I don’t see this. Isn’t determinism a yes-no, true-false kind of thing. What is somewhat deterministic? I am not familiar with “compatibilism”. It sounds very convuluted to me. I was saying that the universe cannot be determined up to some point and then not. I also pointed out that the supposed point is not well defined.
Suppose that determinism is not true and we have indeterminacy at the level of the electron. We still may have a determinism-like universe on the macro level. By and large, the movements of macroscopic objects will still be describable and predictable to a very high degree using deterministic laws, such as Einstein’s mechanics. The effects on the quantum level simply do not show up in any measurable way on the macro level.
Yes. Determinism is probably an all or nothing thing. I am not taking a position here as to its truth or falsity. In agreement with you, I wondered why consciousness would have to be indeterminsitic, which what Quasar has argued.
The point about compatiblism does not per se contribute anything to the debate about the truth or falsity of determinism. I raised the issue or compatiblism because Quasar had implied that there was something special about consciousness that made it immune to the deterministic laws governing the rest of matter (assuming that determinism were ture). You disagreed with Quasar, asking at what point in species evolution would we get a shift away from determinism.
My point about compatibilism: Quasar’s belief, that consciousness has to be indeterminsitic EVEN IF the rest of the world turns out to be determinsitic, evidences an Incompatibilist way of thinking on Quasar’s part. The incompatibilist argument is:
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consciousness must be indeterministic in order for humans to have free will;
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humans have free will;
Therefore, consciousness must be indeterministic.
The compatibilist takes issue with the first premise. How, asks the compatibilist, can we get free will out of randomness, which is what indeterminism is? Compatibilism is not convoluted and it is widely known and accepted. But again, it is a purely philosophical position that does not weigh in on the issue of determinism vs. indeterminism.
So basically the discussion is deviating into the following argument: if determinism does indeed guide the evolution of the universe, is there a limit to it? a barrier at which point determinism is no more? I ventured the possibility that consciousness and the actions that spring from it are not determined, i.e. they are unpredictable, therefore implying that, as long as we are talking about rational beings, the universe’s determinism comes to a halt.
Of course, all of the entities that are exempt from interacting with rational beings–free from their sphere of influence-- would only be subject to the laws of physics and remain chained to its previously determined future.
Some of you disagreed based on the fact that reasoning is a process carried by the brain, which is physical in nature and thus subject to the supposedly deterministic laws that govern it.
Point well taken. That had occurred to me before but I discarded it more on the grounds of intuitive perceptions (no Daniel, I don’t believe in the existence of a soul) than on a well developed rational process.
I’m now challenged to think it more thoroughly. I’ll be posting back.
But, before I do, one reaction to a reply:
Daniel Shebasson said
quote:
Quasar: You state that “Conscious thought, and the actions that it motivates, are subject to but not determined by the basic law of the universe.” What does it mean to be “subject” to a natural law as opposed to being determined by it? Are you referring to indeterministic or probabilistic laws in contrast to other laws of nature?
In the context of what I was mentioning:
Being subject to refers to being affected by something, for example the law of gravity. If I’m stupid enough to jump from the top of a building without my rocket boosters I’m evidently going to hit the floor (auch!), nothing I can do about it.
Being determined by alludes to being controlled, coerced, to do a particular action according to a previously written script. Thus, if rational processes and the actions they generate are determined, the decision of jumping or not is not up to me, I will do whatever the script written under the influence of universal laws dictate.
But, if thoughts are not determined by previously set laws, then it is my decision to take the jump but, after I do, gravity will take me down whether I like it or not, I’m subject to its dominance.
Synthesizing:
The determinism implies that decision to take action is not being circumscribed to universal laws, you do indeed have carte blanche to act as you desire–within the limits of what is physically possible
But, the subjection to these laws affects the actions once they are executed, that is, you got no control over the laws of the universe and are deterministically bound to them once you, by exerting your free will, decide upon a particular course of action.
Finally, regarding:
“Conscious thought, and the actions that it motivates, are subject to but not determined by the basic law of the universe.”
I believe I phrased it ambiguously. Correcting:
Actions, derived from conscious thought, are subject to the basic laws of the universe but not determined by them, instead being commanded by thoughts, as mentioned above.
Thoughts, on the other hand, are, once converted into actions, subject to these laws. Before evolving into actions though, they are not determined by them, they are unpredictable in nature.
I missed this before, about asking for help posting a link. One way to do it is to copy and past the web address. Also, there are instructions in the fine print at the top and/or bottom of the page in small colored letters that say vB code. If you click on those, it will tell you how to proceed. I posted my first link on another thread today with a shortcut, so that only a word describing the thread appeared and not the whole long address. You may have to practice this a little.
More a little later; I want to refer to something in your last post and Hotmail won’t let me copy and paste, so I’ll have to go directly to SDMB to ask you a couple of questions regarding the subject of the OP.
Sorry about the hi-jack.
quasar says
Sometimes I wonder if the OT writers were using the fall of Adam as a sort of metaphor for human thought not being pre-determined. The thoughts of animals are not self-reflective; their thinking processes are in place for suvival purposes (so far as biology seems to have discovered).
