Can @Kenosha Kid, @jgill, @fdrake and the like weigh in on the accuracy of what I was saying up-thread about predictor systems (like human beings) being inherently chaotic / non-linear systems? My math isn't good enough to verify that formally, but the similarity between prediction and backward causation, plus the relationship of backward causation to apparent randomness, seems like it has to guarantee it; i.e. foreseeing the supposed future necessarily changes the past that that future was foreseen from and so changes the future which then etc...

Divergences would be expected to be within, not beyond, global constraints such as gravity.

What effects do uncaused quantum events have on the macro-scale world? You'd think that all those "tiny divergences from initial conditions will add up over time to great divergences" would be observable at the macro scale, but what we observe is consistent - similar causes lead to similar events. — Harry Hindu

On the macro scale things proceed more or less as we expect. Water always seems to erode the land, for example, but we have no way of knowing what effect random quantum events might have on the precise courses of erosion.

It is a groundless assumption that, given exactly the same initial conditions, a flow of water would produce exactly the same erosion patterns, down to the micro-physical level, over and over again if we were able to "rerun" it. I say it is groundless because there is no possible way to confirm it.

I see no contradiction between classical and quantum mechanics, they just present different levels of granularity.

Yes; but then you are going back to quantum phenomena to produce randomness.

What we in the article though is indeterminism in a classical system without reliance on quantum phenomena.

The salient point is that determinism is not found in classical physics but assumed. The article goes some way to showing that the assumption might be removed without cost.

If that is the case it is a point worth making, especialy given the number of threads involving causal chains hereabouts:

turkeyMan's Evolution & Growing Awareness
@substantivalism's Infinite casual chains and the beginning of time?
@PhilosophyNewbie's Kalam cosmological argument
@Pippen's Refutation of a creatio ex nihilo
@Samuel Lacrampe's Simple Argument for the Soul from Free Will
@Benj96's Why does the universe have rules?


Much hinges here. We ought be clear about it. — Banno

We are just trying to approach this objectively. Many of us want to feel in control.

We are just trying to approach this objectively. Many of us want to feel in control. — turkeyMan

Sure. It might not be a good idea to pretend to be in control when you are not. Better to become comfortable with uncertainty.

How does “due to error we can never predict the position of the balls” lead to “the notion that the universe is determined fails”? I would agree that the notion that we can predict the universe fails, but those aren’t the same thing. Not that I agree with the notion that it’s deterministic.

Wrote a post trying to explain some chaos concepts a while ago. Since you're a meteorologist I'd guess you probably already know it and are making a point regarding chaos being a buzzword most of the time, but just in case — fdrake

I was a meteorologist sixty years ago. A math prof 1971 - 2000. My interest stems from pure mathematics and I've written about extending the iterative process to infinite compositions, mostly in the complex plane. Chaotic behavior crops up, but my main interest is in behavior around fixed points and obtaining striking imagery (not fractals). Indifferent fixed points tend to be the most complicated - even the word suggests thumbing its nose at the mathematician! Thanks. :smile:

Might be more accurate to say that evidence suggests nondeterminism? — jorndoe

Sure, and we also have evidence that suggests determinism. How do we determine which is the case.

The world is one; it's not neatly divided into micro and macro scales. E.g. radioactivity, a quantic phenomenon, is an important cause of genetic mutations, which are an important driver of evolution. — Olivier5

Exactly. Hence my point that QM and classical physics need to be unified - kind of like how genetics and the theory of evolution by natural selection are unified micro and macro theories that support each other, not contradict each other like QM and classic physics. The glue to unify them, IMO, would be a proper theory of consciousness.

Divergences would be expected to be within, not beyond, global constraints such as gravity. — Janus

Gravity is part of the system we are talking about, not beyond it. And there are theories of quantum gravity, which seems to indicate that there is randomness in the force and possibly the direction of gravity, so why do we see the the balls in the box fall into predictable patterns at the bottom rather than fill all corners and sides of the box?

On the macro scale things proceed more or less as we expect. Water always seems to erode the land, for example, but we have no way of knowing what effect random quantum events might have on the precise courses of erosion. — Janus

You seem to be confusing you not knowing something is the case with indeterminism.

It is a groundless assumption that, given exactly the same initial conditions, a flow of water would produce exactly the same erosion patterns, down to the micro-physical level, over and over again if we were able to "rerun" it. I say it is groundless because there is no possible way to confirm it. — Janus

It is just as groundless to say that it wouldn't happen the same again, so you need to come up with a better argument that doesn't focus on using our ignorance as evidence that indeterminism is true.

I dunno. I'd hesitate to say prediction = causation in any way. You have to do a lot of work to interpret the estimated parameters of a statistical model causally.

