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Determinism is logically flawed: an argument in need of critique and advice

LegionOnomaMoi

Veteran Member
Premium Member
I've been trying to write-up a concise, clear, and coherent argument against the idea that determinism, or more precisely any deterministic worldview that implicitly or explicitly relies in some way on determinism in physics, is flawed. I have thus far failed to write anything that met all three criteria. I have therefore included a draft of a (fairly) concise (at least for me) version that I hope others might find interesting enough (or confusing enough) to make suggestions concerning, pose questions about, point out flaws made, or post reactions/criticisms more generally. Thanks!

Consider the classical and infamous formulation of determinism given by Laplace:

“We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.”

[Nous devons donc envisager l'état présent de l'univers comme l'effet de son état antérieur, et comme la cause de celui qui va suivre. Une intelligence qui pour un instant donné connaîtrait toutes les forces dont la nature est animée et la situation respective des êtres qui la composent, si d'ailleurs elle était assez vaste pour soumettre ces données à l'analyse, embrasserait dans la même formule les mouvements des plus grands corps de l'univers et ceux du plus léger atome: rien ne serait incertain pour elle, et l'avenir, comme le passé, serait présent à ses yeux.]



This”intelligence” or “intellect” which is capable of representing and analyzing the configuration state of the universe at a particular moment is, according to the deterministic worldview, at least in principle capable of predicting all future states arbitrarily far into the future. Everything is determined.

It is important to understand that Laplace intended this “intellect” to be a kind of idealized physicist/natural philosopher, not a deity or some being with magical abilities. One could consider this “intellect” as a kind of epistemic determinism in which, at least in principle, given complete knowledge of the state of any and all systems (including the entire cosmos) at some point in time, all future states can in principle (if not in practice) be known. A better way of understanding “Laplace’s demon” (why it is often described as a demon, including in the Wikipedia article, I don’t know) is as a physicist with a computer capable of storing the data of all forces acting on all “items of which nature is composed” and the positions of these items, and of plugging them into the requisite equations from physics (e.g., Newton’s equations of motion).

Either interpretation emphasizes the fallacy inherent in this conception of deterministic laws of physics. In classical physics and largely in modern physics, we extrapolate general laws by isolating various systems and studying how they “evolve” in time. We then generalize regularities found, encoding them in equations such as the (second-order) partial differential equation Force= mass * acceleration or Maxwell’s equations. The problem is that in all laws and theories derived from this method, from Newton’s laws to Einstein’s equations, we have removed ourselves. To illustrate this better, let’s consider Laplace’s intellect again.

As an idealized physicist, this “intellect” exists in the universe, as does whatever means (enormous brain, computer, etc.) it uses to store the configuration state of the universe and analyze it using the mathematics of the laws of physics. To simplify things, let’s assume that the “intellect” consists of a physicist plus a computer which can be fed the data of the state of the ‘universe system” at some time and calculate all future states using the equations of the laws of physics. The physicist and the computer exist in the universe. Thus the computer must, in addition to storing the requisite information on the rest of the universe, encode the precise configurations of particles which compose itself and the physicist. But this means that the computer must store this information somewhere, and that place ALSO exists in the universe. This in turn means that the physical particles that make-up this storage must be encoded by the computer for analysis. Ad infinitem.

Put differently, in order for any intellect that isn’t supernatural to be able to encode the specifications on the configuration of all particles in the universe, this intellect must encode include its own state. But to represent its own state physically (to encode or “store” it as data) it needs to expand the universe (it needs more particles than itself and the rest of the universe to represent the state of itself and the rest of the universe).

Put MOST simply, I can’t encode the state of the universe and analyze these data to calculate the future without being outside of the universe.

THAT’s the fallacy of the deterministic description of the cosmos from the perspective of physics. No matter how many times we analyze isolated systems to extract general laws that describe the evolution of general systems, we do so by writing ourselves out of the picture.

