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Rhubarb
Guest
In mechanistic thought, everything is deterministic. If we reduce everything to matter and motion than determinism is all we’re left with. How I understand mechanism, it is what happens when determinism runs amok.
Personally, I’ve never put much stock in Hard Determinism. I think it’s it’s like the saying about squares and rectangles. Mechanism is necessarily deterministic, but determinism is not necessarily mechanistic.
Personally, I’ve never put much stock in Hard Determinism. I think it’s it’s like the saying about squares and rectangles. Mechanism is necessarily deterministic, but determinism is not necessarily mechanistic.
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tonyrey
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According to quantum theory there is indeterminism at the subatomic level…
Determinism is not necessarily mechanistic because theists like Calvin believe in predestination, i.e. spiritual determinism. It is necessarily deterministic when it is combined with materialism because then it leaves no scope for free will (which implies self-determinism!).
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stenlis
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According to current scientific understanding, physical matter is NOT determinate.
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twinc
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since there is no matter,then all this natter is of no matter - twinc
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Geremia
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In certain interpretations of quantum, yes
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Geremia
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So physical matter has freewill? In order to understand matter, there must be some logic in it at some level, even if the logic is a logic of probabilities. There are both deterministic and non-deterministic interpretations of quantum.
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Geremia
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Are you a Cartesian?
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James_S_Saint
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Yes, all matter is determinate.
Proving that to *you *is all together indeterminate.
I know that all matter is determinate because I know that is what makes it matter. If it wasn’t determinate, it wouldn’t matter.
Proving that to *you *is all together indeterminate.
I know that all matter is determinate because I know that is what makes it matter. If it wasn’t determinate, it wouldn’t matter.
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stenlis
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About as much free will as a coin has when you flip it
Of course there is and it does involved probabilities. The most prominent part being the wave function en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_function which you can use to get probability distributions of quantum states.
Yes, but the interpretations are not scientific (at least not in Popper’s sense) but philosophical. They were proposed by scientists but they are neither provable nor disprovable.
Only one of the interpretations - the Bohm interpretation offers a mechanistic view on the universe. The many minds and many worlds interpretations postulate that we live in a non-deterministic universe which is a part of deterministic multiverse.
In any case, all the predictive capabilities of quantum mechanics count with probabilistic variables. Bohm argued that there may be deterministic variables ‘hidden’ behind the events we perceive as random. There are two big problems with that:
- Nobody demonstrated (found) those variables
- If they exist the implication would be that Einstein was wrong and information does travel faster then light (because of an observed property of quanta called ‘quantum entanglement’)
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Geremia
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Given an initial condition—say, “heads up”—and how many times the coin rotates a full 360º, one can determine precisely the result of a coin toss. But when you say “you flip it,” you assume there is an interaction between my freewill and the determination of the initial conditions of the coin toss; it is entirely up to me, e.g., how forcefully I flip it and which side is up initially. From the initial conditions onwards, however, the problem is entirely deterministic.
Yes, but the wavefunction is not by necessity real; the theory makes predictions just as well regardless whether we assume it has a real or purely instrumental existence.
Bell’s inequalities, applied experimentally in Aspect’s experiment, showed that Einstein’s particular hidden variable interpretation is false. An empirical experiment falsified a “philosophical” interpretation. To me, there is no hard line between philosophy and physics in the modern sense of the term.
Some might not be.
Which does not by itself prove they do not exist, but anyways…
Violates non-locality, yes
Okay, but what do others, e.g., Catholic theologians, think? I am willing to bet they would say matter is deterministic because it cannot have freewill. This is a gift from God only to humans, as far as we know, right?
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stenlis
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I’m not sure where the ‘will’ comes into this in your view when talking about matter. In quantum mechanical view, an electron, when measured, exhibits a property - the spin, for example, in a probabilistic fashion. There does not seem anything ‘voluntary’ about it though. The exhibited property is always coherent with the wave function. There is no electron with a ‘mood swing’ that would make it behave in an unexpected fashion. The behavior of particles is probabilistic, but it is in no conceivable way subjected to a ‘will’ of its own.
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Geremia
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What is will, then? It is a faculty by which a being decides. Does an electron decide whether to be in a spin-up or -down state upon measurement? If it did, I do not think we would get upon measurement a perfect 50% probability of it being in either state. But it appears to have a will because any particular measurement is indeterministic.
I guess I am still convinced that there is a deeper, underlying logic to quantum events that we have to-date only understood in terms of probability. I am not necessarily thinking of “hidden variables” or “non-locality” as a solution since mathematics may be incapable of describing the former and our understanding of space-time may be flawed, forcing a reinterpretation of the latter.