Say if you're studying lung cancer rates observed in hospitals within countries, and you have country level data, hospital indicator and smoking status of the individual as predictors. If you took an individual that was a non-smoker, then made them a smoker , you'd get something close to a causal interpretation of increased risk. If you took an individual that lived in Scotland, then put them in England, you'd get another change in risk. Does that mean this individual moving to England suddenly gets an increased lung cancer risk as soon as they cross the border?

Sure, and we also have evidence that suggests determinism. How do we determine which is the case. — Harry Hindu

Can't we have both? Some things are deterministic, some aren't... Actually, this is what evidence suggests. (And perhaps with further nuance, sometimes, depending on wider context or whatever, some things are variously deterministic or not...)

That doesn’t sound like the kind of thing I’m talking about. I mean like how if you could send information back in time (backward causation) to show someone their future, their foreknowledge of that future would then change their behavior and so also change what their future ends up actually being. Likewise, if that person merely predicts their own future in an ordinary way (or just hears such a prediction), those expectations about the future will change their behavior and so make their actual future vary from the predictions.

True backward causation introduces true randomness (even if the universe was otherwise deterministic, the moment that information from the future arrives introduces a fork in the timeline, and from the perspective of someone living through that moment it’s random which timeline they “end up in”). So it seems that something that seems to approximate backward causation (ordinary prediction) would in turn introduce something that looks approximately like randomness, i.e. chaos, even if everything was technically strictly deterministic.

IOW it seems like it must necessarily be very difficult to predict the future of something that can predict the future.

if you could send information back in time (backward causation) to show someone their future, their foreknowledge of that future would then change their behavior and so also change what their future ends up actually being. — Pfhorrest

If information simply went back in time at all, it would be a "resulting" physical state that is also a "prior" physical state, but being a physical state in at least a Newtonian sort of sense, it should have some effect on the resulting physical state which could lead to a different result. You wouldn't need an intelligence to cause the conflict. Something akin to this is behind the Chronology Protection Conjecture.

Likewise, if that person merely predicts their own future in an ordinary way (or just hears such a prediction), those expectations about the future will change their behavior and so make their actual future vary from the predictions. — Pfhorrest

Suppose instead of a person, it's just a computer program competing in a "tournament" of sorts. A program may be coded, say, to run Monte Carlo simulations of other programs to affect its odds of winning the tournament. In such a way we can abstract out the intelligence and the person. (Incidentally I've competed in such tourneys before... it's fun). But this isn't changing any program's behavior; it's simply coding what the behavior is. And the result isn't necessarily chaotic just because your program is playing by these rules. Does that make sense?

If we got into it we'd be discussing your philosophical system rather than the thread topic.

I'm not saying anything about this has to do with humans or intelligence, merely giving humans with intelligence as an example of a predictive system. The computer example you give works perfectly fine for me too.

You say that in that case the result isn't necessarily chaotic. That's what I'd like more information on, because it seems intuitively like it must be chaotic, because every change in prediction causes a change in behavior which changes the future prediction which changes the behavior and so on in a non-linear manner. (You say "isn't changing any program's behavior", and in one sense, a conditional sense, that's true, but I mean in the sense of the consequent of that conditional. All the "if-then"s are the same, sure, but if every "then" results in a different "if" that then necessitates a different "then" which produces a still different "if"...).

Nothing about this has anything to do with my philosophical system, this is just a comment on the randomness-vs-chaos subthread of this topic. My original point of commenting was just to clear up the conflation of randomness with chaos, and this line of conversation is an extension of that, about how even if we didn't have randomness, the consequent predictability would then make any world with beings like us trying to exploit that predictability chaotic, and hence unpredictable still.

You say that in that case the result isn't necessarily chaotic. That's what I'd like more information on, because it seems intuitively like it must be chaotic, — Pfhorrest

It's a bit tough to talk about since in my mind the specs are a bit fuzzy.

These tournaments I describe are often playing with some game theoretical situation... in these situations there could be an ideal strategy such as "pick at random A 30% of the time, B 5% of the time, C 0% of the time, and D 65% of the time, regardless of any past behaviors of the entity you play against". A simple program playing this strategy could do no better; suppose we had a pragmatic ideal... call it the MTS, which uses a Mersenne Twister to approximate this strategy in a straightforward way (it just generates large numbers uniformly, and uses partitioned ranges according to the above percentages to drive its selection directly). We might then have another candidate in the pool that also employs a Mersenne Twister, but this program runs an incredibly deep Monte Carlo Simulation (so call this the MCS), and it turns out this program would play very close to the ideal strategy as a result. In practice in such a tournament MTS could consistently rank first followed by MCS. Generally in this situation, your top ranking programs would be stable regardless of whether the programs predict (MCS) or not (MTS). But I get the feeling that you're reasoning that MCS would somehow be unstable because it predicts; to which I reply, if in at least some situations, you have a predictor program whose behaviors are not-chaotic, then your reasoning underspecifies what's required for a system to be chaotic, and in this sense your reasoning is flawed.