Quantum indeterminism is arguably nothing more radical than our own intuition. We cannot sufficiently isolate quantum systems in a way that allows us to pretend we aren’t conscious agents setting up experiments, making calculations, and building models. We can’t be “passive” observers whose observations don’t disturb the systems, but necessarily are participatory observers (to use Wheeler’s phrase). The indeterminacy of quantum theory is perhaps most important because it highlights the fact that in order to pretend classical physics shows the classical world is deterministic we had to

1) Pretend we, as the observers studying these systems, didn’t exist (that we could sufficiently isolate systems to ignore the influence of observation/measurement)

2) Having written ourselves out of the description, we were logically justified in then including ourselves in the domain of the applications of our descriptions (equations/laws).

This last point has been made elsewhere, and I include an example of another’s formulation:

“A key observation which is central to our argument is that it is fallacious to take methods and formal frameworks which have proved successful when applied to small subsystems of the universe and apply them to the universe as a whole...the [reason] Newtonian paradigm cannot be extended to the whole universe is that its success relies on our ability to cleanly separate the roles of the initial conditions from the laws in explanations of physical phenomena. But this separation in turn relies on our ability to do an experiment many times while varying the initial conditions. Only by making use of the freedom to run an experiment over and over again with different initial conditions can we determine what the laws are – for the laws code regularities that are invariant under variation of the initial conditions.”

Smolin, L., and Unger, R. M. (2015). The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time. Cambridge University Press.

It is often argued or claimed that quantum mechanics and quantum theory more generally offer some kind of alternative to the determinism of classical physics, and moreover the ONLY alternative. This is not really correct. In reality, quantum physics showed us that we made a serious logical fallacy in extending the laws we developed by extrapolating from the dynamics of mechanical systems in some idealized isolation to the whole of reality. Quantum physics forced us to include ourselves as observers and stop pretending that our descriptions of mechanical systems were limited to these.

As a final demonstration of the flaws of thinking classical deterministic physics could, even in principle, apply to us, consider the infamous law of the conservation of energy (or of momentum, or of energy-momentum). It is often not stated that this law (or these laws) only holds for isolated (or more accurately “closed”) systems. In experimental practice, the violation of the conservation of energy is practically a given, because

1) We are never able to actually create closed systems or model systems as closed without being inaccurate

&

2) Whenever we do not find energy to be conserved, we either modify theory (e.g., by changing the conservation law to the conservation of energy-momentum, among other things), or far more commonly we conclude that the system wasn’t “closed”. In other words, the criterion that the conservation of energy holds only for closed systems is used to determine whether a system is closed.

It is the second of these that is the more important. It is circular (at least partially). The energy is conserved in any system which is closed, but we don’t have any way of determining whether a system is closed without conservation laws. More fundamentally, every experiment that is closed doesn’t include the scientists running the experiment, and thus even in principle there can be no experiment which shows that the most fundamental conservation laws hold in general because such an experiment would include systems outside of the experiment (namely, the experimenters and whatever technology they used).

The only scientific foundations for determinism (classical physics, which is deterministic) only works because in classical physics we use free will to determine how to measure/observe systems which we have excluded ourselves from, and then include ourselves and everything else as being governed by the descriptions we obtain from these observations/measurements.
 
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Shadow Wolf

Certified People sTabber
I'm watching this thread so it doesn't get lost, and I'll reply tomorrow, or, technically later today as it's 3 in the morning and I'm about to try to do that sleep thing I've been finding to be a terribly difficult thing to do lately.
 

LegionOnomaMoi

Veteran Member
Premium Member
I'm watching this thread so it doesn't get lost, and I'll reply tomorrow, or, technically later today as it's 3 in the morning and I'm about to try to do that sleep thing I've been finding to be a terribly difficult thing to do lately.
Thanks!
 

Windwalker

Veteran Member
Premium Member
Very nice. Of course I agree. This spills over into philosophies which believes as science progresses in its discoveries it will tell us what the reality of reality is. The entire approach excludes themselves from the equation. The only way is to take the subject, the one observing, and turn it into an object itself to be observed. But turning the subject into an object still requires a subject to see the object! You have to include the subject itself, as the subject itself, which cannot be observed and therefore not measured. In other words, "real reality" cannot be observed and at the same time be said to be a whole picture, or truly be an accurate description.

