Not misspoke at all. Some claim they have seen a unicorn with a purple horn and believe it is a fact and it is not it is false therefore a false fact.
A true fact would verified by objective verifiable evidence.
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Should we believe in Free Will?
- Thread starter Nakosis
- Start date
Not misspoke at all. Some claim they have seen a unicorn with a purple horn and believe it is a fact and it is not it is false therefore a false fact.
A true fact would verified by objective verifiable evidence.
The Natural Laws I refer to are the Laws that under lie our physical existence. Nothing in our physical existence is 'free' from the consequences of these Natural Laws and the outcomes of the chain of cause and effect events and decisions that are limited by these laws. The natural laws developed by science are also a consequence of the underlying Natural Laws of our physical existence.
Of course, this obviously true. Reread the above and respond.
This is a naive view, we and our decisions are largely constrained the natural laws that under lie our physical existence and outcomes of cause and effect events and decisions throughout the millennia of our physical existence.
Skwim
Veteran Member
But you weren't talking about a belief in something as a fact, but science's use of the concept:
post #142 said:
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Fits!!!
Your being an anal retentive grammarian, and it will not get you anywhere.
Someone can 'believe' they see something like unicorns, ghosts, or maybe a sasquatch, but they are not true verifiable facts.
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Okay, we differ.
Skwim
Veteran Member
Whoa there fella. It isn't my fault you can't defend what you say. You said A is B and now I'm to blame for your inability to explain or justify it. And believe me, even a 5th grader can divine the meaning of "A is B." It certainly doesn't take a grammarian, anal retentive or not, to do so. Thing is, your ad hominem here really isn't saving you from your failure to produce a coherent answer, but simply illustrates a sad desperation.
Good grief, you really don't understand the concept of fact, do you, or maybe it's a difficulty with English sentence structure. But here, let me help out. In as much as you referred to facts as they relate to science, lets take a look at fact in just this context. My favorite definition, along with that of many others, is one enunciated by Stephen Jay Gould in 1994*
"In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent."
fact
noun
[fakt]
1. something that actually exists; reality;
2. something known to exist or to have happened:
noun
[fakt]
1. something that actually exists; reality;
2. something known to exist or to have happened:
"As far as science goes the word is not even used. Facts may be referred to as true or false."
* You're probably unfamiliar with Stephen Jay Gould, but he was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation.
Source: Wikipedia
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Amazingly accurate self reflection!
Good Grief Charlie Brown!
All your sincere, devoted, fastidious effort simply confirms why a false fact is not a fact!
There is no dualism of non-interacting worlds. You already tried that nonsense; you couldn't argue it on the basis of facts. The individual photons detected in the experiments testing the non-local and realism postulates are detected by macroscopic instruments.
The thesis of determinism, as defined in SEP article, is refuted by the results of the experiments testing the Leggett-Garg inequality.
Skwim
Veteran Member
Amazingly accurate self reflection!And just as I was beginning to respect you for your thinking, too. Oh well.
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Do not take such trivia too much to heart, and you are really trying to hard to split frog hairs. It is not meaningful!
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Terrible imitation of a broken LP.
Indeed the Quantum World underlies our macro world as one inseparable physical existence, but the differences are very real. The law of gravity does not apply to the Quantum scale, and Quantum behavior has its own rules.
The thesis of determinism applies to macro world, and not necessarily in the Quantum world. Being tested by macroscopic instruments does not change anything. Pretty much all the attributes and behavior of the Quantum World are detected and measured by macro instruments. Nothing new here.
All objects that constitute what you refer to as "the macro world" (a designation that I'm certain you cannot even define specific) are composed of quanta that do not exist in a definite state in the absence of or prior to a measurement. Therefore, the thesis of determinism, as defined in the SEP article, cannot be true for "the macro world" that you have your obsolete Newtonian fantasies about.
The SEP article refers to phenomenon associated with the Quantum World. You are falsely appealing to phenomenon to falsely conclude the the thesis of determinism is 'proven false' fro the macro world. You are reaching beyond the scope of the article to justify your personal agenda.
Newtonian physics no longer fully explain the macro world. That is not the issue here.
You are stoically justifying a false view the thesis of determinism applied to the macro world to justify a personal agenda,
This unfortunate delusion is not remotely haw science views the thesis of determinism concerning the macro world.
One good explanation . . .
From: Does Micro-indeterminism entail Macro-indeterminism?
First, the case in defense of the thesis that micro-indeterminism does not entail macro-indeterminism could go something like this: there is some finite set of possible and indeterminate quantum mechanical events [Q1, Q2,… Qn], and nothing determines which of these events will occur. This is sufficient for micro-indeterminism. Now suppose that each member of the set [Q1, Q2,… Qn] would either (i) (along with the set of macro-physical events preceding it) bring some macro-physical event P about necessarily, or else (ii) at least would do nothing to impede P’s coming about deterministically from some set of antecedent macro-physical events. So, on the first story Q1 ⊃ P, and Q2 ⊃ P, and so on, so that (Q1 v Q2 v … Qn) ⊃ P. On the second story there is causal closure of the macro and/or micro physical levels, so that each of these levels is entirely causally autonomous from the other. If either of these two stories worked, then one could safeguard macro-determinism even while conceding micro-indeterminism.
