Determinism Is Self Defeating

[bennyboy]

I rather tire of people who. . .

We are not amused, wot? Condescension much?

[. . .] there is no obvious reason to consider the behavior of the brain and nervous system as not being predictable in principle.

You can believe whatever you want in principle. The question is whether you can show it to be true. So go ahead and show it. It's pretty exciting that we can predict some near behaviors based on observations of brain activity. However, going from these primitive calculations to assertions about processes lasting more than a couple days is like going from saying a thunderclap predicts rain, to saying that in principle, we can predict patterns of weather five years from now.

Also, some systems may NOT be provably deterministic, even in theory. I've argued that any predictions which depend on the value of pi are intrinsically imprecise, giving way necessarily, and in all cases, to the butterfly effect. In other words, there is not even theoretically any way to make accurate predictions about some systems, making determinism impossible to verify. Perhaps you should start by showing, in principle, that we can calculate the complete value of pi.

that is not how science works.

Insisting that all philosophical issues be filtered through the scientific process pretty much defines "begging the question," since as Joe pointed out, science is pretty much founded on physical determinism.

If you have reason to believe that the laws of physics do not apply to a specific phenomena or system under examination, the onus is on you to propose a test which will show this to be the case and then performing it.

I "rather tire of people" who play the BOP game with philosophical assumptions masquerading as actual science. However, I'm often wrong. Go ahead and link any experiments you can find which prove any given state of the universe can lead only to exactly one other. Then perhaps we will be amused.