Ambrose Bierce has written some wonderful poetry, and one of these, in The Devil’s Dictionary, talks about the problem of free will as it applies to the fall of Adam.
Human thought is self-reflective, and humans are aware of their own mortality (which often leads to discussions somewhat similar to these).
I believe that animal thought would be more under the auspices of randomness or determinism, depending on which universal view you accept (or combination of the two) and human thought could be directed by the knowledge of mortality. The knowledge that the sun is going to turn into a red giant may someday cause scientists to try to prevent this somehow, or migrate, as quasar said earlier.
I would have difficulty with the concept of human thought being predetermined, (this is only intuitive) but not as much difficulty accepting determinism as set into motion from the big bang onwards.
Backing up a little, and in the spirit of the motto of the SDMB, does any of you wish to clarify any of the following to me (in a kindly manner, please?)
I understand the concept of entropy to be the tendency of everything to break down into its component parts. This, I would see as being predetermined. The energy in the closed system that is the universe is neither created nor destroyed, only changed. So that part would be predetermined also, a set amount of energy within the universe, right?
What is a working definition of randomness as applied to physics, and how could it apply here?
Thank you for your consideration of this post.
Entropy and heat are connected. Heat is the thermo in thermodynamics. Energy in the form of heat is the least useful form of energy. It can only be used to do work when there is a difference in temperature. When all the energy is in the form of heat and the heat is evenly distributed, the entropy is at a maximum. Earlier when the universe was thought to be static (not expanding or contracting) the end of the universe was called heat-death, because eventually all the energy would be converted to heat and when equiblirum is reached, no further work could be done. If the universe expands forever, the result will be particles getting so far apart that they cannot interact with each other. The temperature will approach, but never quite reach, absolute zero.
You asked for a definition of entropy. I don’t think this will make anything clearer, but hang on. A change in entropy is the heat transfered divided by the absolute temperature of the system during some interval. An alternative definition of entropy is k*ln(W) where k is Boltzmann’s constant and W (not to be confused with work) is a number proportional to the probability of the occurance of a particular event.
I just try to think of entropy as a precise measure of disorder.
Entropy is interesting because it is believed by many to explain or in some way be linked to the arrow of time. The arrow of time is what makes things in the universe appear to move forwards rather than backwards. We never see an egg plattered on the floor spontaneously come together, shell and all, and jump back onto the counter to become unbroken again. We would observe such a time reversed event only if we watched a tape of an egg falling and breaking backwards. Entropy, pursuant to which disorder in a closed system increases in the same direction as time moves into the future, explains why the egg cannot do this. The egg’s disorder increases into the future.
Now this does not mean that order cannot ever increase in a part of our system. We could theoretically create a machine to put the egg back together again. Likewise, the creation of animals in the womb is an example of order being created out of disorder in a particular object. But in these cases, the overall diorder of the system still increases, since much more energy is spent to create the order in the object and overall disorder increases. So the mother’s body, in consuming food and using energy to create the baby in the womb, increases disorder in the world even if it produces an object with is more ordered.
The expansion of the universe has also been linked by some thinkers to entropy and the arrow of time. As long as the universe expands, entropy will continue to increase. I think one guy named Goldberg reasoned that if the universe began at some point to contract, entropy would reverse and the arrow of time would reverse. But it is unclear whether we would observe this change (whether we would observe eggs spontaneously unsplattering and jumping back into their shells), since the temporal direction in which our brains would work would also be time-reversed.
All of this is highly speculative, but fun to think about anyway.
Daniel Shabasson
I agree with everything you said in the first two paragraphs. However I disagree with what you said in the third. I agree that entropy is linked to the temporal direction with which our brains work. I’ve heard the theory that when the universe contracts, entropy (and hence our time-sense) will reverse and I don’t buy it. That means that at some point time, as we perceive it, will abruptly (from our point of view) come to an end. Also, entropy increases in a static universe. By your reasoning, a static universe would not experience time at all. Would the time reversed contracting universe go through exactly what we are going through now just backwards? No. Entropy must increase with time independent of the expansion or contraction of the universe.
I’m not sure I buy the Goldberg universe. But I think it is fun to speculate about it.
I wonder what, in a Goldberg universe, would happen at the precise moment that the universe began to contract.
Let us assume, for the time being, a completely deterministic universe. Let us suppose that we have a big bang at one end of the universe and a big crunch at the other end. It seems to me that, assuming a deterministic universe, and assuming that deterministic laws of nature do not have a time directional element (they work equally well backwards and forwards), the development/history of the universe from the moment the universe starts to contract towards the big cruch will be an exact mirror image of the universe from the big bang to the point it begins to contract.
The two universe halves will be mirror images of each other. There will be counterparts of us in the second half of the universe that will be exactly like us, and they will experience the same things. Their experience of the world will be exactly like ours. In fact, there will be no way to determine which end of the universe is “really” the big bang and which is the big crunch. Each end of the universe will be the beginning of the universe from the perspective of those within them. There is, it seems, no real meaning to the question of which end of the universe is really the beginning and which the end.