This where you then have to step outside doing science alone which examines objects, and embrace simple being itself as the subject, unfolding the reality of the subject as the subject, expanding perception and awareness itself as the subject. Then to see the whole, you go a step further and make the two, subject and object, nondual. At which point, you're now beyond both science and religion, and embracing both as nondual, as neither opposites nor the same. In other words, neither science nor religion exposes ultimate reality as it is. Both are however, fingers pointing to the moon, metaphors. Science is metaphor. Religion is metaphor. Metaphor is is pointer, not a descriptor of what the thing itself actually is.
 

beenherebeforeagain

Rogue Animist
Premium Member
I've been trying to write-up a concise, clear, and coherent argument against the idea that determinism...is flawed.
By this statement, I am perceiving that you are arguing FOR determinism...?

First thought: could this be an example of Godel's incompleteness theorems? That we have to make certain assumptions about either the underlying nature of the universe, and/or our methods and our abilities to know about that universe, that cannot be proven within the system of logic/observation we are using to understand the universe?

Second thought (and possibly part of the first): is this an issue of the problem of induction, in that we generalize laws from limited observations, and at the limit of those laws, realize we cannot in fact trust that we have generalized correctly--that there may actually be other laws that we could have induced (or may yet identify), had our observations and methods of induction worked differently--that would better/more accurately explain the universe we observe or logically/fundamentally assume to be?
 

Willamena

Just me
Premium Member
One could consider this “intellect” as a kind of epistemic determinism in which, at least in principle, given complete knowledge of the state of any and all systems (including the entire cosmos) at some point in time, all future states can in principle (if not in practice) be known. A better way of understanding “Laplace’s demon” (why it is often described as a demon, including in the Wikipedia article, I don’t know) is as a physicist with a computer capable of storing the data of all forces acting on all “items of which nature is composed” and the positions of these items, and of plugging them into the requisite equations from physics (e.g., Newton’s equations of motion).

From Stanford:
In Laplace's story, a sufficiently bright demon who knew how things stood in the world 100 years before my birth could predict every action, every emotion, every belief in the course of my life. Were she then to watch me live through it, she might smile condescendingly, as one who watches a marionette dance to the tugs of strings that it knows nothing about.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/
 

atanu

Member
Premium Member
This”intelligence” or “intellect” which is capable of representing and analyzing the configuration state of the universe at a particular moment is, according to the deterministic worldview, at least in principle capable of predicting all future states arbitrarily far into the future. Everything is determined.
...
Put MOST simply, I can’t encode the state of the universe and analyze these data to calculate the future without being outside of the universe.

THAT’s the fallacy of the deterministic description of the cosmos from the perspective of physics. ....

Quantum indeterminism is arguably nothing more radical than our own intuition. We cannot sufficiently isolate quantum systems in a way that allows us to pretend we aren’t conscious agents setting up experiments, making calculations, and building models. ....
...
The only scientific foundations for determinism (classical physics, which is deterministic) only works because in classical physics we use free will to determine how to measure/observe systems which we have excluded ourselves from, and then include ourselves and everything else as being governed by the descriptions we obtain from these observations/measurements.

1. Above, I have attempted to summarise the key points. I think that you will not be able to get an agreement that 'conscious agents' have influence on results.... The discussion will degenerate into endless loops.

2. I believe that we know many things but we do not know that which knows. I also believe that it is valid to ask "Who will know the knower?" and "Who will see the seer?"
 
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Skwim

Veteran Member
LegionOnomaMoi said:
Consider the classical and infamous formulation of determinism given by Laplace:

“We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.”​

In classical physics and largely in modern physics, we extrapolate general laws by isolating various systems and studying how they “evolve” in time. We then generalize regularities found, encoding them in equations such as the (second-order) partial differential equation Force= mass * acceleration or Maxwell’s equations. The problem is that in all laws and theories derived from this method, from Newton’s laws to Einstein’s equations, we have removed ourselves. To illustrate this better, let’s consider Laplace’s intellect again.

