the future is predetermined and the fate of the cat was determined at the dawn of creation. If there is no such reason then the fate of the cat depends on luck. ::I guess I would prefer to speak of "probabilistically determined events" rather than "uncaused events." User:Patrick0Moran 02:32, 11 May 2005 (UTC) It's not just that the laws of quantum mechanics do not give any "reason" for the specific, as opposed to probabilistic, behavior of an individual particle going through a double slit, quantum mechanics makes statistical predictions that would be violated if some underlying reason unknown to us existed. There have been a number of experiments to verify those predictions and so far they do not appear to be violated, though many physicists believe better experiments are needed to conclusively settle the question. See Bell test experiments. --User:ArnoldReinhold 12:59, 11 May 2005 (UTC) :Excellent. Thanks. User:Patrick0Moran 15:00, 11 May 2005 (UTC) ==Quantum vandalism== Using a random number based on radioactive decay obtained from http://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/, I have selected a word in this talk page and changed its spelling. The random number (in hexadecimal) was 3D70. I used the low order 10 bits to form a line number (as the page appeared in my text editor, bbedit, whch can number lines). The high order digit determined the word in the line to change. --User:ArnoldReinhold 13:45, 11 May 2005 (UTC) == Needed citations == === Quantum uncertainty & macroscopic events === WhiteC said: :Actually there has been determination of the statistical likelihood of quantum uncertainty affecting macroscopic events (without deliberate quantum devices to use it like Schrodinger's Cat)... it is incredibly small (though still greater than zero of course), although I can't remember just how small it is at the moment. I'll have to see if I can find a figure somewhere. If we could have this citation it would let us argue persuasively, I think, that the butter would fly. Then, to avoid getting hit by somebody who would object to our thinking and call that doing "original research", it would be nice to find a good citation from some reputable Cal Tech physicist. (-; O.K., I'd settle for MIT or even Stanford ;-) User:Patrick0Moran 03:01, 13 May 2005 (UTC) :The book I originally read it in is at the public library checked out by someone else. But I have it on reserve, and it should be about a week or so. User:WhiteC 01:50, 15 May 2005 (UTC) === Difference between unknowable causes and no causes === Patrick Grey Anderson (at the top of this page) said: : I understand that people point to the seemingly random nature of quantum mechanics as standing in opposition to determinism, but randomness is still restricted by causality. In order for quantum mechanics to be undetermined, a particles would have to move for no reason whatsoever, as opposed to a shift occurring for no reason that we can *measure*. Brian Greene, ''The Fabric of the Cosmos'', describes the experiment figured out by Bell that reliably puts to rest the objections of Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen that Patrick reflects in the quotation given immediately above. Greene describes the experiments and the reasoning behind them in a section that culminates on p. 114 of his recent book. "We are forced to conclude that the assumption made by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, no matter how reasonable it seems, cannot be how our quantum universe works." The experiment is quite elegant, and the error in prediction obtained by following the EPR beliefs is not a tiny fraction, it is 16%. User:Patrick0Moran 15:56, 13 May 2005 (UTC) === Assertion that there is a consistent viewpoint on astrophysics === I don't understand the following assertion: :Different astrophysicists hold different views about precisely how the universe originated (Cosmogony), but a consistent viewpoint is that scientific determinism has held at the macroscopic level since the universe came into being. Calling something a "consistent viewpoint" is terribly unclear. Consistent with what? Maybe the writer meant "self-consistent," "internally consistent"? And whose viewpoint is this supposed to be? That of one person? That of the majority of astrophysicists? If a citation were provided it would help tighten up this passage. User:Patrick0Moran 16:49, 14 May 2005 (UTC) :That was my writing, and I agree it is pretty weak (but it used to be even worse ;-) ). I have been trying to find a name for this viewpoint without any success. "Internally consistent" would be better, I suppose. I believe that many scientists (not astrophysicists particularly) hold this viewpoint, but I have no idea how one could possibly find this out, so that makes it pretty weak. :It seems to me to be an internally consistent form of determinism, if one accepts that quantum indeterminism holds at the scale of very small things. I apologize for phrasing it so poorly. I'd appreciate any suggestions for tightening it up. User:WhiteC 02:03, 15 May 2005 (UTC) I didn't mean to bark anybody's shins. How about: :Various astrophysicists may differ about precisely how the universe originated; they hold different theories of or opinions about Cosmogony. But, as a group, they are in general agreement with the idea that since the very beginning of the universe everything has occurred according to the kind of deterministic interrelation among events consistent with quantum physics. User:Patrick0Moran 04:09, 15 May 2005 (UTC) === Infinite series === One section describes something that sounds like the Kantian antimonies, but without mentioning Kant and without being clear enough that I can figure out exactly what is being asserted. I suspect that the actual argument is something like the following: Assume: All events have causes, and their causes are all prior events. The picture this gives us is that Event AN is preceded by AN-1, which is preceded by AN-2, and so forth. Under that assumption, two possibilities seem clear, and both of them question the validity of the original assumption: :(1) There is an event A0 prior to which there was no other event that could serve as its cause. :(2) There is no event A0 prior to which there was no other event, which means that we are presented with an infinite series of causally related events, which is itself an event, and yet there is no cause for this infinite series of events. User:Patrick0Moran 17:34, 14 May 2005 (UTC) === Illusion of free will due to ignorance === The current article has: :Dynamical-evolutionary psychology, cellular automata and the generative sciences, model emergent processes of social behaviour on this philosophy, showing the experience of free will as essentially a gift of ignorance or as a product of incomplete information. This treatment seems to reflect a very strong POV, but, lacking citations, I cannot tell whether this POV belongs to one of us or is instead a reflection of the views of unnamed cellular automata et al. ;-) (Something is wrong with the syntax of the original or cellular automata are getting more uppity than I had suspected.) Donald Davidson, for one, had a very cogent critique of this kind of an analysis, so I suppose the analysis itself must have adherents somewhere. But the writing of our own article on determinism should not speaking of these adherents as "showing" that determinism predicates the meaninglessness of ideas of freedom. User:Patrick0Moran 19:01, 14 May 2005 (UTC) === A good point from what used to be the top of the page === I'm trying to clean out issues remaining near the top of this discussion page and then archive the old stuff. I found one point that seems to me to deserve more discussion: :I just object to statements like, ''the entirety of space-time came into existence at some point'', unless you define this point embedded in a larger space-time outside of our own. The fallacy comes from implying that both the statements, ''space-time is everything'', and ''something exists outside of space-time'', are true. However, I work in computer software and don't ''do'' physics (although this is really about philosophy), so maybe I'm just using the the wrong kind of logic? User:Nodem I don't think you are using the wrong kind of logic at all. In fact, this problem has been a serious source of concern at least since the time of St. Augustine. He tried to work out a consistent view of the differences between the characteristics of a creator God and his creation, and one of the things that occured to him was that time may have been created along with space and all the things in the universe. St. Thomas put his tremendous intellect to the task of coming up with an internally consistent philosophy that would yet be in accord with the ''Bible'', and he believed that God is perfect and therefore is not limited. It is his creations that are limited. So God must be infinite -- He can't be bounded or limited space or time or in any other way. When he created the universe he created space and time, so it doesn't make any sense to ask when God decided to create the universe. To do so is to apply the limited concepts appropriate to humans, appropriate to the mundane universe of discourse, to the unlimited. So time has a beginning, and there is a reason for the existence of time, but the reason for time is not something that stands in a temporal sequence. Physicists came to similar conclusions for much different reasons. When Newton gave human beings his physics, he gave them an enormously successful tool for working on the world. It so precisely predicted the mechanical actions of things that everything seemed to go like clockwork -- better than clockwork, actually. So it was possible to imagine that the affairs of the universe went off like a game played with perfectly elastic and perfectly frictionless spheres on a perfectly flat but bounded table. If the balls were rolling around and bumping into each other then they could continue to do so for an infinite time and that made it possible to imagine that they had been bumping around for an infinite time already. On the grounds of that kind of a picture the only reason to imagine a beginning was a theological reason. If anybody thought about entropy in regard to the universe I guess they just assumed that the effects might catch up with the universe some time so far in the future that it wasn't worth worrying about, and if they did worry about it in context of an infinite prior timeline they perhaps comforted themselves with the idea that there must have been a divine act of creation after all. Then people discovered that the universe is expanding. To even be able to think about this meant a certain kind of mental preparation such as was provided informally by a little book called ''Flatland'' that talked about how a two-dimensional creature would experience life on a flat surface, on a spherical surface, and then on the surface of a sphere that was expanding -- but without causing his own size to expand. In the world of more formal mathematics the same general kind of ideas were developed in non-Euclidian geometries that dared to talk about a higher dimension into which the universe could expand -- so that universe could expand without the rate of expansion being