Do either of these stories work? I was, for a time, tempted to think that the first one could work in principle. After all, it seemed logically possible. The second is a little more queer because it is hard to imagine that micro-physical events could be called genuinely ‘physical’ events if they were not in any sense causally connected to the observable physical realm – what would it mean to call them ‘physical’ if they were not part of one single physical plenum? However, maybe the second story deserves more sympathy than that. Perhaps the word ‘physical’ has a wider use, so that we can even refer to universes in a multiverse ensemble (if such an ensemble exists) as physical, and the events occurring in them would be genuinely physical events, even if they were causally sealed off from our observable physical world. However, something is obviously wrong, in fact, with both of these stories, as I intend now to illustrate.
Suppose that there is a macro-physical brain-state event B1 which is caused by some ‘observation’ of an (indeterministic) quantum mechanical event (of course this wouldn’t be direct observation, but just suppose that all the appearances where such that, given my scientific paradigm, it appears to me that some quantum mechanical indeterminate micro-physical event has occurred – i.e., I can ‘detect’ it). Suppose that the set of all macro-physical events prior to B1 is symbolized by ‘S’, where each event in S is either entailed by all the events prior to it, or at least, if there is a ‘first event’ in the set, that it will entail all of the events subsequent to it in the set. Let this world with S & B1 be symbolized as W. Now, there is a logically possible world W’ which is maximally ‘close’ or ‘near’ to W, in which S obtains, but B1 does not obtain. Instead, S obtains along with B2, where B2 is the observation of a different quantum mechanical event (or none at all). Here, since both B1 and B2 are macro-physical events (i.e., observable brain states), it seems as though micro-indeterminism has led to macro-indeterminism. Notice that our logically possible worlds (W: [S&B1], and W’:[S&B2]) are both metaphysically possible, and nomologically possible given our currently best understanding of physics (at least to the best of my knowledge, and accepting for the sake of argument that an indeterministic model of quantum mechanics is correct insofar as it is indeterministic).
Another source covers the options in more detail:
The Implications of Determinism {2017)
by Roy Weatherford
The problem of determinism arises in all the major areas of philosophy. The first part of this book, first published in 1991, is a critical and historical exposition of the problem and the most important ideas and arguments which have arisen over the many years of debate. The second part considers the various forms of determinism and the implications that they engender.
More to follow . . .
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Again, again and again . . . I have never claimed your mythical dualism of non-interacting worlds.
Try putting on your glasses. The SEP definition of the thesis of determinism says nothing about "the Quantum World". The definition says "the world." There is no "quantum world" vs. "macro world" where different laws apply. The dualism of non-interacting worlds that you are espousing here is anti-scientific garbage. The thesis of determinism has been experimentally proven false.
False, the observations in the article were those of behavior in the Quantum behavior in the Quantum World ONLY.
Please provide a source that reaches these conclusions concerning observations in the macro world, and note provided reference concerning the differences.
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Quote where the SEP article restricts the definition of determinism to "the Quantum behavior in the Quantum World ONLY."
There is no "macro world" where different laws apply. You can't even define your goofy idea of a "macro world".
I said, " . . . the observations for the SEP article were made ONLY of the Quantum World. That is a fact.
Still waiting for a reference that determines the thesis of determinism is proven false for the macro world.
I gave references that refer to the micro and macro world, and there difference in indeterminism and determinism. but, of course you choose to ignore them. The difference is descriptive and a matter of scale and behavior according to the Laws of Nature as science describes them.
From: Living in a Quantum World
"According to standard physics textbooks, quantum mechanics is the theory of the microscopic world. It describes particles, atoms and molecules but gives way to ordinary classical physics on the macroscopic scales of pears, people and planets. Somewhere between molecules and pears lies a boundary where the strangeness of quantum behavior ends and the familiarity of classical physics begins. The impression that quantum mechanics is limited to the microworld permeates the public understanding of science. For instance, Columbia University physicist Brian Greene writes on the first page of his hugely successful (and otherwise excellent) book The Elegant Universe that quantum mechanics “provides a theoretical framework for understanding the universe on the smallest of scales.” Classical physics, which comprises any theory that is not quantum, including Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity, handles the largest of scales."
The macro world is subject to the Law of Gravity. and the Quantum World is not on the scale of quanta and the basic behavior of the particles and energy of matter.
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Still waiting for an academic source that demonstrates that the thesis of determinism is proven false by research of evidence and observations not falsifiable in the macro world.
The bold is not a conclusion of the article.
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This is the only world that exists. Classical physics is an approximation scheme, and a useful one, but ultimately no system is governed by any classical laws whatsoever.
