That’s okay. You don’t believe in quantum mechanics.
But this debate is then utterly pointless. The only way to answer your latest questions is in terms of something you don’t believe in.
True if on land, but in the sea, where the water supports the mass of the animal?
Having read Gould’s “Wonderful Life” (and Conway Morris’s book on the same subject), I was curious about what edge a notochord gave Pikaea in a marine environment. The only one I could think of was that it allowed soft-bodied animals to develop larger muscles, allowing them to compete with arthropods in terms of speed and agility. Which, on rereading is exactly what you pointed out. :smack:
Quantum “indeterminism” is an epistemic problem, not a metaphysical one. It may very well be impossible to obtain sufficient knowledge to predict, as humans, what will occur in such a situation. However, such a situation either will or will not occur depending on whether sufficient cause exists.
If it happened, no matter how fortuitous it seems to us in retrospect, it must have had sufficient cause. Our inability to access all the data that could recreate that event, as limited by the uncertainty principle and various other quantum mechanics tools, has nothing to do with what occurs. What we know, and what is, those are two different things entirely. Given the exact same situation of actual events preceding it, there is only one outcome possible. Our ignorance as to the specifics involved does not impact this in the slightest.
The sheer audacity of people here who wish to deny the basic principles of causality is astounding. One would think the antirealists and their dastardly kin had won out, whereas in reality the evil forces of Putnam, Derrida, and Foucault were defeated and thrown back by the sensible people who still inhabit the world of reason.
I just wanted to jump on here and say that, IMHO…
MEBuckner- I honestly don’t have much of an opinion on this matter. But what you wrote earlier, your statement of causality was beautiful. I re-read it like 3 times.
Beautiful words.
Okay, RexDart, the OP and your posts come down to:
“If everything was exactly the same, would everything be exactly the same?”
Well, yes, by definition.
As Darwin’s Finch and I have both tried to point out from different angles, there’s no debate there. It’s a pointless argument.
I agree with Desmostylus that the argument from Kelsonk and RexDart boils down to “if everything were the same, would everything be the same?” I’m not qualified to comment on the issue of whether quantum indeterminacy is “real” or merely an artifact of our lack of information. I would just point out, as I was trying to in my earlier post, that if everything is not the same, if even one thing is different, then lots of other things will also wind up being different.
Tristan: Thanks!