greater "on the edges" than "in the center." (There's a good discussion of these ideas in George Gamow's book, ''One, Two, Three...Infinity''.) And somehow these ideas came together with the observations of astronomers that indicated that the universe is indeed expanding. Anyway, to cut all this blathering short, people started to wonder what the movie they were making of the expanding universe would look like if they would run it backwards through the projector. The answer seemed to be inevitable. The stars would grow closer and closer together until at some point they would disappear into a single point. And since Einstein had demonstrated that space and time form a continuum, that meant that if space would disappear at that point, then so would time. Another way to say that is that the operational definition of time involves the observation of the movements of things. When there are no longer things, when there is no longer space that things might move in, that means the we've reached the beginning terminus of time. So, in a rather spooky way, physics points to the "creation" of the universe at a single point in time. Even within our own universe, it is possible that different regions of the universe could be cut off from each other because, with everything moving away from everything in all directions, the speeds with which stars move away from each other are additive over distance. The more distant stars are from us, the more rapidly they are moved away from us by the expansion of the universe. At some point the sum of these speeds exceeds the speed of light and "news" of whatever happens beyond that point will never reach us. It doesn't mean that these distant parts of the universe cease to exist, it must means that they cease to have any possibility of interacting with us. So even though they are "genetically" related to us, they might as well be in entirely separate universes as far as any practical considerations go. If we trace backward to the Big Bang (assuming we're not making some big mistake somewhere) we lose even the theoretical possibility of catching a glimpse of a time before t=0 in our universe. At the same time we accept the idea on the basis of a lot of experience that nothing is uncaused. Put it in slightly different words: There is always a reason why something happens. It could always be otherwise. The millionth swan that I investigate may turn out to be ultraviolet in color instead of white. But right now we are on a pretty good roll as far as uncaused events go. So we think about whether there could be other universes and other time lines that, like ours, start out at a t=0 and move along in a "line" that has nothing to do with ours, no connection to ours. And we can also wonder what conditions might exist in some universe outside of our own that might initiate the big bang that started our universe. There's a joke that is getting pretty old by now, but I still smile whenever somebody tells about the country bumpkin in New England who is hailed by a passing car from some sophisticated part of the country. Being lost they ask him how to get to Five Corners or whatever it was, and he replies, "You can't get there from here." Hopefully that is untrue in New England, but maybe it is true in regard to vastly separated regions of our own universe. At least I remember that Prof. Greenstein of Cal Tech was reported to be talking about ideas like that in the early 60s, and I doubt that he was their sole author. Perhaps it is also possible that there are other universes that were created in line with the same kind of reasons that lie behind our universe. There are even people who are now talking about how (theoretically, I suppose) one might recreate the conditions that prevailed just before the Big Bang and therefore produce a new universe that would go off on its own space-time continuum. Being totally cut off from our universe any sentient beings that came into existence in that universe would be forever ignorant of our having touched off their Big Bang. The original statement was: :''the entirety of space-time came into existence at some point'' That statement does indeed play tricks with our minds because it unwittingly throws us into the wrong way of visualizing things. We should be led to visualize something like an ant crawling down a ribbon that is gradually unfurling from a balloon at a rate slower than the balloon is rising into the sky. At some point if the ant keeps walking he is going to come to the end of the ribbon. It's not that he simply comes to a point where a sign says "Go no further!" and the color of the ribbon changes or something like that. There simply is no more ribbon. How about something like: :"If we could retrace our steps back through time, we would come to a terminus. We would have run out of space and time at the point at which space ceases to have a volume and any "clock" that existed would have no leeway for its pendulum to move.
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Determinism/archive1
Determinism
:''This article is about the general notion of determinism in philosophy. For other uses of the word "deterministic" see: Deterministic (disambiguation).'' Determinism is the philosophy concept which claims that every physical event, including human cognition and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. No mysterious miracles or totally random events occur. ==Philosophy of determinism== The principal consequence of deterministic philosophy is that free will (except as defined in strict compatibilism) becomes an illusion. It is a popular misconception that determinism necessarily entails that all future events have already been determined (a position known as Fatalism); this is not obviously the case, and the subject is still debated among metaphysicians. Determinism is associated with, and relies upon, the ideas of Materialism and Causality. Some of the philosophers who have dealt with this issue are Omar Khayyam, David Hume, Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, and, more recently, John Searle. ::: With Earth's first Clay They did the Last Man's knead, ::: And then of the Last Harvest sow'd the Seed: ::: Yea, the first Morning of Creation wrote ::: What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read. :::::''(Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, LIII, rendered into English language verse by Edward Fitzgerald)'' ==Nature of determinism== The exact meaning of the term "determinism" has historically been subject to various interpretations. Some view determinism and free will as mutually exclusive, whereas others, labelled Compatibilism, believe that the two ideas can be coherently reconciled. Most of this disagreement is due to the fact that the definition of "free will," like determinism, varies. Some feel it refers to the metaphysical truth of independent agency, whereas others simply define it as the feeling of agency that humans experience when they act. For example, David Hume argued that while it is possible that one does not freely arrive at one's set of desires and beliefs, the only meaningful interpretation of freedom relates to one's ability to translate those desires and beliefs into voluntary action. ===Determinism in the western tradition=== The idea that the entire universe is a deterministic system (philosophy) has been articulated in both Western and non-Western religion, philosophy, and literature. The Ancient Greek atomists Leucippus and Democritus were the first to anticipate determinism when they theorized that all processes in the world were due to the mechanical interplay of atoms, but this theory did not gain much support at the time. Determinism in the West is often associated with Newtonian physics, which depicts the physical matter of the universe as operating according to a set of fixed, knowable laws. The "billiard ball" hypothesis, a product of Newtonian physics, argues that once the initial conditions of the universe have been established the rest of the history of the universe follows inevitably. If it were actually possible to have complete knowledge of physical matter and the laws governing that matter at any one them, then it would be theoretically possible to compute the time and place of every event that will ever occur. In this sense, the basic particles of the universe operate in the same fashion as the rolling balls on a billiard table, moving and striking each other in predictable ways to produce predictable results. Whether or not it is all-encompassing in so doing, Newtonian mechanics deals only with caused events, e.g.: If the original position of an object is x, y, z, and if it is hit dead on by an object moving along some vector V, then it will be pushed straight toward another point x', y', z'. If it goes somewhere else, the Newtonians argue, one must question one's measurements of the original position of the object, the exact direction of the object moving on V, gravitational or other fields that were inadvertently ignored, etc. Then, they maintain, repeated experiments and improvements in accuracy will always bring one's observations closer to the theoretically predicted results. When dealing with situations on an ordinary human scale, Newtonian physics has been so enormously successful that it has no competition. But it fails spectacularly as velocities become some substantial fraction of the speed of light and when interactions at the atomic scale are studied. Prior to the discovery of quantum effects and other challenges to Newtonian physics, "uncertainty" was always a term that applied to the accuracy of human knowledge about causes and effects, and not to the causes and effects themselves. ===Determinism in the eastern tradition=== In the East, determinism has been expressed in the Buddhism doctrine of pratitya-samutpada, which states that every phenomenon is conditioned by, and depends on, the phenomena that it is not. A common teaching story, called the Net of Indra, illustrates this point. A vast auditorium is decorated with mirrors and/or prisms hanging on strings of different lengths from an immense number of points on the ceiling. One flash of light is sufficient to light the entire display since light bounces and bends from hanging bauble to hanging bauble. Each bauble lights each and every other bauble. So, too, each of us is "lit" by each and every other entity in the Universe. In Buddhism, this teaching is used to demonstrate that to ascribe special value to any one thing is to ignore the interdependence of all things. Volitions of all sentient creatures determine the seeming reality in which we perceive ourself as living, rather than a mechanical universe determining the volitions which humans imagine themselves to be forming. In the story of the Net of Indra, the light that streams back and forth throughout the display is the analog of ''karma''. The word "karma" does not mean anything like "the result of a past good or bad action." "Karma" refers to an action, or, more specifically, to an intentional action, and the Buddhist theory holds that every karma (every intentional action) will bear karmic fruit (produce an effect somewhere down the line). Karma is the only thing that is fundamentally real. Volitional acts drive the universe. The consequences