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Geremia
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What inspired this thread was a conversation about how original sin propagates by generation. Click here to read the conversation.
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NowAgnostic
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Not exactly sure of the problem here.
Physical matter with no free will → completely determinate → mechanism → no free will.
This is not a contradiction in itself.
Unless by that last part you mean no free will in humans, not free will in physical matter. You’d have to deny the possibility of compatibilism to make that assumption and be a libertarian with regards to free will. Even if you are, you can still deny the initial premise, or each of the first two connections. You can:
- Deny that physical matter doesn’t have free will. After all, who is to say an electron doesn’t “choose” what slit to go through in a double-slit experiment. You can’t refute it scientifically, and you can only “refute” it philosophically by dogmatic a priori assertion. It’s not logically impossible electrons could have free will.
- Deny that lack of free will renders it completely determinate. Again, quantum mechanics seems to argue forcefully against determinism. Of course you can adopt something like the Bohm interpretation but this just moves the indeterminacy from the particle’s behavior to the initial conditions (the “pilot wave”). Again, science can neither confirm nor deny the Bohm interpretation, Copenhagen interpretation, or any other, and philosophy can only posit an a priori assertion. It’s not logically impossible matter is indeterminate (meaning, its behavior at the micro-level is ontologically, not just practically, incapable of prediction, except in a probabilistic sense).
- Deny that complete determinacy implies mechanism. After all, even if science can show an absolute correlation between physical and chemical structures, and the existence of life, science does not, and never will gain the answer to **why **this correlation exists, while mechanism holds that science can provide the **complete **explanation. It’s kind of like the hard problem in neuroscience - we certainly know that photons of a certain frequency land on the retina, which causes a series of reactions which result in the firing the optic nerve, which results in a series of firings through the brainstem, which gets processed in the visual cortex, etc. - but we do not know exactly why this should correlate with the experience of seeing the color “red”.
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stenlis
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I’ve never heard a good coherent definition of what is free will that I could directly use to distinguish between things that do and do not have free will.
In any case ‘will’ in my opinion is a decision process which requires some consideration for the consequences of one’s actions. That does not seem to be the case for an electron.
It does exactly that - 50/50 chance. It’s indeterministic in the fact, that you can’t tell for sure what the next outcome of a measurement will be. If you measure it 1000 times, you can be pretty sure that it’s going to be roughly 50% up and 50% down. The more measurements the closer the ratio gets to 50/50.
Fair enough. The hidden variables and non-locality kinda go hand in hand in this case, because Bell proved that if there are hidden variables, they must be non-local en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem
I am inclined to believe there is no mechanistic background to the perceivably random quantum events. The main reason is that we have mathematical (statistical) tools to assess the ‘randomness’ of events. For example, you can let a computer generate a large sample of random numbers. If you run the randomness assessing algorithms (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_randomness ) on that sample, if the sample was large enough those algorithms will pick up the fact that there is some underlying pattern. That’s because the computer generated random numbers are not, in fact, random - they are generated by a very VERY intricate formula. They look like random and the algorithms cannot tell you what the formula is, they just can tell you that there is a pattern of sorts.
With quantum events this is different. No matter how large the sample is, the algorithms seem to show that it is truly random and that there is no hint of an underlying pattern.
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NowAgnostic
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Yes, but the article says that statistical randomness is not necessarily true randomness, e.g. objective unpredictability. The digits of pi exhibit statistical randomness yet they are predictable. You can’t prove there isn’t some similar “Cosmic Code” determining the outcome of supposedly “random” quantum events. I’ve given up frankly on ever being able to determine a “right” interpretation of quantum mechanics. Physicists can shut up and calculate, and philosophers will be arguing till the cows come home.
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Geremia
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The problem is, e.g., whether physics could predict the motion of the atoms in my fingers voluntarily typing this post. The problem is basically the psychosomatic problem, the relation between the will in a human’s soul, its body’s matter, and matter outside the body. My body’s matter is not determinate to others because I can will it to move however I like, yet matter outside my control is determinate. This may be precisely why the quantum measurement process is only probabilistically determinate. When an observer measures, suddenly his will encroaches upon the matter previously outside his control, perhaps rendering it only probabilistically determinate.
For more information, read about von Neumann (1955) et al. here.
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stenlis
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Digits of PI do not exhibit statistical randomness. Run the randomness tests on them and you will discover they have a non-random nature.
piworld.de/pi-statistics/pist_longruns.htm
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geometer
Guest
The behaviour of a dripping fosset is described by a strange attractor, which is a chaotic model. So no the behaviour of the fosset is not completely predicable and determined.
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