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Originally Posted by roachboy
thanks filtherton...so then determinism is of a piece with the assumption that mechanical causation applies across scales?
that seems among the first things that would go out the window when you juxtapose anything like quantum physics to actions that happen within the scale that we as humans percieve/inhabit.
so there's a question of scale.
another problem: projections as to cause lean on assumptions about the general characteristics of the system within which elements circulate. there is a kinda huge body of information out there on complex dynamical systems theories for modelling how life operates: because of the characteristics of these systems, any notion of determinism is inapplicable. instead you have processes that are geared around emergence, coupling of waveforms/oscillators, etc. there is obviously event that follows event, but causal links are really difficult to say much about in a meaningful sense, particularly if your notion of causation is locked into mechanics.
natural law seems like a name given to an observable regularity. so it would be a frame-contingent characterization. within particular types of systems, these regularities are predictable and so functionally are like laws. the frame-contingent status of this claim--that regularity x *is* a "nautral law" is at once obvious and overlooked.
this snippets outline problems, tant pis, let's cut to the question:
why is it that folk want to generate a simple, linear world for themselves?
here are some sentences from wittgenstein's tractatus.
he is most elegant:
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Let me preface this by saying that i'm not a quantum physicist so some of this is coming out of my ass. With that out of the way, i think that quantum physics is what you get when you try to understand phenomena that exist at the very far end of what we are currently capable of perceiving. It's pretty esoteric shit, but to my knowledge all physicists operate under the assumption that things are predictable. Perhaps predictably unpredictable.
Anyways, i think that it is more of a philosophical question as to whether certain things truly are random, or whether we just haven't yet divined a means of understanding and explaining the underlying mechanisms.
To me, the idea of randomness is very similar to the idea of an all controlling diety. These notions occupy the opposite ends of a spectrum- both require a certain amount of faith in light of the constant trudging forward of scientific understanding. They're both somewhat romantic notions, too, when compared to the idea that because everything has essentially already happened all we can really do is experience it as it plays out.
Probabilistic models are interesting things. They're all assumptions and probabilities and differential equations. What's interesting is that, from what i've gathered in my somewhat limited experience with them, they're only necessary when you don't have enough information(for whatever reason) to form a deterministic model(though i imagine that's not always true). In the end, though, they're just models; they're only as accurate and useful as we can make them, and they expose just as much information about our limited perspectives as they do about how the world might work.
As for why folks would want a linear world: i imagine most of them don't. Most people enjoy the notion of free will, and determinism doesn't really allow for it. The other side of that coin is that a completely determined existence might conceivably completely absolve one of any sort of personal responsibility, i.e. "It's not my fault, i was merely swept up in the unwavering momentum of the history of the universe."