of this view often confound our ordinary expectations -- much in the way quantum physics has results that are strongly counterintuitive. Fritjiof Capra has written extensive on the parallels and differences among western physics and other systems of thought in his book ''The Tao of Physics.'' A shifting flow of probabilities for futures lies at the heart of theories associated with the ''Yi Jing'' (or ''I Ching'', the ''Book of Changes''). Probabilities take the center of the stage away from things and people. A kind of "divine" volition sets the fundamental rules for the working out of probabilities in the universe, and human volitions are always a factor in the ways that humans can deal with the real world situations one encounters. If one's situation in life is surfing on a tsunami, one still has some range of choices even in that situation. One person might give up, and another person might choose to struggle and perhaps to survive. The Yi Jing mentality is much closer to the mentality of quantum physics than to that of classical physics, and also finds parallelism in voluntarist or Existentialist ideas of taking one's life as one's project. The followers of the philosopher Mo Zi (or "Mo Tzu" if you prefer the earlier Wade-Giles Romanization) made some early discoveries in optics and other areas of physics, ideas that were consonant with deterministic ideas, but the vine that produced this early fruit quickly withered and died. ==Arguments against Determinism== ===Argument from Morality=== Some critics of determinism argue that if people are assumed incapable of independent choice (free will) there can then be no rational basis for morality, and therefore some aspects of criminal and civil jurisprudence and legislation appear irrational and unjust. How, they ask, can one be punished for an involuntary action? In order to maintain the integrity of social institutions that rely in part upon holding people responsible for their actions, it becomes necessary in their eyes to deny determinism, at least as far as it applies to what we ordinarily call voluntary actions. Determinists have responded to this critique by distinguishing between normative and positivism claims, arguing that statements of fact can and should be made independently of their consequences. Thus, even if determinism is inconsistent with the idea of a moral universe, that does not necessarily invalidate its conclusions. The presumed social utility of ideas of crime and justice should not be permitted, they argue, to override questions of truth. Contemporary U.S. philosopher Donald Davidson (philosopher), among others, has argued that if people behaved in an uncaused way then one would describe their actions as insane, not as free. His view is consonant with the philosophical position advocated by Mencius that maintains that one's innate characteristics are the result of deterministic causation, that among these innate characteristics there exists a set of drives (analogous to other drives such as the sex drive) that are axiological or moral in nature, and that factors external to these moral drives can act to inhibit their operation. Inhibiting their action is tantamount to a loss of freedom, which is something one instinctively seeks to avoid. In Western terms, Mencius would say that human beings are born with a conscience, that they are acting in accord with their own natures and inclinations when they guide their actions by their consciences (along with their other drives such as hunger), and that we all experience a loss of freedom when we realize that we are being controlled either directly or indirectly by outside forces -- whether those forces are the lingering effects of conditioning or the imminent threat of death posed by a pistol held to one's head. In short, self-determination is freedom and other-determination is loss of freedom. Morality depends on the exercise of what one's nature has determined one to be and on being ''de facto'' responsible for all the consequences of what one decides to do. If one is free of external control one is an entelechy; to the extent that one becomes determined by external factors,one loses one's individual identity and becomes merely the extension of another entity. ===Determinism and Quantum Mechanics=== Since the beginning of the 20th Century, quantum mechanics has revealed previously concealed aspects of events. Newtonian physics depicts a universe in which objects move in perfectly determinative ways. At human scale levels of interaction, Newtonian mechanics gives predictions that in all respects check out as completely perfectible, if not perfect in practice. The dependability of predictions turns out to be reliably improved by refinement in our knowledge of initial conditions. Poorly designed and fabricated guns and ammunition scatter their shots rather widely around the center of a target, and better guns produce tighter patterns. Absolute knowledge of the forces accelerating a bullet should produce absolutely reliable predictions of its path, or so we thought. Contrary to what Newtonian mechanics would predict, at atomic scales the paths of objects can only be predicted in a probabilistic way. In double-slit experiments, electrons fired singly through a double-slit apparatus at a distant screen do not arrive at a single point, nor do they arrive in a scattered pattern analogous to bullets fired by a fixed gun at a distant target. Instead, they arrive in varying concentrations at widely separated points, and the distribution of their hits can be calculated reliably. In that sense the behavior of the electrons in this apparatus is deterministic, but there is no way to predict where in the resulting interference pattern an individual electron will make its contribution. On the macro scale it can matter very much whether a bullet arrives at a certain point at a certain time, as snipers and their victims are well aware; the question is whether there are analogous quantum events that have macro- as well as quantum-level consequences. It is easy to contrive situations in which the arrival of an electron at a screen at a certain point and time would trigger one event and its arrival at another point would trigger an entirely different event. Whether such events are significant in nature is open to question and empirical investigation. If probabilistically determined events do have an impact on the macro events such as whether a person who could be historically important dies in youth of a cancer caused by a random mutation, then the course of history is not determined from the dawn of time. But some authorities argue against the reality of such probabilistically determined events and/or argue that events on the atomic scale cannot influence the course of events on the macro scale. Some people have argued that in addition to the conditions humans can observe and the rules they can deduce there are hidden factors that determine absolutely in which order electrons reach the screen. They argue that the course of the universe is absolutely determined, but that humans are screened from knowledge of the determinative factors. So, they say, it only appears that things proceed in a merely probabilistically determinative way. Actually, they proceed in an absolutely determinative way. Although matters are still subject to some measure of dispute, quantum mechanics makes statistical predictions that would be violated if some underlying reason unknown to us existed. There have been a number of experiments to verify those predictions, and so far they do not appear to be violated although many physicists believe better experiments are needed to conclusively settle the question. See Bell_test experiments. ===First Cause=== Intrinsic to the debate concerning determinism is the issue of first cause. Deism, a philosophy articulated in the seventeenth century, holds that the universe has been deterministic since creation, but ascribes the creation to a metaphysical God or first cause outside of the chain of determinism. God may have begun the process, Deism argues, but God has not influenced its evolution. This perspective illustrates a puzzle underlying any conception of determinism: Assume: All events have causes, and their causes are all prior events. The picture this gives us is that Event AN is preceded by AN-1, which is preceded by AN-2, and so forth. Under that assumption, two possibilities seem clear, and both of them question the validity of the original assumption: :(1) There is an event A0 prior to which there was no other event that could serve as its cause. :(2) There is no event A0 prior to which there was no other event, which means that we are presented with an infinite series of causally related events, which is itself an event, and yet there is no cause for this infinite series of events. Under this analysis the original assumption must have something wrong with it. It can be fixed by admitting one exception, a creation event (either the creation of the original event or events, or the creation of the infinite series of events) that is itself not a caused event in the sense of the word "caused" used in the formulation of the original assumption. Some agency, which many systems of thought call God, creates space, time, and the entities found in the universe by means of some process that is analogous to causation but is not causation as we know it. This solution to the original difficulty has led people to question whether there is any reason for there only being one divine quasi-causal act, whether there have not been a number of events that have occurred outside the ordinary sequence of events, events that may be called miracles. The extreme philosophical position in this line of development was held by Leibniz, who held in his monism philosophy that all seemingly causal interactions between two (or more) entities, A <-> B, are actually interactions mediated by God, A<->God<->B. Immanuel Kant carried forth this idea of Leibniz in his idea of transcendental relations, and as a result had a profound effect on later philosophical attempts to sort these issues out. His most influential immediate successor, a strong critic whose ideas were yet strongly influenced by Kant, was Edmund Husserl, the developer of the school of philosophy called phenomenology. But the central concern of that school was to elucidate not physics but the grounding of information that physicists and others regard as empiricism. In an indirect way, this train of investigation appears to have contributed much to the philosophy of science called logical positivism and particularly to the thought of members of the Vienna Circle, all of which have had much to say, at least indirectly, about ideas of determinism. ==Modern perspectives on determinism== ===Scientific determinism and first cause=== Since the early twentieth century when astronomer Edwin Hubble first hypothesized that red shift shows the universe is expanding, prevailing scientific opinion has been that the universe started with a Big Bang, and therefore has a finite age. Different astrophysicists hold different views about precisely how the universe originated (Cosmogony), but a consistent viewpoint is that scientific determinism has held at the macroscopic level since the universe came