As an idealized physicist, this “intellect” exists in the universe, as does whatever means (enormous brain, computer, etc.) it uses to store the configuration state of the universe and analyze it using the mathematics of the laws of physics. To simplify things, let’s assume that the “intellect” consists of a physicist plus a computer which can be fed the data of the state of the ‘universe system” at some time and calculate all future states using the equations of the laws of physics. The physicist and the computer exist in the universe. Thus the computer must, in addition to storing the requisite information on the rest of the universe, encode the precise configurations of particles which compose itself and the physicist. But this means that the computer must store this information somewhere, and that place ALSO exists in the universe. This in turn means that the physical particles that make-up this storage must be encoded by the computer for analysis. Ad infinitem.

Thing is, the demon isn't in need of any of such analyses and computations. He would operate solely on the principle of cause/effect, the heart of determinism. To insist that he act as a computer and go through all its machinations is to unnecessarily complicate the issue. Forget the computer. If you need to introduce Laplace's demon in order establish a flaw in determinism then think of him as Laplace described him: an intellect with knowledge of "all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed," AND how they interact. .

The demon would see events A, B, C, D and know that because of them they would necessarily act as a cause of event Z. Why? Because he's aware of all the relevant forces and the effects connected with them.

But this is all needlessly playing let's pretend to the crux of the issue, which is the question: why does stuff happen? From where I sit there are only two possibilities: randomness and cause/effect (determinism). Although randomness may occur at the quantum level, none of the events would individually and randomly impact anything above that level, which leaves cause/effect as the operative agent.

Keep in mind that all that determinism says is that every effect has a cause, and because of this effects (events) happen by necessity and are therefore inevitable. NOW, if events don't occur because they're caused (determined) then one is left to come up with some other reason. So far I haven't seen any.


.

.
 
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Willamena

Just me
Premium Member
Thing is, the demon isn't in need of any of such analyses and computations. He would operate solely on the principle of cause/effect, the heart of determinism.
.
That's to miss what the demon is: apart from determinism.
 

LegionOnomaMoi

Veteran Member
Premium Member
By this statement, I am perceiving that you are arguing FOR determinism...?
Your perception was wrong, because my post was poorly written. Actually the whole thing was flawed from the start because I really wanted to make Laplace's statement the starting point as to me it serves a dual role: it is both the statement most associated with determinism and a clear demonstration that classical and much of modern physics rests upon the assumption that we don't exist. Classical physics was developed using the assumption that we could freely choose to prepare or specify the initial state of various mechanical systems (by "freely choose" I refer to the fact that, given any experiment or determination of an initial state in classical physics we assume that our decisions to prepare or specify the system in the manner we have had no effect upon the system, thereby allowing us to generalize from the results of different experiments with different systems to formulate dynamical laws). It separates systems that are considered by any theory in classical physics from those considering these systems. It then infers that the generalizations abstracted from these results apply to those who were always and necessarily treated as independent of any experiments/observations.

A better starting place would have been Descartes. In an attempt to take skepticism to the absolute extreme, he argued that we can't even prove anything observed exists (we could be in The Matrix or, in his example, find ourselves in a fake reality imposed upon us). He then argued that even given such extreme skepticism, in which an individual tries to doubt the truth/existence of anything and everything, there must remain one thing which such a skeptic can be sure of: the skeptic. That is, in order to doubt that one exists (at least as a mind/consciousness), one must doubt, which mean one exists in order to doubt (cogito ergo sum).
Classical physics evolved into a paradoxical reversal of this most basic necessity (that one has to exist to question whether one exists). Having assumed that our observations our actually true (even though we know all measurements are inexact and even though classical physics quickly required descriptions of systems in terms of probabilities and statistics), and having assumed that our generalizations of these observations that were codified in the mathematical and deterministic "laws of physics", we could therefore infer that we must also be described by these self-same laws, making us no different than the deterministic, mechanical systems we observed to derive the laws we did. We then used these findings that depended upon our status as observers separate from all the systems observed (and capable of "observation"), we could deny our volition.
Descartes allowed for the extreme fallibility of sense-data/observations and showed that the "I" or conscious self must still exist in order to ponder existence. Classical physics tried to assumed that the sense-data of observers must exist in order to deny the existence of the observers (that is, it denied the existence of observers in their role as such).
First thought: could this be an example of Godel's incompleteness theorems?
No.
Second thought (and possibly part of the first): is this an issue of the problem of induction, in that we generalize laws from limited observations, and at the limit of those laws, realize we cannot in fact trust that we have generalized correctly--that there may actually be other laws that we could have induced (or may yet identify), had our observations and methods of induction worked differently--that would better/more accurately explain the universe we observe or logically/fundamentally assume to be?
IMO, sure, absolutely.
 