Now, if the universe is not deterministic, I think there are problems for the Goldberg universe. But I’ll leave that for another time. Off to bed.
Another quick point. I don’t see that the Goldberg universe encounters a logical problem in the possible static universe you posit. Why couldn’t time just stop if the universe stops expanding (but does not begin to contract)? I don’t see any absurdity to the possibility of time stopping.
If everything that happens in the expanding phase happens time-reversed in the contracting phase, how could you determine which phase we are in? Any experiment to try to determine whether our perceived time is parallel or anti-parallel to the supposed Universal time would necessarily yield the same results (time reversed) in the two phases. If there is no way even in principle to determine the direction of the universal time, then in what sense does it exist? Similarly, there is no way to distinguish the two phases. If there is no way to distinguish two things, then in what sense are they different? What you are left with is * one * phase that abruptly ends at the point of maximum expansion.
My point about the static universe is this: If you assume the direction of (perceived) time is the direction of expansion. What does this say about perceived time in a static universe? Would time stand still in a static universe?
The absurdity of time stopping is that time stops with respect to…what? Consider the statement: “Everything in the universe stopped for one hour.” I contend this statement is without meaning. Stopped for one hour as measured by…???
(more toward the OP…)
I skimmed through the posts, and I did not see any mention of Chaos Theory (sorry if I missed it). It seems that the larger the system (e.g., a galaxy), the more determinisitic it can be (i.e., longer-term predictions can be made) whereas small-scale aspects of the universe are less predictable or even probability-based (e.g., Quantum Mechanics). Chaos Theory indicates that the outcomes of even some large scale system (e.g., weather) can differ under nearly identical starting conditions because of the small scale randomness/probability.
Phobos
I touched on this in my first post to this thread without using the term Chaos. My point was that you can create randomness from determinism and you can create determinism from randomness. They are not as easy to distinguish as one might think.
You make a good point, and I think I agree that there is no meaningful difference between the universe that has two mirror halves and one single universe that progresses to the point where the universe starts to contract and then just stops.
I tried to vary the hypothetical universe by imagining one clock that is immune from the change in the direction of time (would keep ticking in the same direction even after the time direction change), but this does not work, since there is the possibility that some matter or being in the world would interact with the clock and this would make one universe half different from the other and thus not really a mirror of the other.
But I do not agree that it does not make sense to say that time could stop. Yes, you are right, it is absurd and meaningless to say time could stop for one hour. But time stopping altogether is is different matter. Time stopping is synonomous with there being no change in the universe past one point in time. Which is the same as the universe ceasing to exist. So saying that time stops is the same as saying there just isn’t anything after that point in time. I don’t know of any good a priori argument for saying that time must be infinite in either direction.
I conclude based on the foregoing that if the expansion of the universe causes the arrow of time, and if universe is deterministic, that time will stop at the point the universe begins to contract.
Of course, the universe may not be deterministic, and the arrow of time may not be caused by the universe’s expansion. So we really don’t know what would happen at the point the universe begins to contract.
Let us now consider the second half of the mirror universe if the universe is indeterministic. I think the Goldberg universe runs into some serious trouble. Consider a hypothetical person, Bob, at the exact point where the shift occurs. Bob is the “product” of the both worlds meaning that he is the result of the entire history of the universe coming from both ends of the universe, which meet at the point of temporal change. It seems to me it would be a miracle if two different universes with entirely different histories and innumerable differences produced by indeterminacies produced the exact same individual.
I’ll chime in with a cop out that the question is unanswerable at this time because we do neither understand the exact initial conditions (although I believe we have a pretty good guess) nor the precise physical laws that govern the universe (relativity vs. quantum mechanics). If you can’t define the problem, you can’t develop a solution.
I’ll also say that I believe the question cannot ever be answered. To me, such questions are on the level of asking “Where did the universe come from?” or “Where did God come from?” You can keep going father and father back (the Universe came from the Big Bang… where did the singularity before the Big Bang come from). At some point, I believe the answer has to be “It just was like that.”
You can ask if the universe if deterministic or random, but no matter which way you decide, you can always ask “Are you sure its deterministic/random? How do you know? Why is it that way?” “It’s just like that.”
This doesn’t mean that I don’t think the question isn’t worth asking, because it is an important question, but I also think it’s a question that doesn’t have an answer.
And 9 months later…I’m finally posting back. I always planned on resurrecting this thread–as I felt it had not been sufficciently discussed–and, somehow, never found the time. It is until now, with the threat of its pruning into oblivion looming ever closer down the horizon, that I have finally been drawn back here. Could these turn of events have been predicted beforehand? 
As I feel like a pile of shit right now, I will refrain myself from making any actual contribution to the matter at hand, limiting my intervention–for the time being–to the ageless bump-and-run strategy.
Any commentaries that might be forthcoming will be appreciated and duly noted.
Off to get some rest…