into being. ===Determinism and generative processes=== In emergentist or emergence of cognitive sciences and evolutionary psychology, free will is the generation of infinite behaviour from the interaction of finite-deterministic set of rules and parameters. Thus the unpredictability of the emerging behaviour from deterministic processes leads to a perception of free will, though free will as an ontological entity does not exist. As an illustration, the strategy board-games chess and Go (board game) have rigorous rules in which no information (such as cards' face-values) is hidden from either player and no random events (such as dice-rolling) happen within the game. Yet, chess and especially Go with its extremely simple deterministic rules, can still have an extremely large number of unpredictable moves. By analogy, emergentists or generativists suggest that the experience of free will emerges from the interaction of finite rules and deterministic parameters that generate infinite and unpredictable behaviour. Dynamical-evolutionary psychology, cellular automata and the generative sciences, model emergent processes of social behaviour on this philosophy, showing the experience of free will as essentially a gift of ignorance or as a product of incomplete information. ==See also== * Causality * Chaos theory * Open Theism * Free will * Scientific determinism * Deterministic system (philosophy) * Block time * Compatibilism * Voluntarism * Game theory ==External links== * [http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/dhi.cgi?id=dv2-02 ''Dictionary of the history of Ideas'':] Determinism in History * [http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwIntroIndex.htm Philosopher Ted Honderich's Determinism web resource] * [http://www.galilean-library.org/int13.html An Introduction to Free Will and Determinism] by Paul Newall, aimed at beginners. * [http://www.determinism.com/essay.shtml Determinism] An Essay by Peter Gill * [http://www.determinism.com/05042002.shtml Where's The Free Will?] An Exploration of This Elusive Concept by Gordon M. Orloff * [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Causal Determinism] Philosophy of science Metaphysics Random numbers
Determinism
Archives: Talk:Determinism/archive1 == Ancient Determinism? == This article relates determinism to modern science, and to free will. Although it may have not been called determinism, the idea of it seems to have existed for a long time. The Stoics and many Christians argued that free will is impossible. This is mainly because God should know everything that will happen in the future. In Bondage of the Will, Martin Luthor argues that free will is impossible because of a view similar to determinism. I would also like to note that with or without determinism, we might not have free will. Determinism isn't really the most powerful argument against free will. Our ideas of cause and effect (even if random) still will pose a problem. --User:Dragonlord 08:54, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC) :That kind of determinism is usually refered to as fatalism, if I'm not mistaken. Completely agree with you on determinism/indeterminism, either way there's no explaining "free will". Randomness is every bit as opposed to free will as order is. User:Mackanma 22:55, 7 May 2005 (UTC) :I think there were some ancient Greek philosophies which were determinist. I'll look them up and put something in. I don't think they were very popular before Newtonian physics though. I think compatibilism -v- incompatibilism is the philosophical argument about whether free will and determinism can coexist. User:WhiteC 00:55, 8 May 2005 (UTC) There is a related argument, for those who believe in the existence of a soul that is something other than a function of the body. The soul can control the body, but the body cannot control the soul. That's why the soul goes to hell if it wills bad things. It actually helps to think of these things in terms of a robot and a waldo. (A "waldo" is a servomechanism that is controlled by a human being at the other end of a cable or some other communication channel.) Would it make sense to exact vengeance upon a waldo if the human at the control panel moved his/her remote hand and smashed in the head of a visiting dignitary? Obviously now. The VIP's body guards might disable or destroy the waldo, but if they were being rational it would only be to facilitate their getting at the murderous human. If it doesn't make sense to exact vengeance on a waldo, how about on a robot that is deterministically programmed to fire its weapons on anybody approaching with a drawn gun? A rational response would be to fire the programmer (and/or accuse him/her of murder or manslaughter), and replace the robot's read-only memory that contains the defective programming. Even if the robot were somehow capable of feeling, it wouldn't make sense to torment it. If the person who programmed the robot was also the person who tortured the robot as a form of "justice," that person would be really sick. How about a robot that has been given heuristic (artificial intelligence) capabilities and has been programmed with one instruction that states: :Check whether the gold is being stolen. If the gold is being stolen, try something (the last thing that worked or something new), remember what you've tried, and go back to the beginnning of this loop. The robot tries all sorts of things and finally ends up hitting robbers with a crowbar. Some robbers die. The police intervene. The robot protests that he was only doing what his wired-in fundamental command programmed him to do. It would make sense to me to hold the robot's programer/designer responsible. But suppose that the robot has "human" feelings. The robot can feel pain if we smash its limbs or even if we confine it and thereby frustrate its programmed need to protect the gold. Would it make sense, would it be just, to punish the robot? The problem with the robot, at this point, is not that it is being controlled from the outside by somebody tapping in code at a keyboard. The problem may not even be that there is a problem with the original programming contained in a few MEGs of ROM in the robot. In fact, if a different sequence of robbers and/or a different sequence of random attempts to secure protection of the gold has occurred, then the robot might have come up with a better way of protecting the gold than by braining robbers with a 10 pound steel rod. If it's dealt with lot of devious humans trying all sorts of ploys to get at the gold it may be extremely resistant to attempts to get it to give up the successful use of brute force -- because it has learned that when it gets scammed by a human more gold gets lost. The problem with the robot, from our point of view, is that it is operating under its own set of rules, rules that we do not like. We have several courses open to us: (1) Destroy the robot. (2) Tear the robot down,extract its ROM and reprogram it. Under either of those options the old robot is essentially gone. (3) Punish the robot. Make it feel pain and make us feel like gods. (4) Throw up our hands and let it continue to do its work. Put up "Beware of the Robot!" signs. What are our other options? Regardless of how it became what it is here and now, the robot interprets things as it has learned to interpret them and feels whatever it feels. In many respects it is not capable of doing anything about what it is and what it feels. To what extent is it capable of dealing with its imminent demise? In other words, to what degree is its future behavior not boxed in by the things that others have done to it? Well, it is "heuristic," and it is programmed to try other things when what it is doing does not work. It should be clear to the robot that arrival of law officers with tanks was not anticipated, and that getting blown up, disassembled, or imprisoned will interfere with it achieving its programmed goals. We can say to the robot, "You're in a bad fix here, feeling pain because you can't protect the gold because you've gotten yourself in trouble with the police. I can fix all that by pulling the plug. Just let me open your control panel and you'll never feel a thing." Or we could offer virtually the same deal to the robot but promise to wipe its memory, edit its basic code, and reactivate it. But suppose the robot says, "I'm just as sentient as you are. I have the same feelings you do. I don't like being in trouble and suffering pain, but I do like being alive and being myself. I suppose you think it is all right to wipe me out, and if you really think about it you'd probably be equally willing to wipe out another human being. Are you willing to make that a general rule and say that any other human being has the right to wipe you out? And maybe robots (and here he cups a plastisteel hand gently over your shoulder) have the right to wipe humans out." By one interpretation, "free will" is like the will of the human being at the other end of the tether from a waldo. Nothing that happens to the waldo can go back up the wires and take control of the hands and feet of the human being. Control goes all one way. But the problem of free will just gets moved up a notch. Is the human being the waldo of something else? If not, does the human being have the control over himself/herself that he/she had over the waldo? By another interpretation, "free will" is never an absolute and one-way kind of control. I either am what I am and act out the essence of my being as best I can in this world, or I get destroyed. If I stay in operation, then the question of "free or determined" has three kinds of answers. (1) I am determined as to what I am because I was constituted in the general way that all things in the world get constituted. Causation was never miraculous and never "totally random." (2) In my actions I am partly determined by internal factors (I lover butterscotch pudding) and partly determined by external factors (the ingredients for butterschotch pudding can't be had for love or money). But (3) is more interesting. What I do in live can change what I am. Nowadays even if I suffer some disease because of my genetic constitution it may be possible to correct that problem. If I was born blind then soon it may be possible to fit me up with a set of artificial eyes. By so doing I increase my range of freedom, and, similarly, if I get careless and let my arm get cut off I decrease my range of freedom. User:Patrick0Moran 19:43, 15 May 2005 (UTC) == Determinism & Quantum Mechanics == I'm no quantum physicist, but it seems to me like the author of this section has made a critical misunderstanding. The objection to determinism in quantum physics has nothing to do with "uncaused events" nor am I aware of it claiming there are such events (like I said though, I'm no quantum physicist). As I understand it, the major objection to determinism arises from the fact that for determinism to work, you have to be able to obtain absolute information about the state of the universe at any given moment. You have be able to know every property of every particle. Quantum physics doesn't allow for this - at best you can know the probability that something will have a particular property, but you cannot be absolutely certain, and it is