Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site mmintl.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!pwa-b!mmintl!franka From: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams) Newsgroups: net.philosophy Subject: Mechanism and Determinism Message-ID: <573@mmintl.UUCP> Date: Thu, 8-Aug-85 12:27:52 EDT Article-I.D.: mmintl.573 Posted: Thu Aug 8 12:27:52 1985 Date-Received: Sun, 11-Aug-85 07:10:44 EDT References: <1386@pyuxd.UUCP> <1100@umcp-cs.UUCP> Reply-To: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams) Organization: Multimate International, E. Hartford, CT Lines: 41 [Please, don't eat me!] There has been an underlying in a number of recent discussions recently which I think is invalid. This is, to put it baldly, that randomness equals freedom. For example, Charley Wingate states that the hypothesis that some behavior reflects quantum fluctuations has no evidence against it, and seems to feel that he has proved something thereby. Unless quantum mechanics is very wrong, random events are part of the way the universe works. Determinism is a dead issue. But this does not imply that the behavior of complex systems is not reducible to the interactions of their components. Let me define what I will mean by a mechanistic system. A system is mechanistic if its components, at a sufficiently fine level of detail, can have their behavior in any situation described completely by a probability distribution, and the behavior of the system is *in principle* describable by this behavior, given the (initial) relationships of the system. The modern equivalent of determinism is to assert that the entire universe is mechanistic. I see no reason to regard a resident of a mechanistic universe as any more "free" than the resident of a strictly deterministic universe. Both run equally counter to my sujective sense of free will. It seems to me that there are three possibilities. All have problems: 1) The universe is mechanistic, and my free will is an illusion. But what is it that has that illusion? How do you explain my subjective awareness *to me*? (You can explain it to yourself as simply the behavior of the system, i.e., me.) 2) The universe is mechanistic, but there is some way in which free will is a meaningful concept in such a universe. Frankly, I can't imagine what such a conception would be. One can give definitions such as r.e.a., but these don't match my subjective experience. 3) The universe is not mechanistic. But how can it not be? What does it mean for a system not to be the result of the behavior of its components, or for those components to behave in a way which is not expressible as a probability distribution?