RE: determinism versus indeterminism
December 20, 2008 at 12:10 pm
(This post was last modified: December 20, 2008 at 12:23 pm by Purple Rabbit.)
(December 20, 2008 at 12:05 pm)josef rosenkranz Wrote: As for the Casimir effect if it is a result of an encounter between matter ant antimatter particles than ,may be simplistic thinking,here you are with a cause.It is not due to an encounter of matter and anti-matter. The matter and anti-matter particles are a result of random creation 'out of the blue'. In other words the phenomenon is uncaused.
(December 20, 2008 at 12:05 pm)josef rosenkranz Wrote: purple rabbit wroteAll laws you speak of in the above are purely inductive laws. Even the law of constant speed of light is inductive. Noone can gaurantee you 100% that the speed of light tomorrow stil will be constant because there is no known deductive method to obtain that result. Still all those laws have strong empirical evidence. The question is, there is no purely logical reason known why these laws hould hold at all. All these laws rest on observations in the past. We only ASSUME they keep validity in the future. And this so far has been a very fruitful assumption indeed. I am not arguing that we should drop the assumption, I'm only observing that it is an assumption and that it means that determinism has this logicaly unvalidated assumption at it's root.
(quote)
The problem of induction is much more fundamental than you assume here. You cannot deduce in any absolute way (like in deductive mathematics) conclude from past events behaviour for future events. The latter does not follow sufficient and necessarily from the former. The law is not deductive. This problem is at a much more basic level than that the sun stops rising everyday as a result of a special situation stopping the earth rotation. It means the rule is not a result from deductive logic. You can call it inductive reasoning but you cannot at any time call it deductive reasoning. The law of nature, all laws of nature, are inductive laws, they unsubstantiated assume that behaviour from the past can be extrapolated into the future.(unquote)
You seem to have not understood me.
I did not speak of any absolute law.I affirm that any physical law ,whether inductive or deductive as you say, is valid in deterministic terms only within conventional limits .
Take for instance Newtons law of physics ,they are valid only within limited speeds of the system where they act.
May be that except the speed of light which is considered as absolute,
the laws stated by Einstein and later by great physicists as Hawkings,Penrose,Friedman and others. are laws which have experimental confirmation and are valid also only within conventional limits although they deal with cosmological problems.
From a philosophical point of view they might be inductive or deductive
but that does not disminish their value as laws, accessible to the consciousness of human minds, which are explaining how the Universe ticks.
True tha modern mathematics handles with the problem of induction and deduction but I am not sure if the mathemathical formulas of physical laws by Einstein and others take into acount this aspect.
"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