this uncertainty which prevents determinism working. User:Noodhoog 18:15, 8 May 2005 (UTC) (signed after initial posting) :Please sign your postings. Otherwise you will end up at some point arguing with yourself. ;-) :Somewhere among my pile of partially consumed books I have a concise statement/argument by a presumably reputable physicist that maintains that a careful study of physics indicates that there could not be a certainty of causation at one level that is permanently masked from observers by difficulties in the observational process. If I recall correctly there were entropy problems involved. Even if I have misremembered the argument and its tightness, there is for sure one position out there that says that uncertainty is in the very nature of things, and that probability is inherent in the very fundamental nature of the universe. :There is another position that says that there really is a certainty of causation, and yet because we do the equivalent of locating crystal wine goblets by swinging a baseball bat we simply cannot know the state of things at any one time well enough to predict with absolute certainty the state of things at any other time. :The degree to which seemingly "infinitesimal" differences at time one can produce huge differences at some later time has been greatly illuminated by the discovery of the so-called "chaos" theory. It's a pity that they chose that name for the discovery because it creates the false impression that from a determined state at one point you get a chaotic state at another point. Talking about laminar flow turning suddenly into turbulent and "chaotic" flow at some point only heightens that perception. :The actual case is that if you start with a certain class of equations that are typically used to model things like weather change, and that are used by choosing some starting values, deriving a set of answers, and then feeding those answers back into the same equation, and so on, it turns out that changing a value by a very slight amount at one stage will result in great differences after several more stages in calculation. The famous example is how the flapping of a butterfly's wings or the non-flapping of the same butterfly's wings will produce or fail to produce a storm (all other initial conditions being equal) sometime down the line. :If you believe that when an electron "hits" a reflective surface there is only one way for it to go (even though we cannot measure its incoming path and velocity without changing what we are measuring), then that electron would only be able to go one place and either trigger or fail to trigger some Rube Goldbergian device that would blow the planet up. But if the electron's motion is in its essence probabilistic then there is no way that the god who fires the electron with exact control of force and direction can tell for sure whether the world ends. :One system of belief gives us a universe that is causal but ultimately unpredictable, and the other system of belief gives us a universe that is causal and ideally (but not practically) predictable. What would an uncausal universe be like? I guess it would be one in which a firing squad of 100 soldiers with functioning rifles and live ammunition could draw a bead and fire on one man and the man would have some chance of surviving unscratched. In other words it would be a universe in which it would not be possible to realistically assign probabilities to the occurrence or non-occurrence of events. :An interesting midway point would be a universe in which luck played a part much like what many people used to believe it played, e.g., a world in which whether one gets shot dead by the sheriff is really a 50-50 deal regardless of who the sheriff is, how good a weapon he procures, etc., a world in which baseballs behave like single electrons in a quantum physics experiment. That's a useful thought experiment, I think, because it immediately makes us aware that the real macroscopic world is not much like that, and reminds us that in the real world we can improve rifle designs and improve ammunition designs to the point that over even fairly long differences there is no question but that a bullet will strike a bottle close enough to dead center to destroy it. And that leads us further to wonder whether we can push all the way to the other extreme, the limit case where the bullet will arrive unerringly no matter how small it and its target become and how great may be the distance between them. Quantum physics seems to me to indicate that perfection is impossible. User:Patrick0Moran 07:08, 8 May 2005 (UTC) ::Thanks for the reminder. I've a tendency to forget to put in my signature :) ::Before I mention anything else, I should say that pretty much all the quantum physics I'll be talking about here is based on the Copenhagen Interpretation, which is the most widely (but not universally) accepted view of QP at present. Obviously, if you base your views on a different model, much of what I have to say here will be incorrect or irrelevant from your POV. ::Without getting drawn into too deep a discussion about this, it seems to me that your planet busting electron device is largely similar in nature to the Schrodinger's Cat experiment, utilising the predictability or unpredictability (as the case may be) of a quantum level event to produce (or not) a large scale event in the "real world", and there have been many articles written on the nature of such experiments ::Your point about the firing squad is particularly interesting as well, because as I understand it, in our universe it IS theoretically possible for a firing squad of 100 to fire at a man, and for all 100 bullets to miss him, or pass straight through him leaving him unscathed. It's just so mindbogglingly unlikely to ever actually happen that you'd need trillions of firing squads shooting trillions of men every second for trillions of times longer than the age of the universe for it to have a decent statistical chance of actually occurring. Lest claims of such an amazingly small chance of ever seeing this event ever appear as a copout, however, let me direct you to the phenomenon of quantum tunnelling which is this very effect in practice, and without which, such devices as electron tunnelling microscopes would not function. As I understand it, quantum tunnelling does not imply in any way a violation of the cause-effect model, as tunnelling simply occurs at a "probability miss" - i.e. when an electron has, say, an 80% chance of going a particular direction, but goes a different direction instead (which would land in the other 20%) ::This is no less caused than if it had gone in the expected direction, it's simply not the one considered most likely. After all, even if something has a 99.99999999% chance of happening, there's still that tiny chance that it won't. ::I think you are perhaps overestimating the randomness introduced by these features rather too much. It's highly unlikely there will ever be a rifle designed to a degree where quantum uncertainty, rather than, say, wind turbulence, machining precision, user skill, or the flight dynamics of the bullet would be the major factor in the accuracy. Furthermore, if it was accurate to the point where quantum uncertainty was the major deciding factor, those factors would be so tiny as to render the gun pinpoint accurate by anybody's standards. Simply put, quantum uncertainty doesn't tend to have any noticable impact on the universe at our scale of things, even taking into account chaos theory and it's butterly effect. What it does mean, as I stated before, is that you can never obtain absolute information about the state of the universe at any given moment due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, regardless of how sophisticated and precise your measuring instruments are. Because the ability to theoretically (if not practically) obtain such information is a requirement for determinism (as you need it to extrapolate the future) this breaks the deterministic model. User:Noodhoog 18:15, 8 May 2005 (UTC) "If it's 'uncausal' then you'd find cases like xxxxx," is not the same statement as "If you find cases like xxxxx then it's uncausal." As you point out, if 100 men in a firing squad loaded real ammunition from different lots of ammunition by different manufacturers, etc., into fully tested real weapons, and they were all crack marksmen and they all shot at a guy who was secured to a stake and he didn't get hit by a single bullet, then that might be the result of chance. And, as you point out, the probability of it happening (even if they were all such lousy shots that there was only a 50-50 chance in each case that they'd hit their target) would be really low. But since we live in a "causal" universe, if that ever happened the first thing the authorities would likely do would be to hold an inquiry regarding the "conspiracy" to make the execution fail. That is to say, humans ordinarily would not accept uncritically the idea that a sparrow took out the first bullet, the primer was bad in bullet in the second gun, etc., etc. They would apply Occam's razor and figure that the most likely explanation was that deliberate human intervention was involved. Suppose that there were seven prisoners adhered securely to seven posts along the far end of a football field, and one marksman with a top of the line sniper rifle was at this end of the field. It is his regular job to kill one out of seven prisoners and scare the bleep out of the other six. They are all led in blindfolded so they don't know which stake they are being led to. The marksman has a shooting tripod and he has locked his rifle in position perpendicular to the 0 yard line. So he really doesn't have to aim it anymore. In our universe seven men are brought out, the priest reads a prayer, the marksman pulls the trigger. Except for the rare case in which the gun misfires for some reason (bad ammo or whatever), the guy taped to the center post regularly has his head blown off and the others go back to their cells. In another universe, somebody almost always dies, but it is not always the guy on the center stake. What is predictable is not which man gets it in any given execution, but what number of bullet holes end up in each stake after a thousand executions. In neither universe would any of these executions be regarded as being uncaused. What if the heads of individual humans appeared to spontaneously blow up? Would we regard those "executions" as uncaused events? Would we insist that there must be a cause for these events even if we couldn't see what it might be? (There was actually a case like this back in the beginning of jet fighter use. U.S. jet fighters were being shot out of the sky when it appeared that no enemy aircraft, and even no other aircraft of an stripe, were in the vicinity. The cockpits of the recovered aircraft had all been shattered by what appeared to be machinegun fire. It being rather close in time to 1947, flying saucers were suspected for a time. But not everybody believed that the fighter planes and pilots were spontaneously sprouting 50 calibre holes. Finally somebody realized that pilots must be shooting off a round of machinegun fire as part of their exercises and then going into a power dive along the course of their