Another more relevant fact is that the deterministic structure of classical mechanics (and classical field theory, etc.) stems from assumptions about the nature of a world external to us as observers. The "laws" of classical physics, such as the conservation laws of non-relativistic mechanics (in either the Hamiltonian or Lagrangian scheme) or their extensions and equivalents in classical electromagnetism and classical relativistic physics, technically only hold true of isolated systems. In other words, they never actually hold true. Free will is actually built into classical physics via the assumption that we as observers are free to generalize from specific systems and in particular free our choice of initial condition without which no classical system is deterministic. From simple differential equations of particle motion in 1D to much more complicated trajectories of much more complicated systems in some phase space, the dynamical equations which govern classical systems are fundamentally indeterministic for the simple reason that solutions to differential equations are only unique if one specifies values for the arbitrary constant one gets from finding antiderivatives.
The reason this is more than just trivial elementary mathematics is how all the various classical frameworks from Newton's celestial mechanics to the far more sophisticated, elegant analytical mechanics are all based around assumptions about our abilities to make observations/experiments involving free choices. Classical laws hold only for systems that are isolated and are deterministic only once initial conditions are specified because the structure of classical physics reflects the structure of classical physical experiments/observations: Assume that a system made sufficiently isolated from the rest of the universe so as to make its study possible as a system, assume that observations can be made arbitrarily gently so as to remove the observers from consideration, and then see if the system behaves over time according to the mathematical laws in one's theory.
As physics became more advanced and our knowledge grew, such assumptions became more and more problematic as did the difficulty of trying to understanding a world using the assumption that a perfect god created an orderly universe in which inanimate things acted accorded to orderly laws. For one thing, we sought to understand more phenomena (including things like living system, electromagnetism, etc.). For another, physical theories became more and more structured around laws of thermodynamics and energy, which necessitated making assumptions about the in-principle reducibility of statistical laws of complex systems to mechanical laws governing their parts. It became more and more difficult to gain even the kind of deterministic structure one had if one assumed that we could sufficiently isolate systems and were free to choose the conditions of observations in such a manner as to generalize. We now had to assume that, if we were capable of unimaginably fast computing power and information processing, we could in principle describe, say, a small amount of gas in some container as both isolated and entirely in terms of its constituents. But the justification for this remained shaky (and is still the cause of some disagreement, but as we now know that no system described by classical statistical physics is reducible even in principle to classical mechanics or field theory, assumptions about ergodicity of classical statistical mechanics aren't as big of a deal as when Boltzmann and Maxwell and so forth had their disagreements about the nature of statistical physics).
Quantum mechanics is more deterministic than classical mechanics. This is mostly due to the fact that the dynamical equations governing quantum systems are linear, but it is also due to the manner in which human choices are built into the structure of the theory. In quantum mechanics, observables are no longer simply values we obtain from experiment but are required within the theory itself as abstractions, as are certain assumptions about equivalence classes of systems which in classical physics could be differentiated via something like changing initial conditions (quantum mechanics is a statistical theory, and is irreducibly so). The issue of indeterminism in quantum theory has more to do with indeterminate properties than anything like the kind of determinism discussed here. Bohmian mechanics is as deterministic as classical mechanics, but Bohm was quite clear that, as in classical mechanics, this deterministic structure makes assumptions about our ability to make free choices of initial conditions and false assumptions (that are FAPP true) about isolation. The issue for most physicists and philosophers who aren't supporters of Bohmian mechanics is that it introduces into physical theory a fundamental nonlocality and a new ontology via the pilot wave by which Bohmian point-particles retain determinate trajectories. What, after all, is the point of being able to describe microscopic systems as having definite positions and follow classical-like, deterministic paths when this determinism is obtained only by positing some more fundamentally ghostly, non-classical influence extending everywhere and at all times?
Quantum theory simply made us face the fact that we can't use empirical data gathered by experiments/observations which of necessity are always particular to form general laws/models without making counterfactual assumptions such as that the results of a particular experiment concerning e.g., electrons hold for electrons more generally because we were free to sample more generally than we did:
"Free choices are important both at the level of fundamental physics, and for technological applications...
Another reason why free choices are important is to establish symmetries on which physical theories can be based. For example, the concept of an electron is based on the implicit assumption that we could pick any of the electrons in the universe and find the same properties (such as its mass). More precisely, given a set of particles that are experimentally indistinguishable, the assumption that we can sample freely from this set establishes a symmetry between them."
Colbeck, R., & Renner, R. (2012). Free randomness can be amplified. Nature Physics, 8(6), 450.
It turns out that even the basic assumption that we can describe an external, idealized world according to laws that hold true providing that we allow for our free choices of experimental parameters on systems we determine to be sufficiently isolated ultimately fails. The best we can obtain is a determinism in which our ability to replicate experiments given choices of parameters is possible, but only when encoded in a physical theory (quantum theory) in a manner that allows for prediction when observation is built into the mathematical structure of the theory at even the most basic level.
Free will of a kind is demanded of any and all possible physical theory because without the ability to make choices such that we could have chosen differently the logic upon which all of physics and indeed scientific inquiry rests is lost to us. The moment we assume that our choices are determined, we lose the ability to say that anything about the results of any observation or experiment anywhere at anytime says anything at all about anything beyond what happened at that place at that time (and in a very limited way, as we lose the empirical basis to form categories such as "cells" or "planets" to study as such).