Intuitively (from my end), there's a bit of fuzziness as to what you're describing. You seem to be comparing (a) what an entity would "ordinarily" do, to (b) what an entity would do "if" it had a predictor. But what are (a) and (b) actually describing? In the above scenario the MTS is a type of "(a)", but how would you apply "(b)" to it? And the MCS is a type of "(b)", but what is the "(a)" that the MCS would do? Or is (a) vs (b) comparing the MTS to the MCS? If that's the case, the actual behaviors of the MCS in this tournament are really more approximations of a stable strategy, not a factor generating chaotic behavior (at least in and of itself).

You make a good illustration of how prediction doesn't necessarily lead to chaos. I guess I would have to weaken my claim to prediction can easily lead to chaos. The example situations I was thinking of are ones where, given information about undesired consequences of actions, the predictor system then acts differently, which then produces different predictions, and the predictor system then acts differently, etc. I hadn't really thought through how this still nevertheless settles (or can settle) on a stable course of action, once the predictions are all of desired consequences.

I guess the only real upshot of this to the implications of determinism on free will is that a predictor system can arbitrarily evade prediction, by doing other than what it predicts other predictors will predict of it.

I don't know now, I'm feeling burnt out from work search shit and can't think straight anymore today.

Definitely.

Philosophical systems are like penises... fun to play with, but not in public. Further, we know they are there, and that they have great import for their owner, but we don't want them waved on our faces at every move. Some degree of subtlety is expected.

Yeah, I'd rather this thread did not become yet another platform for @Pfhorrest.

It is just as groundless to say that it wouldn't happen the same again, so you need to come up with a better argument that doesn't focus on using our ignorance as evidence that indeterminism is true. — Harry Hindu

You are asserting that determinism is the case. I am not asserting that it is not the case, but that we have no way of knowing either way.

Philosophical systems are like penises... fun to play with, but not in public. Further, we know they are there, and that they have great import for their owner, but we don't want them waved on our faces at every move. Some degree of subtlety is expected. — Banno

I'll pay that one! :lol:

How does “due to error we can never predict the position of the balls” lead to “the notion that the universe is determined fails”? I would agree that the notion that we can predict the universe fails, but those aren’t the same thing. Not that I agree with the notion that it’s deterministic. — khaled

This, to me?

I started this line of thought with an old Anscombe article, which superficially was a critique of Davidson's position that reasons for action are indeed causes. It broadened considerably when I added the Del Santo article, focusing the conversation more on physical causation. It seems to me that we have broad agreement, at least amongst those posters here who have some learning in physics, that classical systems need not be deterministic. The conversation now is about refining that notion or explaining it to Harry.

Those ubiquitous threads that link causation to the beginnings of spacetime and variously invoke God or panpsychism or Roger Penrose for the most part fall to this view.

We still have the discussion of reasons as causes to attend. But if causes are not as determined as was thought, perhaps it doesn't matter all that much whether we choose to treat our reasons as causing our actions. SimIlarly, the demise of determinism takes the pressure off our feeling justified in punishing those who choose stuff we don't like.

So, where would we start? Rocks are deterministic, and human beings are not? How about a mosquito?

So I'll just not express my opinion on any philosophical topic anymore because that would just be discussing "my philosophical system"? I said nothing about any connection to anything else in philosophy besides determinism, chaos, and so on in this thread. Which is the topic of this thread.

Oh I thought the last line was you talking not Anscombe. My bad.

I was asking that we not get too far of topic. And I'm a dick. Please accept my apologies for the offence caused.

:up: :ok:

Thank you.

Little thought experiment: let's say you had a save and reload function with which you could save and reload certain moments in time and space with the exact same conditions as when you had first saved them. You are an independent observer of a Galton box like the one above and the observer effect is not in play in our experiment. Given only one save and infinite reloads, could you, as a passive observer, accurately predict the outcome of the ball in infinitely many trials and definitively say that every single trial will have the same result? In that infinity, is there any margin for error?

I suppose this is a variation of Laplace's demon, which has been mentioned farther up in this thread, but it's something I've considered since my early teen years, minus the specific example of the Galton box. In other words, is the universe a function, where variable y is the only possible outcome of x, or is it a nonfunction, where two or more outcomes y1, y2,...yn are possible given a single input x? Are quantum states completely and ideally random or are they dependent, where the first would theoretically change outcomes and the second would not?