Do you believe in determinism?

If you drop a rock off a cliff, it will fall down.
Physics above the quantum level is deterministic, and there is no indication that the randomness at the quantum level translates to randomness above that level.
So, yes, I subscribe to determinism.

@ragingloli Yeah but dude, that’s science, not philosophy. On the philosophic side of this, one can’t certainly go back in time to prove or disprove that a certain action could have led to something else.

You can’t prove or disprove the existence of the human soul, either. But what you can do is show evidence that there is such a thing as the laws of physics. (ie. The rock drop test)
And you can also observe a lack of evidence for any systems which defy the laws of physics.

So, while perhaps there may be free choice there doesn’t happen to exist any good evidence for it. Similarly, you might want to believe in a soul but you can’t produce any good evidence for one.

No. I lean toward indeterminism, exactly for the reason @ragingloli denies. If the macroscopic world is determined by some lower order of properties—in this case that of quanta and its seemingly probabilistic nature, then the macroscopic world is determined by an indeterministic system and must itself be indeterministic.

Radioactive decay is a classic example of this. One can know the rate of decay, but the atom which decays is literally random—it is not determined by any prior state.

Even if radioactive decay is the only indeterministic event in the entire universe to happen at a macroscopic level (I think there’s more than just that), it seems to me that this would still be enough to make our universe indeterministic. In other words, if the universe was somehow replayed from its inception, then different atoms would decay in the replay, and the universe would be different—the subtle changes could even accumulate in a sort of butterfly effect.

What some physicists and philosophers have debated over the last century or so, is whether the quantum realm is really indeterministic and statistical in nature, or whether there’s some hidden variables—that a more complete theory of quantum mechanics would result in QM being a deterministic theory. There has been no development in QM and no evidence to support this view.

This is an aside, but as far as I can tell, indeterminism does not imply free will. One could make a case for it, but I see many people just assume that it follows.

@ninjacolin I always thought determinism (and most schools of philosophy) centered around things that can’t be verified, not science. A rock dropping or a tree falling in the forest making noise, or not, has nothing to do with choices or souls.

Although I must admit, I always pretty much thought philosophy is what went down before people had any grasp of psychology. (which is a science, so I denno)

To be clear, I don’t believe or disbelieve in determinism, but I just don’t see what science is doing in there. What, exactly, is the relation? If anything, then I can just say determinism is real because whenever I press start on a video game, the video game will start. The only alternatives are, the game is broken and won’t start, or something happens outside the game which prevents me from pressing start, or the power goes out. But all that doesn’t reflect on anything about people having choices, or not.

To an extent. I think that the lives of most people are determined to a reasonable degree by the circumstances they’re born into combined with psychological factors, and maybe even biological ones.

I still believe that we have the free will to react to situations as they occur though, and I also feel that through sheer determination (not determinism :-) that even in the most unlikely circumstances we can change our life situations and behavior patterns.

This is an interesting subject to me, and one of which I was planning on reading more about when I get more time and money.

What it comes down to is this: can the real world be described in terms of mathematics? I say the answer is yes and no. Yes, because the laws of motion describe how things move and no because to define precisely where something is takes an infinite number of decimal places and can only be approximated.

Psychology knows less about its subject matter than philosophy, in my opinion. Philosophy is down to a science, I would say: Logic and/or mathematics. You can calculate the soundness of conclusions.

Whatever you can produce a true and sound conclusion for gets to be believable by Ninjacolin or by any friend of Science. So simple.

The only reason I believe in determinism is because I’ve never observed an indeterminate anything. Not once! So, being scientific about it, my conclusions about determinism must follow what can be observed not only by me but also by my peers.

Since everything we’ve ever done comes from the past both in the macroscopic universe and the microscopic universe and even at the atomic scale we see predictable rules at play.. then it seems hard to extrapolate that somehow the human brain does something special and skips the causal order that everything else in the whole universe seems to follow. There just doesn’t seem to be any evidence that this would be the case.

@Kropotkin, nice thoughts. The atoms surely keep their rate of decay by some sort of clock at which point some mechanism which we don’t understand causes the decay order. All we know is that they decay in an unpredictable (to humans) order. We don’t know whether they could decay in a different order if every atom in the universe was reset back to 10 years ago.