Determinism Is Self Defeating

[little_monkey]

Magic would falsify determinism, I said that before. But we don't observe magic. But we do observe that the universe can be understood with scientific laws.

Magic, if provably magic and not a new technology or product of an as-yet discovered law, would falsify determinism. So let's say I produce a rabbit out of a hat. Are you going to run out the door screaming "Science is proven false. Determinism is wrong!" or are you just going to say "Hmmmm. . . we do not yet understand all the causal factors leading to this event. (Because of lack of information)

I can't imagine ANY observable event in which this wouldn't be the approach.

Unless you're gullible, the right way to approach any new phenomenon is by studying it through the scientific method. However, if it is real magic, that is, it defies all scientific explanation, then the next question would be why that single event is magical? and are there other events that are also magical? Now if we can explain the magical, then would it be real magic?

Regardless of the lack of knowledge, if something were magical, that would reveal itself quite easily, and determinism would then be defeated.

Mind.
Can't see it. Can't touch or feel it. Can't manipulate on it in any way. Still claimed as part of physical determinism.

Mind as separate from the brain has been postulated a long time ago. The problem is that it doesn't add anything to what we know if we don't postulate as a separate entity. This reminds me of the luminiferous aether. No one ever disproved its existence. But there is no equation or even a term in an equation, that we can say, "oh this is due to the aether'. So you can take physics course without mentioning the word 'aether', and not a single equation would change. That's why the aether was abandoned as a concept - it served no purpose at all.

But no one is saying that you must prove determinism, no more than one is required tp prove the existence of quarks. But assuming their existence, QCD unfolds. Similarly assuming determinism, then science unfolds.

This, I accept. The point of science (at least to me) seems to be taking systems which aren't currently predictable, and learning how to predict them. In a sense, I'd accept this as a kind of statistical determinism. Don't think that I don't love science, and most especially the amazing things people have learned doing it.

Well it's not an immediate goal to find out that a system is predictable. The immediate goal is to understand how a system works. That it turns out that a given system follows certain laws is what we have found so far.

However, all the specifics of the system are unknowable: for example, the spin on very particle. And in some cases, the causal chain confounds us in making useful and important predictions (for example about weather), and there's good reason to believe that will never change due to the butterfly effect (I prefer to call it "precision creep" or something).

We do know what spin is, but what we don't know is why a spin zero follows the Klein-Gordon equation; spin 1/2, the Dirac equation; spin 1 the Maxwell's equation, and spin 2 (gravitons), should be a quantized General Relativity equation - tho' this hasn't been accomplished so far.

As to the butterfly effect, this comes from chaos theory, but it's not what people think about chaos. In physics, it means that a very small change in the initial conditions can produce humongus, drastic effect.

Okay. If you want to say, "Assuming determinism is what allows us to provide real-life results, and generates an understanding of the unvierse that no other philosophical position would allow," then I'm 100% behind you, and science, and the use of that assumption.

However, sometimes we forget that assumptions are assumptions, and because we're so used to them, we start treating them as brute facts. This leads to things like, "We know the universe is deterministic, so the mind must be only an expression of deterministic processes. Therefore, free will is at best an illusion." Since this is at odds with my own observations and experiences, I cannot allow that line to go unchecked without challenge: it must be proven, not believed on principle.

We don't have a very good theory on free will. So there's lots of work to be done before we can say what free will is.

Let me say this-- if science can really show WHY mind exists in a supposedly objective universe, and can really show a good basis for how some physical processes arrive at actual sensation, then my view on determinism could potentially change, since the existence of mind is my main obstacle to determinism. So far, some evidence has been provided-- but it is still very crude, and because of the way the brain processes, I'm really not sure that it's possible to go much farther. It's an exciting age, this is, because we can at least give it a pretty good try.

What if we can produce a robot that would be sentient and would exercise free will? Would you then conceed that we have an understanding of those concepts and there is no other reality but this physical world?