Determinism Is Self Defeating

[little_monkey]

Dr Eisen probably won't prove anything at all - but there may come a time when we have evidence that we don't have now, sure. That doesn't give us any reason to give out special passes in the now, imo.

No, but it DOES mean that philosophical determinism isn't the threat to science that Joe (and probably most people) say it is. In fact, science already uses probabilities to account for the difference the range of possible outcomes of a system beforehand, and the actual outcome of the system once it unfolds and is directly measurable.

Anyway, if philosophical determinism is being based on physical evidence and scientific logic, then consider this: bursts of energy from events on distant stars aren't predictable. We have evidence of such bursts, and assume that such bursts will occur again in our future, but absolutely cannot predict them. This means that we have to account for such bursts in any fine-tuned calculations we're doing, which will therefore be probabilistic at best, or purely chaotic at worst.

So I don't think using physical observations as evidence of determinism works at all. We're stuck with a philosophical approach.

I think we've done this before: you are confusing what is reality and our knowledge of reality. The reason we use probability simply means we don't know all the relevant factors. Tossing a coin is the typical example: if we knew all the forces acting on a coin, we would be able to predict its outcome, instead we don't, and so we deal with this situation using the probability that it's going to be 50% heads, 50% tails. This is a reflection of our knowledge, not that reality is not deterministic. The alternative is to believe in magic, for lack of a better word. After 500 years of scientific investigation, there's not a shred of evidence that this universe functions on magic.