Re: The Road with no Branches argument

From: 1Z (peterdjones_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 11/02/04 

Date: 2 Nov 2004 04:25:32 -0800

"Acme Diagnostics" <LFinezapthis@partpostmark.net> wrote in message news:<41842278$0$2547$45beb828@newscene.com>...
> peterdjones@yahoo.com (1Z) wrote:
> >"Acme Diagnostics" <LFinezapthis@partpostmark.net> wrote in message
> >
> >> This is the second time you've ignored this point about
> >> unpredictability of single events becoming predictable in the
> >> aggregate or higher level of description.
> >
> >That is true of some kinds of systems, suchs as rocks, , and we understand why it is
> >true of them, just as we understand why it is false of chaotic system
>
> That some things are chaotic has never been in contention.
>
> >Any macroscopic indeteministic system will eventually have knock-on
> >effects on other sytems, so in the long term and large
> >scale the world will indeed be indeterministic -- with localised
> >pockets of (for all practical purposes) determinism, such as the
> >ones you say you have observed.
>
> American Heritage "Determinism": every state of affairs,
> including every human event, act, and decision is the
> inevitable consequence of antecedent states of affairs.

If that were the only meaning of determinism, you personally
could not claim to have *observed* determinism, since that
would imply observing he entire history of the entire universe.
Presumably it has a more approximate and localised applicability
as well (my "for all practical purposes").

> So as long as those "knock-on" effects are governed by logical
> processes, the system is determinate.

A system that kicks off with a random event can continue
deterministically
until it encounters another random event. But a universe containing
such systems is not deterministic in the global sense you quote above.

I don't know what you mean by *logical* processes -- if you mean
deterministic processes, why didn't you say so ?

> It (including those
> processes) may be very complex beyond our ability to ever
> understand. It may be very chaotic. It may be entropic. It may
> wind down to a random collection of molecules, particles, or even
> "the stuff" if we ever find it. But it *could* still be
> determinate.

If there is underlying indeterminism (and QM says there is)
AND chaotic systems, which there are, there is large-scale
in determinism.

I can't make any sense of your comment: you seem to be
saying that it could containt all the ingredients for indeterminism
but still be deterministic. Why ?

> My opinion, worth absolutely nothing at all, is that it is
> determinate only within a range of levels of descriptions but
> including that God can create a game of chance, and that
> includes our everyday macro world and probably
> the QM level too.

Unclear again.
Meaning that the universe is approximately, near-enough deterministic
?

> I'm not one of those who thinks technological
> advance stopped at 12:01pm today. I think we may have
> a few million years to go, still a slap of cosmological time,
> and might discover things we haven't discovered in our first
> measly few baby steps. We're still at the "Wow, weather is
> complicated!" stage. But living in Florida, I'm amazed
> at how far we've come in predicting hurricane tracks in our
> last 1/10th of a baby step and can't help notice that that seems
> a higher level of description than butterfly flapping.

OTOH progress in science has revealed a lot more indeterminism
than we used to think.

> >>>Can you predict the weather?
> >>>If you could, it would be a refutation of my claims.
> >>
> >> Yeah, if I could refute unfalsifiable claims I'd be real famous.
>
> Still applies, evidently.

The claim that the weather is indeterministic is falsifiable. You
falsify
it by predicting it.

> >> I've already refuted your claims: "Weather is
> >> indeterminate.
> >
> >I have read back over the thread wihtout seeing any refutation.

> I've refuted that there is any proof or even rigorous basis for
> that claim. Mike agreed to the former, maybe the latter - the
> last qualification I remember was "prima facie case." I've posted
> several times that I have no problem with it being his opinion.
> I've also stated more than once that I agree with him from our
> anthropomorphic POV.
>
> I agree with indeterminism from your POV too, btw. I agree with
> it from every poster's POV, including mine.

Still very unclear. Are you using 'indeterminism' to mean
'de facto unpredictability' ? Note that (in)determinism refers
to what is actually going on, predictability to what you can know.

> So our only disagreement was what God knows. By "God" I mean
> "objective POV." If you read back, then you know Mike and I
> agreed that we cannot know "Weather is indeterminate" from
> God's POV.

We cannot know it is determinate from that POV either.
>From the POV we actually have, the evidence is that it is
indeterminate.

> (I just posted a limited definition of "objective POV" in my
> reply to Mike, hoping it will suffice for my part in this
> discussion.)
>
> Not only did I agree that weather is indeterminate from your POV,
> but that it is indeterminate from your POV "for the foreseeable
> future," which I thought was quite generous. I half expected
> Milan to jump on me for that.
>
> >Given two well-supported premisses, that the weather is chaotic,
> >and that the quantum world is indeterministic, the conclusion follows.
>
> I don't remember two "well-supported" premises.

They may be new to you.

> I remember
> that QM might be indeterminate and it might not be, suggested to
> my naive understanding in the Hawking excerpt Milan posted for
> one credible source, not equating to "unpredictable" from our
> POV. One link to a credible source stating that the scientific
> concensus view is that QM is *objectively* indeterminate, not
> just unpredictable in particular cases, and not just from our
> POV, would change my mind on this premise. I think that's
> reasonable considering that I can think of a lot more stringent
> criteria. I really don't know, or even think I know. I have a
> vague recollection of reading that, under those conditions,
> determinacy was undecided.
>
> I saw no support for "amplification" generally into the macro
> universe.

It follows automatically from the fact that chaotic systems
are *critically* dependent on their initial conditions.

> Mike offered one example and, in good faith, I
> offered one (Brownian motion) but there was no support for
> "amplification" generally, not to say that QM effects are
> non-existent, just that they aren't "amplified" generally.

How general it is depends on how many chaotic systems are around.
In any case, if there is any indeterminism, derterminism as you define
it above
is false.

> There
> is no accounting for why every object in the universe is not
> bouncing around at the speed of light in magnified QM ways.

Yes there is: we clearly understand why on-chaotic systems
don't amplify quantum-level effects.

> Every
> object may be bouncing around a teency bit, including molecules
> in the atmosphere, but that doesn't necessarily translate to
> indeterminism. It just as easily translates into a probabilistic
> universe that seems to work quite nicely (lawfully), though
> eventually everything crashes into something else (but again,
> lawfully).

It all depends on what kind of system you are dealing with.

> >But you can't refute the alleged indeterminism of weather,
> >directly, by predicting it, and you can't refute the
> >premisses from which it is inferred. So you can't refute it.
>
> You have "refute" confused with "prove the opposite case."
>
> Larry

Determinisn and indeterminism are logical opposites, disproving the
one is proving the other.

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