original flight -- and being intercepted by the bullets that they had caught up to. Pilots were advised of the possibility of shooting themselves down, and the mysterious shootings stopped.) If people's heads did start exploding, we would want to know things like whether there was a regular per-month quota, whether there were geographical predictors,etc., etc. It's actually really hard to understand what could be truly regarded as an uncaused event. But to be caused does not necessarily imply that it is to be predictable. Part of the problem with thinking about these questions is that we unconsciously have a kind of atomistic idea of events. The birth of a baby is "an event". But actually the birth of the baby is part of a continuum of growth that can be traced back through months in the womb and forward through however long the individual continues to live. What we call the cause of an event is merely an earlier portion of an event continuum. A causless event would be an event that began out of nothing in an instant of time and continued on from there. Maybe it happens occasionally that a space-Rok appeares out of the nothingness of interstellar space and goes flying off to gobble space dust or absorb cosmic radiation or whatever space-Roks usually do, but I don't think many people have ever witnesed such an event -- at least at macroscopic levels. If such an event did happen, how would one judge whether it was really uncaused? Surely some people would say that God had indulged himself by making a miracle, and other people would say that the space-Rok boiled up out of some kind of quantum foam. Just because we don't know the reason for some event does not prove that the event in uncaused. On the other hand, discovering that a million or a billion supposedly uncaused events all had causes would not prove that there are no uncaused events. To bring things back to quantum mechanics, suppose that we have a double-slit experiment going, and we are firing electrons toward the double slits. Experiments show that even if single electrons are fired, these single electrons will "interfere with themselves" in such a way that they will arrive at an array of different but predictable places. Now if we consider "an event" to be arriving at one position or the other, then we could ask whether there is anything happens that determines which point the actual electron arrives at in each instance. It is demonstrable that there is a probabalistic differentiation of impact points. We can put a detector of some sort on the other side of the slits and we'll detect a characteristic interference pattern that gets clearer and clearer as we fire more and more single electrons through. But is there anything else that can be determined as to why in any particular instance the electron arrives here or there? And, to go back to uncaused events for a moment, if we turn off the electron generator and take it away, does the detector light up occasionally because of the spontaneous generation of electrons? It seems to me that if we imagine that, in addition to some kind of probabilistic distribution function inherent in the nature of electrons that gets manifested in the double slit apparatus, there is also some kind of "demon" with an atomic scale fly swatter or baseball bat who hits the electrons to make them go toward the appropriate target point, then we involve ourself in infinite regress since we need to explain the demon, how the demon operates on the electrons, where the demon gets its probability chart, how it knows how to interpret the probability chart, etc., etc. When we restrict ourselves to what we can determine empirically, electrons hits the slits and fan out in a probabalistic or wave interference-like pattern, and that's it. If we would be correct to assume that all of our actions are pre-programmed for us as a result of our having been constituted by macroscopic forces that have no probabilistic component, and as a result of outside forces impinging upon us that are likewise devoid of any probabilistic componets, would it not be possible for us to decouple ourselves from the past by making random choices on the basis of physically random events like the decay of radioactive elements? If the geiger counter beeps within the next half second I will move to Europe; otherwise I will stay here. User:Patrick0Moran 07:56, 9 May 2005 (UTC) :There is even a website that will supply you with random numbers based on radioactive decay: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/ But the notion that quantum uncertainty normally plays no role in macroscopic events is unfounded. The sensitive dependence on intitial conditions that allows a butterfly wing flap to affect (and even effect) future storms can be extended to the energy from the radioactive decay of an individual atom. Or, if you prefer, such a decay could cause a spike in a butterfly's nerve causing its wing to flap. A perhaps more vivid example of the direct influence of QM randomness on human affairs is cancer. Some fraction of cancers are caused by exposure to ionizing radiation. While it is generally believed that more than one mutation is required to make a cell malignant, it certainly happens from time to time that the final mutation is caused by a single radioactive decay product interacting with a DNA molecule at just the right (or wrong for the patient) place and time. Molecules at room temperature bounce around at a rate of several billion times per second. If the time of the decay of the single atom that generated the cancer's initiating particle had been a nanosecond earlier of later, it is not likely that the cell in question would have been successfully transformed. It is my understanding that there is no theoretical basis for saying when an individual atom of a radioactive isotope will decay, beyond the probability implied by the isotope's half-life, which for naturally occuring isotopes is in the hundreds of millions, if not billions of years. That is true even if all the initial conditions of all the constituant particles of the atom were somehow known to very high accuracy at one point of time, a measurement prohibited by QM. The individual atom was itself created (and its initial conditions set) under conditions, whether in a supernova or a nuclear reactor, where QM effects dominate. To say the exact nanosecond and nanometer time and place of that atom's decay has a cause seems totally lacking in scientific basis. Yet the suffering resulting from that precise event is all too macroscopically real. --User:ArnoldReinhold 10:07, 9 May 2005 (UTC) ::Actually there has been determination of the statistical likelihood of quantum uncertainty affecting macroscopic events (without deliberate quantum devices to use it like Schrodinger's Cat)... it is incredibly small (though still greater than zero of course), although I can't remember just how small it is at the moment. I'll have to see if I can find a figure somewhere. ::Chaos theory and quantum uncertainty are totally unrelated principles. Chaos theory (unlike some versions of quantum theory) is deterministic; it is just difficult to predict chaotic systems in practice, since it is difficult to determine the starting conditions with the necessary precision. So, this is just an analogy, which should not be stretched too much. User:WhiteC 02:35, 10 May 2005 (UTC) Unless they are operating in totally separate universes, they are not "totally" unrelated. The "incredibly small" likelihood of quantum uncertainty affecting macroscopic events may also be manifested in "incredibly small" differences in the states of some system, but the interesting thing to me about the way some of these things work out numerically is that the successor states may eventually diverge substantially. I don't find the fatalistic picture of the universe, according to which the future of everything was immutably determined in the beginning, to be persuasive because (a) it would be impossible to prove that there is no "slop" in the system, and (b) quantum considerations seem to me to indicate that there are cases when indeterminancy would take a hand in the way things went on from that point. Even if the universe has been de facto deterministic and pre-programmed up to this point, what happens if somebody (acting out of his/her predetermined constitutional proclivities in cooperation with the predetermined stimulii that operate on him/her) decides to do or not do something major in the world depending on a geiger counter dice cast? Which reminds me. An uncle of mine used to determine his route when taking a walk by tossing a coin at intersections. His idea was probably just to avoid being predictable and getting into a rut. But it taught me to look at random departures from my planned route (colloquially known as "getting lost") as an opportunity to discover something that might be very useful for me. User:Patrick0Moran 04:06, 10 May 2005 (UTC) So that something important does not get lost, let me quote from the beginning of this section: :The objection to determinism in quantum physics has nothing to do with "uncaused events" nor am I aware of it claiming there are such events. I think that this criticism of the wording of that passage in the article is valid. There is possible, however, that the original writer was trying to get at something that is valid. If you consider a double-slit experiment, nobody doubts that the fact that light hits the screen on the other side of the slits is because there is an arc lamp or a laser or some other light source on this side of the slits. But if we slow things down so that we can emit photons one at a time, then we discover that sometimes a photon will contribute to one "hot spot" on the screen, and sometimes a photon will contribute to a different "hot spot" on the screen. The question can then be asked: "Does something act to cause the photon to go one spot or the other?" User:Patrick0Moran 04:25, 10 May 2005 (UTC) ::Perhaps 'truly random events' instead of 'uncaused events'? To say that the individual electron's path is uncaused seems to assume that because we haven't found the cause yet there isn't one. There seems to be an epistemology (what can we know about causes) versus ontology (what causes are there, regardless of whether we can find them) problem. User:WhiteC 11:03, 10 May 2005 (UTC) I think there is an important philosophy (and philosophy of science) issue here. By "philosophical" I don't mean "inconsequential" or "pertaining to metaphysical sandcastles" either. Going at least as far back as Plato and Aristotle we have tried to understand the functioning of the universe in the only way we could at first -- by comparing it to the way humans perceive themselves to do things. Humans throw rocks and break pots, so if a meteorite hits a house we tend to think of there being a hurler out there. We look for a doer every time something appears to have been done -- even if later on in our history we come to understand that gravitational fields can draw a meteor down out of the sky and through somebody's roof. It is extremely difficult for us to put this hylemorphic idea aside, the image that there is an actor who behaves as would a carpenter to impose a plan or idea (morphe) on some wood (hyle). Take a look at: [http://www.mathematik.uni-muenchen.de/~bohmmech/BohmHome/bmstartE.htm] (select "picture gallery" and then "room one") and ask yourself how somebody would interpret the moving pictures of electron strikes hitting a screen. If I thought I was seeing a picture of bullet holes being made in a wall, I would assume that a rifleman was changing his/her aim and trying to hit a series of tall vertical targets spread out along that wall. If the lines were actually relatively close together I might think I was seeing the normal kind of pattern that a rifle locked in a shooting tripod will make. But that kind of patterns is circular, and if the rifle and ammunition is any good at all there will be more holes the closer you get to the center of the circle. But I would be puzzled by the bands (even if arrangements were made to produce a circular diffraction pattern). "Why is the gun only striking the center of the bullseye and the black bands, but avoiding the white bands? What is causing this phenomenon?" It would be very difficult for me to accept the idea that that is just the way that bullets go out of a gun. If somebody tried to tell me that then I would perhaps say that we should not, "assume that because we haven't found the cause yet there isn't one." But the "cause" will have to be some kind of "imp," something that is not a part of the very nature of the physical apparatus (the slits and the electrons) that we already know is there. The imp would work according to a plan, and the plan would turn out to be the rules of interference. Then the question becomes: Why can't the electrons "follow the plan" on their own? Why can't we accept the idea that that is just the way that electrons (and anything else that small, I guess) behave? By the way, I don't particularly like the formulation I have quoted, but we have to be able to say it much better. I don't know whether it can be done without going into a long discussion. One unassailable way would be to find a good Einstein quotation or something like that and then direct people to critiquees of the quoted point of view. User:Patrick0Moran 18:38, 10 May 2005 (UTC) :I don't like the imp part, you are assuming that the cause must be conscious/external because you can't explain it in any other way. Oh, Einstein didn't like quantum indeterminacy, BTW, and most modern quantum physicists disagree with him. User:WhiteC 01:13, 11 May 2005 (UTC) :Okay, look, this has got WAY out of hand. I never brought up 'uncaused events', chaos theory, minature demons, firing squads or any of the rest of it. My point is very, very simple. :1. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle prevents you from being able to have absolute information about the state of the universe at any given moment. :2. Without absolute information about the state of the universe at any given moment you cannot extrapolate to the future. :3. If you cannot extrapolate to the future, you cannot have determinism. :Ergo, determinism is broken under the present view of quantum mechanics. :From this point on I'm staying out of it. If the general consensus is that I have a case, then by all means add what I've said to the page. If not, then don't :User:Noodhoog 23:46, 10 May 2005 (UTC) ::I agree with points one and two, but not point three. Whether a particular person (or observer) CAN extrapolate the future is irrelevant. The question is whether the future is predetermined regardless of whether any observers can tell what this future is. User:WhiteC 01:13, 11 May 2005 (UTC) ::The whole question has been way out of hand since people started working out the consequences of the original "nonsensical" observation that black bodies absorb heat avidly at all frequencies of light but radiate heat at certain preferred frequencies. Like WhiteC I agree with points 1 and 2 and disagree with 3. :::Schrödinger observed that one can easily arrange his famous thought experiment resulting in what he called "quite ridiculous cases" with "the ψ-function of the entire system having in it the living and the dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts." http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/ ::Many physicists have shied away from the apparent implication of the theory that the "cat" in such a case is neither definitively alive or definitively dead until somebody opens the box to observe the state of the radiation detector. Schrodinger was, it appears, objecting to the "sensibleness" of the implication as much as anybody. ::What I've called the "imp" actually turns up in a much less anthropomorphic way in the discussion of these physicists, as something called "quantum potential", and as scale increases toward our macro scale the power of this imp becomes proportionally so small as to become imperceptible: ::: The quantum potential formulation of the de Broglie-Bohm theory is still fairly widely used. For example, the theory is presented in this way in the two existing monographs, by Bohm and Hiley and by Holland. And regardless of whether or not we regard the quantum potential as fundamental, it can in fact be quite useful. In order most simply to see that Newtonian mechanics should be expected to emerge from Bohmian mechanics in the classical limit, it is convenient to transform the theory into Bohm's Hamilton-Jacobi form. One then sees that the (size of the) quantum potential provides a measure of the deviation of Bohmian mechanics from its classical approximation. Moreover, the quantum potential can also be used to develop approximation schemes for solutions to Schrödinger's equation (Nerukh and Frederick 2000). http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/ (near the end of section 5) ::It seems quite clear to me that the double-slit experiments indicate a very "deterministic" result in the sense that the (sometimes singlely in motion) particles that go through the slits will neither arrive at a single point on the screen nor will they be randomly distributed. They will behave in a "lawlike" way. The question, it seems to me, is whether anybody has ever maintained that there is a reason why each one of a succession of particles may be "targeted" on a different maxima on the screen. If there actually is such a reason then the future is predetermined and the fate of the cat was determined at the dawn of creation. If there is no such reason then the fate of the cat depends on luck. ::I guess I would prefer to speak of "probabilistically determined events" rather than "uncaused events." User:Patrick0Moran 02:32, 11 May 2005 (UTC) It's not just that the laws of quantum mechanics do not give any "reason" for the specific, as opposed to probabilistic, behavior of an individual particle going through a double slit, quantum mechanics makes statistical predictions that would be violated if some underlying reason unknown to us existed. There have been a number of experiments to verify those predictions and so far they do not appear to be violated, though many physicists believe better experiments are needed to conclusively settle the question. See Bell test experiments. --User:ArnoldReinhold 12:59, 11 May 2005 (UTC) :Excellent. Thanks. User:Patrick0Moran 15:00, 11 May 2005 (UTC) ==Quantum vandalism== Using a random number based on radioactive decay obtained from http://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/, I have selected a word in this talk page and changed its spelling. The random number (in hexadecimal) was 3D70. I used the low order 10 bits to form a line number (as the page appeared in my text editor, bbedit, whch can number lines). The high order digit determined the word in the line to change. --User:ArnoldReinhold 13:45, 11 May 2005 (UTC) == Needed citations == === Quantum uncertainty & macroscopic events === WhiteC said: :Actually there has been determination of the statistical likelihood of quantum uncertainty affecting macroscopic events (without deliberate quantum devices to use it like Schrodinger's Cat)... it is incredibly small (though still greater than zero of course), although I can't remember just how small it is at the moment. I'll have to see if I can find a figure somewhere. If we could have this citation it would let us argue persuasively, I think, that the butter would fly. Then, to avoid getting hit by somebody who would object to our thinking and call that doing "original research", it would be nice to find a good citation from some reputable Cal Tech physicist. (-; O.K., I'd settle for MIT or even Stanford ;-) User:Patrick0Moran 03:01, 13 May 2005 (UTC) :The book I originally read it in is at the public library checked out by someone else. But I have it on reserve, and it should be about a week or so. User:WhiteC 01:50, 15 May 2005 (UTC) === Difference between unknowable causes and no causes === Patrick Grey Anderson (at the top of this page) said: : I understand that people point to the seemingly random nature of quantum mechanics as standing in opposition to determinism, but randomness is still restricted by causality. In order for quantum mechanics to be undetermined, a particles would have to move for no reason whatsoever, as opposed to a shift occurring for no reason that we can *measure*. Brian Greene, ''The Fabric of the Cosmos'', describes the experiment figured out by Bell that reliably puts to rest the objections of Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen that Patrick reflects in the quotation given immediately above. Greene describes the experiments and the reasoning behind them in a section that culminates on p. 114 of his recent book. "We are forced to conclude that the assumption made by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, no matter how reasonable it seems, cannot be how our quantum universe works." The experiment is quite elegant, and the error in prediction obtained by following the EPR beliefs is not a tiny fraction, it is 16%. User:Patrick0Moran 15:56, 13 May 2005 (UTC) === Assertion that there is a consistent viewpoint on astrophysics === I don't understand the following assertion: :Different astrophysicists hold different views about precisely how the universe originated (Cosmogony), but a consistent viewpoint is that scientific determinism has held at the macroscopic level since the universe came into being. Calling something a "consistent viewpoint" is terribly unclear. Consistent with what? Maybe the writer meant "self-consistent," "internally consistent"? And whose viewpoint is this supposed to be? That of one person? That of the majority of astrophysicists? If a citation were provided it would help tighten up this passage. User:Patrick0Moran 16:49, 14 May 2005 (UTC) :That was my writing, and I agree it is pretty weak (but it used to be even worse ;-) ). I have been trying to find a name for this viewpoint without any success. "Internally consistent" would be better, I suppose. I believe that many scientists (not astrophysicists particularly) hold this viewpoint, but I have no idea how one could possibly find this out, so that makes it pretty weak. :It seems to me to be an internally consistent form of determinism, if one accepts that quantum indeterminism holds at the scale of very small things. I apologize for phrasing it so poorly. I'd appreciate any suggestions for tightening it up. User:WhiteC 02:03, 15 May 