there are multiple deterministic interpretations of qm too so we can keep the beauty of determinism anyway. — flannel jesus

I'm flummoxed as to why you or anyone would find deteminism beautiful. But then, you just said that physics is 'determined by subjective requirements'.....

you just said that physics is 'determined by subjective requirements'..... — Wayfarer

You put those words in quotes as if I literally said them, but I didn't say them.

I'm flummoxed as to why you or anyone would find deteminism beautiful — Wayfarer

Order. In a deterministic system, every event has its place in the system, every event has a clear explanation and follows from the way the system is. In an indeterministic system, there's chaos because "stuff just happens". There's nothing particularly beautiful about "stuff just happening", compared to the beauty of patterns and order. And you don't have to accept that, of course, it's not some kind of scientific fact that that's what beauty is. I'm not telling you you need to believe that, just saying why I do.

there are multiple deterministic interpretations of qm too so we can keep the beauty of determinism anyway. — flannel jesus

As a matter of free choice!

I didn't say them. — flannel jesus

That was what I took this to mean:

I think a surprising amount of physics is based on abstract, apparently-subjective judgements of physicists. — flannel jesus

In a deterministic system, every event has its place in the system, every event has a clear explanation and follows from the way the system is. In an indeterministic system, there's chaos because "stuff just happens". — flannel jesus

But as I’ve said, it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. As I said already, if the PSR says that everything happens for a reason, that reason might be something like the boundary conditions of a system, or the lawful structure that constrains the range of outcomes—not necessarily a single, fully specified event that had to happen and no other. Like, something will fall down, not up, but where it falls might still contain an all-important element of chance.

In other words, the reason why something happens might be that even though a system is lawful, it might still be open-ended, rather than strictly deterministic. There is sufficient reason why some outcomes are possible and others are not, but that doesn't mean every outcome is rigidly predetermined. Otherwise how could novelty ever enter the picture? How could anything happen?

Otherwise how could novelty ever enter the picture? — Wayfarer

Novelty is relative. As long as you couldn't predict it, it's novel - and you can't predict reality perfectly no matter how deterministic it is. You can predict certain low -complexity events, like the approximate location a bomb will land of you launch it at a particular angle with a particular amount of force, but you can't predict the future of a brain faster than the brain can do something that might surprise you, even if the processes in the brain are effectively macroscopically deterministic.

I found this connection come up again in a podcast I listen to. Within Reason, latest episode, debunking arguments for god with Graham Oppy.

They bring up the principle of sufficient reason and also determinism separately multiple times, but Alex OConnor makes the connection clear-ish here:

if you take my view, which is that for things to have a sufficient reason, they essentially must, like if P is a sufficient reason for Q, that's the same thing as saying that P entails Q, you know, that you can't have P and not have Q follow it.

https://podscripts.co/podcasts/within-reason/137-debunking-arguments-for-god-graham-oppy

So he's kinda getting at here what I think the connection is - if everything has a sufficient reason, then for every thing Q there exists some P that entails Q, and you can't have P without Q following it. That sounds like determinism to me. (I'm temporarily ignoring the infinite regress there, in the fact that every P is also a Q that needs its own P - they do discuss the inherent regress in the podcast if you want to listen)

This is the kind of train of thought that makes me think the principle of sufficient reason, if taken to its logical conclusion, implies determinism.

Without listening to the podcast, if P is a sufficient reason for Q, is the same thing as saying that P entails Q, then every truth is the sufficient reason for every other truth. A somewhat explosive result.

If P and if Q then P entails Q.

Somewhat explosive.

I don't see anything explosive there. This seems like one of those cases of a misapplication of symbolic logic. Yes, in symbolic logic, for all P and Q that are both true, P -> Q and Q -> P, but in natural language when someone says P entails Q they don't generally mean "two facts P and Q that have nothing to do with each other but both just happen to be true".

Then your use of "entails" is not truth functional.

it seems weird that you're unaware of this gap between what people mean by "entails" and how classic symbolic logic treats those things. Surely in your every day life you don't say things like "the fact that there are pyramids in Egypt entails that shark species have been around on earth longer than trees have". Right? I assume you don't find it reasonable to say things like that in the way you naturally speak, in the way you naturally talk about entailment.

Here's an article about the topic for your perusal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradoxes_of_material_implication

if you take my view, which is that for things to have a sufficient reason, they essentially must, like if P is a sufficient reason for Q, that's the same thing as saying that P entails Q, you know, that you can't have P and not have Q follow it.

You can't have P and not have Q follow it. If P is true, then Q is also true. Truth functional entailment.

Make up your mind.

That crows are black would be sufficient reason for seven to be three less than ten.

nope

nope — flannel jesus

A brilliant response.

One way I've approached thinking about it, and I'm not sure it works but it feels like it works, is talking about it in terms of possible worlds.

So if we go back to "the fact that there are pyramids in Egypt entails that shark species have been around on earth longer than trees have", the reason this doesn't ring true for how people naturally use the word entail is because we can imagine possible worlds where there are pyramids in Egypt but sharks haven't been around longer than trees. It's a coincidental truth that both of those things are true in this world, but one doesn't entail the other because there are possible worlds that are different.

https://gawron.sdsu.edu/semantics/course_core/lectures/truth_sets_possible_worlds.pdf

I just read up on relevance logic as well, which is very interesting.

