Determinism Is Self Defeating

[little_monkey]

You are attempting to paint the picture in religious or magical terms: because flitting sounds like something angels or fairies would do. I have two candidates in mind: 1) randomness; 2) mind

There are two kinds of randomness: epistemological randomness and ontological randomness.

Epistemological randomness is just an ignorance of the causes that produce a given effect. This is determinism even though we lack knowledge to make accurate predictions.

Ontological randomness is an event that occurs without a cause. This type of randomness is not due to ignorance; it is due to a particular range of natural phenomena being intrinsically without causation. This means that even if we had complete knowledge of initial conditions, prediction would still be absolutely impossible. This is indeterminism.

Note: we don't have any evidence of ontological randomness.

I agree. If there IS any variability in the universe, scientists will categorize it, enumerate it, and look for ways to benefit from it. Even if God was proven/provable, that wouldn't mean anything. The only thing that can stop science is that causation get completely broken, and nothing can be predicted any more.

Is there any reason why you would want science to be stopped?

Why the pessimism? Why do you think we will never have a theory to explain that? Just 100 years ago we did not understand why two atoms could combine to form a molecule. Today we do. Just 100 years ago, cosmology didn't exist. Today, it does -- and it's yanking the theists in a very bad way. Why do you insist that we should know everything, today?

I have a specific reason in this case. Science is a process of objective study, and the mind exists only as a subjective entity. I do not accept the equation of mind with brain function, because subjective existence and objective existence are not of like type.

If you would open your computer, you would see circuits opening and closing. You would not see that those operations are in effect meant to represent a whole string of zero's and one's, which in term represent symbolically to do certain operations like adding, subtracting, which in terms represents the actual functioning that you see like, print on the screen, send message to receiver, store message in registry 2, erase registry 3, clear CPU, etc. Similarly, if we would open up your brain we would see synapses and neurons reacting with electric impulses, but would not see that these represent your thoughts. Will there be a day when we can do that? Who knows.

You are looking at a "why" question - "Why do we exist?" is not a question that science will ever answer. Science can only shed some light by telling us "how" the universe works. But it is up to each and every one of us to find an answer as to why we exist, what do we want from life, how to make our lives meaningful. You wouldn't want to make those decisions based on superstitions, falsehoods or wild fairy tales as found in most religions .

Some "why" questions, at least as I see them, serve as a standing challenge to particular theories. Why the mind exists matters, because the current scientific position is that the universe can be understood purely in objective terms. To say that some objective processes are subjective is to say that dark is sometimes light.

There was a time we thought that Black Holes would not let any light out -- that's why they are called Blach Holes -- yet now we think that they can radiate (Hawking Radiation). So anything is possible -- the subjective could be explained objectively. Why not!