RE: Determinism, Free Will and Paradox
January 18, 2015 at 5:43 am
(This post was last modified: January 18, 2015 at 5:46 am by Mudhammam.)
(January 18, 2015 at 5:33 am)Alex K Wrote: By deterministic I mean that the state of the universe follows uniquely from its state immediately preceeding it. If only probabilities of events are uniquely determined by what came before, but the individual outcome is not, the world is not deterministic in this sense. I'd find it perverse to call such a universe deterministic...I'm trying to make sense of that with what Greene writes on pg. 341 of "The Elegant Universe"; perhaps you can help clarify. He writes: "The downfall of Laplace's vision, however, does not leave the concept of determinism in total ruins. Wave functions--the probability waves of quantum mechanics--evolve in time according to precise mathematical rules, such as the Schrödinger equation (or its more precise relativistic counterparts, such as the Dirac equation and the Klein-Gordon equation). This informs us that quantum determinism replaces Laplace's classical determinism: Knowledge of the wave functions of all of the fundamental ingredients of the universe at some moment in time allows a 'vast enough' intelligence to determine the wave functions at any prior or future time. Quantum determinism tells us that the probability that any particular event will occur at some chosen time in the future is fully determined by knowledge of the wave functions at any prior time. The probabilistic aspect of quantum mechanics significantly softens Laplacian determinism by shifting inevitability from outcomes to outcome-likelihoods, but the latter are fully determined within the conventional framework of quantum theory."
Perhaps he's simply more lax in his usage of "determinism" than you are?
He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return - Baruch Spinoza
