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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?