2005 (UTC) I didn't mean to bark anybody's shins. How about: :Various astrophysicists may differ about precisely how the universe originated; they hold different theories of or opinions about Cosmogony. But, as a group, they are in general agreement with the idea that since the very beginning of the universe everything has occurred according to the kind of deterministic interrelation among events consistent with quantum physics. User:Patrick0Moran 04:09, 15 May 2005 (UTC) === Infinite series === One section describes something that sounds like the Kantian antimonies, but without mentioning Kant and without being clear enough that I can figure out exactly what is being asserted. I suspect that the actual argument is something like the following: Assume: All events have causes, and their causes are all prior events. The picture this gives us is that Event AN is preceded by AN-1, which is preceded by AN-2, and so forth. Under that assumption, two possibilities seem clear, and both of them question the validity of the original assumption: :(1) There is an event A0 prior to which there was no other event that could serve as its cause. :(2) There is no event A0 prior to which there was no other event, which means that we are presented with an infinite series of causally related events, which is itself an event, and yet there is no cause for this infinite series of events. User:Patrick0Moran 17:34, 14 May 2005 (UTC) === Illusion of free will due to ignorance === The current article has: :Dynamical-evolutionary psychology, cellular automata and the generative sciences, model emergent processes of social behaviour on this philosophy, showing the experience of free will as essentially a gift of ignorance or as a product of incomplete information. This treatment seems to reflect a very strong POV, but, lacking citations, I cannot tell whether this POV belongs to one of us or is instead a reflection of the views of unnamed cellular automata et al. ;-) (Something is wrong with the syntax of the original or cellular automata are getting more uppity than I had suspected.) Donald Davidson, for one, had a very cogent critique of this kind of an analysis, so I suppose the analysis itself must have adherents somewhere. But the writing of our own article on determinism should not speaking of these adherents as "showing" that determinism predicates the meaninglessness of ideas of freedom. User:Patrick0Moran 19:01, 14 May 2005 (UTC) === A good point from what used to be the top of the page === I'm trying to clean out issues remaining near the top of this discussion page and then archive the old stuff. I found one point that seems to me to deserve more discussion: :I just object to statements like, ''the entirety of space-time came into existence at some point'', unless you define this point embedded in a larger space-time outside of our own. The fallacy comes from implying that both the statements, ''space-time is everything'', and ''something exists outside of space-time'', are true. However, I work in computer software and don't ''do'' physics (although this is really about philosophy), so maybe I'm just using the the wrong kind of logic? User:Nodem I don't think you are using the wrong kind of logic at all. In fact, this problem has been a serious source of concern at least since the time of St. Augustine. He tried to work out a consistent view of the differences between the characteristics of a creator God and his creation, and one of the things that occured to him was that time may have been created along with space and all the things in the universe. St. Thomas put his tremendous intellect to the task of coming up with an internally consistent philosophy that would yet be in accord with the ''Bible'', and he believed that God is perfect and therefore is not limited. It is his creations that are limited. So God must be infinite -- He can't be bounded or limited space or time or in any other way. When he created the universe he created space and time, so it doesn't make any sense to ask when God decided to create the universe. To do so is to apply the limited concepts appropriate to humans, appropriate to the mundane universe of discourse, to the unlimited. So time has a beginning, and there is a reason for the existence of time, but the reason for time is not something that stands in a temporal sequence. Physicists came to similar conclusions for much different reasons. When Newton gave human beings his physics, he gave them an enormously successful tool for working on the world. It so precisely predicted the mechanical actions of things that everything seemed to go like clockwork -- better than clockwork, actually. So it was possible to imagine that the affairs of the universe went off like a game played with perfectly elastic and perfectly frictionless spheres on a perfectly flat but bounded table. If the balls were rolling around and bumping into each other then they could continue to do so for an infinite time and that made it possible to imagine that they had been bumping around for an infinite time already. On the grounds of that kind of a picture the only reason to imagine a beginning was a theological reason. If anybody thought about entropy in regard to the universe I guess they just assumed that the effects might catch up with the universe some time so far in the future that it wasn't worth worrying about, and if they did worry about it in context of an infinite prior timeline they perhaps comforted themselves with the idea that there must have been a divine act of creation after all. Then people discovered that the universe is expanding. To even be able to think about this meant a certain kind of mental preparation such as was provided informally by a little book called ''Flatland'' that talked about how a two-dimensional creature would experience life on a flat surface, on a spherical surface, and then on the surface of a sphere that was expanding -- but without causing his own size to expand. In the world of more formal mathematics the same general kind of ideas were developed in non-Euclidian geometries that dared to talk about a higher dimension into which the universe could expand -- so that universe could expand without the rate of expansion being greater "on the edges" than "in the center." (There's a good discussion of these ideas in George Gamow's book, ''One, Two, Three...Infinity''.) And somehow these ideas came together with the observations of astronomers that indicated that the universe is indeed expanding. Anyway, to cut all this blathering short, people started to wonder what the movie they were making of the expanding universe would look like if they would run it backwards through the projector. The answer seemed to be inevitable. The stars would grow closer and closer together until at some point they would disappear into a single point. And since Einstein had demonstrated that space and time form a continuum, that meant that if space would disappear at that point, then so would time. Another way to say that is that the operational definition of time involves the observation of the movements of things. When there are no longer things, when there is no longer space that things might move in, that means the we've reached the beginning terminus of time. So, in a rather spooky way, physics points to the "creation" of the universe at a single point in time. Even within our own universe, it is possible that different regions of the universe could be cut off from each other because, with everything moving away from everything in all directions, the speeds with which stars move away from each other are additive over distance. The more distant stars are from us, the more rapidly they are moved away from us by the expansion of the universe. At some point the sum of these speeds exceeds the speed of light and "news" of whatever happens beyond that point will never reach us. It doesn't mean that these distant parts of the universe cease to exist, it must means that they cease to have any possibility of interacting with us. So even though they are "genetically" related to us, they might as well be in entirely separate universes as far as any practical considerations go. If we trace backward to the Big Bang (assuming we're not making some big mistake somewhere) we lose even the theoretical possibility of catching a glimpse of a time before t=0 in our universe. At the same time we accept the idea on the basis of a lot of experience that nothing is uncaused. Put it in slightly different words: There is always a reason why something happens. It could always be otherwise. The millionth swan that I investigate may turn out to be ultraviolet in color instead of white. But right now we are on a pretty good roll as far as uncaused events go. So we think about whether there could be other universes and other time lines that, like ours, start out at a t=0 and move along in a "line" that has nothing to do with ours, no connection to ours. And we can also wonder what conditions might exist in some universe outside of our own that might initiate the big bang that started our universe. There's a joke that is getting pretty old by now, but I still smile whenever somebody tells about the country bumpkin in New England who is hailed by a passing car from some sophisticated part of the country. Being lost they ask him how to get to Five Corners or whatever it was, and he replies, "You can't get there from here." Hopefully that is untrue in New England, but maybe it is true in regard to vastly separated regions of our own universe. At least I remember that Prof. Greenstein of Cal Tech was reported to be talking about ideas like that in the early 60s, and I doubt that he was their sole author. Perhaps it is also possible that there are other universes that were created in line with the same kind of reasons that lie behind our universe. There are even people who are now talking about how (theoretically, I suppose) one might recreate the conditions that prevailed just before the Big Bang and therefore produce a new universe that would go off on its own space-time continuum. Being totally cut off from our universe any sentient beings that came into existence in that universe would be forever ignorant of our having touched off their Big Bang. The original statement was: :''the entirety of space-time came into existence at some point'' That statement does indeed play tricks with our minds because it unwittingly throws us into the wrong way of visualizing things. We should be led to visualize something like an ant crawling down a ribbon that is gradually unfurling from a balloon at a rate slower than the balloon is rising into the sky. At some point if the ant keeps walking he is going to come to the end of the ribbon. It's not that he simply comes to a point where a sign says "Go no further!" and the color of the ribbon changes or something like that. There simply is no more ribbon. How about something like: :"If we could retrace our steps back through time, we would come to a terminus. We would have run out of space and time at the point at which space ceases to have a volume and any "clock" that existed would have no leeway for its pendulum to move.
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YouTube.com videos better site than Turbo Tax 2007
