RE: Determinism Is Self Defeating
July 2, 2013 at 9:30 am
(This post was last modified: July 2, 2013 at 9:32 am by bennyboy.)
(July 2, 2013 at 8:58 am)Rhythm Wrote: To be fair....we did a little more than simply -assume- that cause and effect holds.
Cause and effect is not determinism, unless each set of causes can only lead to one possible outcome. Take this to the extreme, and it HAD to be that I would be sitting here, typing this text. In all the possible unfoldings of the universe, determinism has it that from the Big Bang, it was destiny that I would be doing this.
You have to be pretty confident to assert that out of all the infinite interactions between matter and energy, both known and as yet unknown, that it all arrives, out of pure necessity, at this moment in time.
I think sentience is a good indicator that this is not the case. The idea that sentience, the thing which most defines what it means to be alive, is a byproduct of a deterministic mechanism, seems unlikely. Why would a machine need to be actually aware for it to process sensory input and output a behavior? Why is there a subjective existence at all?
One approach to that question is to believe that mind, while supervenient on the brain and heavily mediated by it, has some quality that transcends pure mechanism. Another is to go with a pure idealism: that since it's hard to explain the existence of the mind in a physical monism, it makes more sense to explain the existence of physical consistencies in an idealistic universe.
Another approach is the idea of infinite multiverses which realize ALL the possible outcomes of a given state. That way, randomness isn't really randomness-- it's a discovery of which of those infinite multiverses you personally happen to have ended up in.
My point is that in the face of philosophical speculation, science will take an unconvincing and obviously incomplete answer, and will wave away challengers with the BOP-wand. But that's just a cheap tactic. Unless you can show that at any given time, t, the universe could not have proceeded otherwise, determinism must remain an assumption, rather than a scientifically testable hypothesis.
