Thread: Determinism Logically Refuted

from thegnome54
I'm really not following your reasoning here. Saying "the lottery caused it" is a transparently human way of using cause and effect. We're talking physical interactions on a tiny scale, not large-scale events 'causing' others.

Saying the lottery caused it is a way to preserve causality in an apparently random event. The reasoning behind (B) is that, since the lottery is a necessary event, and no other events occur between it and the winning of said lottery, it must be the cause. It's a human way of defining cause and effect, to be sure, but all definitions are human ones. They can be altered if their meaning is too broad or limited.

If scale is the objection, one can merely change the situation to a measurement of an atom that results in one of ten equally possible outcomes, which is relevant in the next part of your response.

from thegnome54
And if I remember correctly, your mechanism for a probabilistic event involved some event collapsing a superposition, resulting in one of several outcomes. However, this event which collapses the superposition would also be deterministic, would it not?

I presume you are saying that state-dependent event B chooses a state from the superposition to be manifested deterministically. This is the lottery example in miniature (with an important difference), and the proposition is case (A), where the lottery must be fixed in advance, and chance outcomes are an illusion.

In the macro-scale lottery, distributing tickets to 10 people and fixing the outcome is easy. If each person has a name, you just ask each person their name and give the winning ticket to the right person. A QM event, however, is blind. The ticket counter can't distinguish between the states, because they exist equally and have the same name, X. Describe how the quantum lottery can be fixed so that the same state would win each time it takes place.

To make the task more difficult, the decision of which state wins must be made only after the tickets are sold (to conform to what is observed in experiments).

In this discussion, "probabilistic outcome" does not refer to human knowledge, but to the likelihood, supported by mathematics and physical evidence, that events at a fundamental level are unfixed, yielding an "exact state" only under observation. It's not that we don't know the value; the event/object in question exists in all states and has no value until we draw it into our causal net via observation.

Our experience of physical objects interacting causally in time can be seen as the continuous selection of a set of contiguous variables from an infinite field. The unselected variables don't cease to exist; we're just not looking at them--they're not part of the view from here. Physicality, causality and duration are foundations of our experience of reality, but not of existence itself. They manifest only where observers like us are present, and reflect the nature of such observers in relation to the whole, not fixed properties of the universe. What we take for a fixed reality is in fact highly provisional and entirely contingent upon the mind.

The universe is not changing states in a causal chain. All moments are manifest. Everything is happening at once, all of the time. Within the eternal now, we view a narrow, shifting cross-section.

This is why I say determinism mistakes the nature of duration and causality. There is a sense in which everything is accomplished, but it is the ground against which our experience unfolds. Nothing fixed is 'happening,' and nothing will happen 'next.' We're just here, now.

The lottery seems random to us because we cannot predict the outcome. All we have to go on are probabilities. However, there is going to be a very specific person who wins it. By the laws of physics, the event of that particular person winning is already set in motion and bound to happen. There is a 100% chance that that person is going to win the lottery. However, we don't have all of the information that the universe contains, so the best percentage we can give that particular person's chances is like .0000001%. That is just a figure denoting our perspective. That is all it represents. It does not take away from the fact that the person who is going to win it is going to win it. He/she in fact will.

Originally Posted by R.D.735

In the macro-scale lottery, distributing tickets to 10 people and fixing the outcome is easy. If each person has a name, you just ask each person their name and give the winning ticket to the right person. A QM event, however, is blind. The ticket counter can't distinguish between the states, because they exist equally and have the same name, X. Describe how the quantum lottery can be fixed so that the same state would win each time it takes place.

To make the task more difficult, the decision of which state wins must be made only after the tickets are sold (to conform to what is observed in experiments).

All you would have to do in that hypothetical situation would be set up the lottery process exactly the same way in every single detail. Use the machine that makes the decision in exactly the same way, with every particle doing the same thing. No changes in any of the variables involved on any level no matter how micro. Then you would get the same result every time.

From UM
All you would have to do in that hypothetical situation would be set up the lottery process exactly the same way in every single detail. Use the machine that makes the decision in exactly the same way, with every particle doing the same thing. No changes in any of the variables involved on any level no matter how micro. Then you would get the same result every time.

That would do a very good job of consistently making the same decision, but how that decision is made is still a mystery, and whether the outcome will be consistent is another matter altogether (always picking the third state is a consistent decision, but it the outcome would be no less random, since states may buy tickets in a different order, or simultaneously).

I'll propose my own idea: The states must be part of the mechanism itself. That is, each state in the quantum lottery knows which ticket is the winning ticket and can choose to take it, avoid it, or even exchange their ticket for someone else's. The physical analogy is that the states of a quantum system recognize a future event before it occurs, and know the correct outcome.

The weakness of this idea is that we must either accept time travel or risk the model falling apart due to the inability of a simple state to know the outcomes of each of all possible/future events*. In order for a state to manipulate the tickets properly, it must know the winning numbers before they are called.