Relevant logicians point out that what is wrong with some of the paradoxes (and fallacies) is that the antecedents and consequents (or premises and conclusions) are on completely different topics. The notion of a topic, however, would seem not to be something that a logician should be interested in — it has to do with the content, not the form, of a sentence or inference. But there is a formal principle that relevant logicians apply to force theorems and inferences to “stay on topic”. This is the variable sharing principle. The variable sharing principle says that no formula of the form A→B can be proven in a relevance logic if A and B do not have at least one propositional variable (sometimes called a proposition letter) in common and that no inference can be shown valid if the premises and conclusion do not share at least one propositional variable.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-relevance/?hl=en-GB#:~:text=The%20variable%20sharing%20principle%20says,and%20conclusion%20do%20not%20share

And that actually seems to more neatly map on to what people mean in natural language when they say one thing implies or entails another. A doesn't entail B just because they both happen to be true, A can only entail B meaningfully, to a native English speaker, if A has something to do with B - and in how I use these words, if B is true in all possible worlds where A is true.

Sure. Better approaches.

The entailment used in the podcast is not amongst the so-called paradoxes of material implication. IF the aim is to firm up the notion of cause, or of sufficient reason, by using material implication, as is set out in the quote form the podcast, then any truth will suffice. And that's not what we want.

There are modal theories of causation. These rely on limits to accessibility between possible worlds - so are somewhat arbitrary. For example, suppose we seek to explain that the rock broke the window when it hit it, we'd say something like that form every possible world in which the rock hits the window we can only access possible worlds in which the window broke. But what is missing is why only those worlds are accessible. Here we haven't explained the cause so much as repeated a description of the cause.

Relevance logic is quite interesting. In the example, the rock hit the window and the window broke, so there is the shared "variable" window. In one interpretation, it takes the accessibility relation to include a third world, so

A→B is true at a world a if and only if for all worlds b and c such that Rabc (R is the accessibility relation) either A is false at b or B is true at c. — SEP article

would be understood as that "The rock hit the window"→ "The window broke" is true at a world a if and only if for all worlds b and c such that Rabc either the rock did not hit the window at b or the window broke at c. As it stands, this also does not give a causal explanation. Something more is needed. And if we treat R as causation, then the account again becomes a description of a causal relation, not an explanation.

In none of these do we have, just form the logic, an explanation of why the antecedent brings about the consequent.

Now I suspect there is a deep reason for this, much the same one I mentioned earlier in this tread, to do with the nature of explanation. An explanation is useful when it is sufficient to stop us asking further questions. So if we ask "why did the widow break?", the answer "it was hot by a rock" might be sufficient to finish the discussion. But there is no reason form logic alone that we should stop here. SO for instance if we were interested in breaking more windows, we might continue the discussion with something like "but when I hit the window with this smaller rock it didn't break. Why?" And answer with an explanation of the rock needing to have sufficient momentum (mass times velocity) in order to break the window. And that might be enough, or we could continue with a discussion of different strengths for various panes of glass...

And the point here is that what counts as being a satisfactory causal explanation is not being a logically final answer, but being enough to stop further questions.

All this by way of pointing out that a sufficient cause is only sufficient for some particular circumstance, and never absolutely sufficient.

The entailment used in the podcast is not amongst the so-called paradoxes of material implication. IF the aim is to firm up the notion of cause, or of sufficient reason, by using material implication, as is set out in the quote form the podcast, then any truth will suffice. And that's not what we want. — Banno

That's what you're insisting on, I don't think it's true. I don't think you interpreting what was said correctly. I think I've made that clear

if you take my view, which is that for things to have a sufficient reason, they essentially must, like if P is a sufficient reason for Q, that's the same thing as saying that P entails Q, you know, that you can't have P and not have Q follow it.

The "you can't have P and not have Q follow it" is "if P is true, then Q is true", that is, P→Q.

Now P→Q is not in the list of paradoxes in the Wiki article. For good reason.

And further, if we understand, as the quote suggests, that if P→Q then P is the sufficient reason for Q, then any truth will be sufficient reason for any other truth.

Please, have a look at the argument I gave concerning causation and answering questions. It shows why we can't have purerly logical accounts of causation. A corollary would be that determinism also collapses.

that if P→Q then P is the sufficient reason for Q, then any truth will be sufficient reason for any other truth. — Banno

You keep insisting this, it's not any more compelling now than the first time you said it. That's not how people mean "entails" in natural language. If you speak to human beings regularly, you'll discover this.

It's basic propositional logic.

Your quote does not rely on " how people mean 'entails' in natural language". It gives a clearly truth-functional definition of entailment: "...you can't have P and not have Q follow it".

I'll have to leave you to it at this rate. A shame, since there are good points to the conversation. But if we can't agree on these basics, there's not much point in continuing.

Your quote does not rely on " how people mean 'entails' in natural language". — Banno

It's a quote of someone using the word entails in natural language. The "clearly truth functional definition" it gives supports my interpretation, not yours. You're being weird.