LegionOnomaMoi

Veteran Member
Premium Member
Thing is, the demon isn't in need of any of such analyses and computations.
Then it isn't the demon.

He would operate solely on the principle of cause/effect, the heart of determinism.
The heart of the causality principle is actually quite recent and is based upon and rooted in the validity of classical Newtonian mechanics. For Aristotle, the truth value of propositions could be causally efficacious (but shouldn't be, hence his rather bad counter-argument against the fact that statements about the future cause the future by virtue of being true or false). Perhaps the most common view of causality historically has been fatalism of some sort, whereby one can somehow decide to act in this or that way yet never escape the fated end result.
The idea that, for any particular state of the universe, any event, any outcome, etc., is sufficiently and necessarily determined by a cause immediately preceding it is based on Newtonian physics. In particular, it is rooted in the fact that, having specified initial conditions for the differential equations describing the dynamical evolutions of mechanical systems, the past and future states of such systems can be known immediately by solving this equation (which, in general, isn't possible; another point against this validity of this mindset).

an intellect with knowledge of "all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed," AND how they interact.
Such an intellect either would not exist in the universe, would not be describable by these forces and positions, or would be incapable of this knowledge. In other words, for this intellect to exist in the universe in a non-supernatural way then it would have to know the forces acting on the items that make it a physical reality, but this knowledge would require physical representation outside the universe. Alternatively, this intellect could "know" things without this knowledge being represented physically, allowing not only for "free will" (mental causation) but all kinds of supernatural nonsense.

The demon would see events A, B, C, D and know that because of them they would necessarily act as a cause of event Z. Why? Because he's aware of all the relevant forces and the effects connected with them.
The demon is not supposed to be supernatural in the sense that the demon is supposed to be, at least in principle, a reality (an idealized physicist). This is opposed to e.g., Newton's God-Mechanic who started the whole thing in motion; Laplace rejected the design hypothesis but held that the mechanical evolution of systems were nonetheless described by Newtonian physics. So an "intellect" who could plug the relevant data into Newton's equations or into the state equations from classical physics more generally could calculate outcomes arbitrarily into the future. That's why Laplace demands that the intellect be able to both know and analyze the relevant data: it isn't an omniscient or supernatural entity but the idealized physicists who could in principle perform the task required. The problem is that this idealized physicist would therefore exist outside the universe (because the physical system must be considered isolated in order even to be a system and the observer was necessarily considered to be wholly separate from the system observed/analyzed/tested/etc.)

From where I sit there are only two possibilities: randomness and cause/effect (determinism)
Cause/effect isn't determinism. Determinism holds that the state of any system (including the cosmos) at any time t must be a necessary and sufficient result/outcome of the state of affairs immediately prior to t. Thus, Aristotle's "final causes" are ruled out as legitimate causes in determinism as are things like fate or god. Deterministic causality requires that effects be uniquely determined by the set of causes immediately preceding them, Cause/effect doesn't.
Although randomness may occur at the quantum level, none of the events would individually and randomly impact anything above that level, which leaves cause/effect as the operative agent.

Keep in mind that all that determinism says is that every effect has a cause, and because of this effects (events) happen by necessity and are therefore inevitable.
Were this true, then determinism wouldn't be coherent. First, because the fact that "every effect has a cause" doesn't prohibit that effects be there own causes, or that causes result from effects, or that causes determine effects. Second, as formulated it is indistinguishable from theistic predestination or fatalism or any number of religious/supernatural belief systems in which "effects (events) happen by necessity and are therefore inevitable" because it allows that e.g., "god did it" be a cause for any effect. Finally, it doesn't follow that because "every effect has a cause" therefore "effects (events) happen by necessity and are therefore inevitable".
 
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