RE: determinism versus indeterminism
December 16, 2008 at 3:00 pm
(This post was last modified: December 16, 2008 at 4:04 pm by Purple Rabbit.)
(December 16, 2008 at 2:26 pm)josef rosenkranz Wrote: I think that modern science and philosophy are so tightly linked that you can barely separate them as different branches.The current scientific view is that the Casimir effect is an example of an uncaused event.
Anyway you can not separate physical events from causality because each event hapens within space-time coordinates being always a link
in a chain of previous timely and posterior timely events.
The current event is always the effect of a multitude of previous events and the cause of a multitude of posterior events.
There can not be a physical event born out of nothing and it can not disappear in nothing.(Except the God allmighty who does not exist).
(December 16, 2008 at 2:26 pm)josef rosenkranz Wrote: Does that mean that we have here a deterministic relation?The philosopher takes it yet a step further and stumbles on the Problem Of Induction so rightly identified by David Hume as a critical issue in our thinking. The philosopher would say that the results of previous experiments in no way logically guarantee the outcome of the next experiment. It is not an absolute but a probable. Hume couldn't fix this shortcoming and nobody has ever found a way out of it. That the sun has risen every day for millions of years is not an absolute guarantee that it will rise tomorrow. Essentially there are two methods of reasoning deduction and induction. Only strict deductive logic can yield absolute results and only in the sense that given that the assumptions are true and the deduction is sound, the conclusion is absolute. Empirical science heavily leans on inductive methods, as does your Ohm Law, and therefore can't give absolute results.
Obviously -yes, but only to be satisfactory for a technician and not for a scientist.
The scientst will measure all three parametres with increasingly accurate apparatuses and he will find that the results are always slightly different.
The cause of it can be that the voltage fluctuates prmanently for an indefinite number of reasons and so does the resistence as a result of influence of the ambient temperature or humidity or changes in the strucure of it's material during the repeated experiment.
The scientist will therefore rewrite the simple law of Ohm to a more complex one related to a certain number of external conditions.
Now repeating the experiment for a big number of times he will obtain a statistical result which has at it's core the determinisic values derived from Ohms basic law and at it's margins, the more experiments he has performed the more indeterministic values.
If the scientist will try to measure the three paremetres down to the level of subatomical particles he will be trapped in the uncertainity principle.
This was a simple experiment but more of such experiments can be imagined in every domain of science especially in byology where al laws ,even the most basical ones are of a statisical structure.
I think that I have made myself a little bit clearer when speaking about the duality of determinism and indeterminism.
I see the importance of recognition of this aspect as a law of nature for the benefit of atheism for reasons I have already expressed in previos threads.
"I'm like a rabbit suddenly trapped, in the blinding headlights of vacuous crap" - Tim Minchin in "Storm"
Christianity is perfect bullshit, christians are not - Purple Rabbit, honouring CS Lewis
Faith is illogical - fr0d0
Christianity is perfect bullshit, christians are not - Purple Rabbit, honouring CS Lewis
Faith is illogical - fr0d0