A more reasonable mechanism would be desirable.

*That just opened up a subtle window into a completely different refutation of determinism that I hadn't thought about before--conflicts with the capacity of a system to hold information. It's a completely different line of argument, and would only interrupt the debate to pursue it.

Originally Posted by R.D.735

That would do a very good job of consistently making the same decision, but how that decision is made is still a mystery, and whether the outcome will be consistent is another matter altogether (always picking the third state is a consistent decision, but it the outcome would be no less random, since states may buy tickets in a different order, or simultaneously).

It is random in terms of unpatterned order, but not random in the sense that there is a gap in the chain of causation. I am not talking about the word "random" with the meaning "lack of pattern". I am talking about effects that come from causes with more than one possible effect and in which there is no reason for one possible effect to happen instead of another one.

Originally Posted by R.D.735

I'll propose my own idea: The states must be part of the mechanism itself. That is, each state in the quantum lottery knows which ticket is the winning ticket and can choose to take it, avoid it, or even exchange their ticket for someone else's. The physical analogy is that the states of a quantum system recognize a future event before it occurs, and know the correct outcome.

You used an analogy, threw knowledge into it, and then talked about knowledge in the real situation as if it was not a metaphor in the impossible hypothetical. My stance on determinism is not about human knowledge of any kind. Forget humans. I am talking about cause and effect.

Originally Posted by R.D.735

The weakness of this idea is that we must either accept time travel or risk the model falling apart due to the inability of a simple state to know the outcomes of each of all possible/future events*. In order for a state to manipulate the tickets properly, it must know the winning numbers before they are called.

*That just opened up a subtle window into a completely different refutation of determinism that I hadn't thought about before--conflicts with the capacity of a system to hold information. It's a completely different line of argument, and would only interrupt the debate to pursue it.

All of that assumes that determinism is about the ability to predict. It is not. Determinism is not about the ability to predict. It is about having one possible 100% specific effect from a 100% specific cause.

Originally Posted by wendylove

This is wrong in some many levels.

This is useless, chaos theory says that things are really sensitive to initial condition. However, note the word possible. Ofcourse things are possible, however that can't be used against something being only possible.

Clarity please.
First off all what do you mean prove, do you mean mathematically prove. If you mean scientifically, then read Popper. Not being provable does not make something false.

No it hasen't.

No it hasen't. Not being able to measure something on a quantum level does not disprove determinism.

debateable

Actually, no. Determinism does not say it can predict the future, it just say that

Thank you, I agree with all of your rebuttals.

From UM
It is random in terms of unpatterned order, but not random in the sense that there is a gap in the chain of causation. I am not talking about the word "random" with the meaning "lack of pattern". I am talking about effects that come from causes with more than one possible effect and in which there is no reason for one possible effect to happen instead of another one.
...
You used an analogy, threw knowledge into it, and then talked about knowledge in the real situation as if it was not a metaphor in the impossible hypothetical. My stance on determinism is not about human knowledge of any kind. Forget humans. I am talking about cause and effect.
...
All of that assumes that determinism is about the ability to predict. It is not. Determinism is not about the ability to predict. It is about having one possible 100% specific effect from a 100% specific cause.

In fact, I made no statement about human knowledge or the ability of humans to predict anything. It was probably a bit misleading when I personified the quantum states, giving them the ability to "know" something. Of course, they would only have to contain the information, not comprehend it, but, as I mentioned, any talk about information is completely tangential to the debate as it has progressed so far. I don't want to talk about it either.

The main point of the post was to clarify the challenge I had made. By proposing a specific mechanism whereby an apparently random quantum lottery could be fixed, I hoped that the main thrust of that challenge would be more easily understood as an appeal to more specific ideas of how determinism would work in practice.

Considering your mechanism for fixing the lottery:

All you would have to do in that hypothetical situation would be set up the lottery process exactly the same way in every single detail. Use the machine that makes the decision in exactly the same way, with every particle doing the same thing. No changes in any of the variables involved on any level no matter how micro. Then you would get the same result every time.

A vague model such as this says more by implication than by explication. I think it would be much improved if it simply said that the event in question can tell the states apart because they differ in respect to hidden variables, and the outcome can thus be fixed (or some variation of this). Then, provided these variables are kept the same, the outcome would never turn out differently in repeated trials.

Originally Posted by Xaqaria

What this all means for Laplace is that no being could possibly know every aspect of the movements and the position of all that exists in the universe at any given point in time, and so his interpretation of determinism is false, and at the very least determinism is ill equipped to make accurate predictions about the state of the entirity of any system at any given point in time.

No being? Maybe no HUMAN being can presently do so but this in no way excludes a creator-God. You are speaking from human perspective and experimentation which is quite obviously not perfect.