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From: gwyn@brl-tgr.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: Electrons, etc., may TOO be deterministic.
Message-ID: <3018@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 8-Nov-85 01:05:19 EST
Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.3018
Posted: Fri Nov  8 01:05:19 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 9-Nov-85 06:15:45 EST
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>     Please note in the first paragraph, I have specified `causally
>     deterministic mechanisms'. In accord with Hume's notion of `causality'
>     as a spatial and temporal conjunction between cause and effect, or
>     Einstein's notion as the propagation of influences locally through
>     spacetime, I believe it's fair to say that modern science has thrown the
>     classical doctrine of determinism (that present state is causally
>     determined by past effects) into the Humean flames.  Unless prefer you
>     turn the word `cause' into swiss cheese, that is. Take your pick.

Since when is Hume relevant to physics?  His idea of causality
is not necessarily correct; there have been serious criticisms
of it.  Certainly few if any theoretical physicists pay any
attention to Hume's work.

I was unaware that Einstein had such a notion of causality;
could you provide a reference?  Einstein believed in a form
of determinism in physics, but I doubt he would have agreed
with your attempt to define what it means.  He was quite
aware of the degree to which physical "laws" (theories,
actually) constrain the behavior of systems and to what
extent systems are not constrained by the laws.  In the
case of classical (non-quantum) field theories, he even
developed a specific technique for quantifying this.

Neither of the two items you mention preclude deterministic
evolution of physical systems.  However, quantum theory (if
correct!) does appear to do so.

>     The 1982 Aspect experiment indicates we can toss more into those flames
>     than causal determinism. In particular, reductionism (the notion that
>     all phenomena can be completely understood by recursive analysis into
>     progessively smaller spatial and temporal elements) must be thrown into
>     the Humean flames, even on the macroscopic level, unless it can be
>     demonstrated that individual quantum events do not affect the high-level
>     behavior under study. Note that most of our machines can be understood
>     reductionistically BECAUSE WE DESIGNED THEM as hierarchical structures
>     whose behavior is determined by strictly causal connections and thus
>     relatively free of `unwanted' noncausal effects.

No serious thinker proposes reductionism as you state it.
Statistical physicists are quite aware of the problems.

>     Living things are notoriously nonhierarchical in their design, and I am
>     hardly alone in supposing that, during the evolution of life, nonlocal
>     interactions may have been put to use in very central organizing roles.
>     Frankly, I am not surprised that the problems encountered in the life
>     sciences have proven intractable to any primitive cause-and-effect
>     analysis that sees everything mechanistically.

Mysticism has had even less success in the life sciences.

Cause-and-effect does not imply mechanistic.  To say that
certain things happen acausally is tantamount to giving
up any attempt to understand them.  You may of course do
so, but you should not call that "science".

>     Whether in anticipation of the results of the 1982 Aspect experiment or
>     not, during the past few decades or so, the sciences have been
>     liberating themselves from the sterility of 17th century dogma and rigid
>     reductionistic constraints that set the norms of classical physics as
>     THE standard of scientific excellence. QM paved the way.

I doubt very much that many scientists from 1900 onward
know what those dogma and constraints are.  The so-called
philosophers of science have been very slow to catch up.

>     I suppose it's understandable that computer professionals would
>     number among the last holdouts. Computers are, after all, totally
>     deterministic -- that is, until they break. But we shouldn't be blinded
>     to the world outside of our deterministic digital world.

Dijkstra's classic "A Discipline of Programming" makes
explicit use of nondeterminism as a tool for constructing
correctness proofs for programs.

>     Some have misinterpreted Bohm's theories as a rearguard attempt to
>     reinstate the deterministic world of our forefathers -- this is
>     mistaken. Bohm insists that nature possesses an inexhaustible depth of
>     properties and qualities that no finite system of laws and categories
>     can ever express entirely; in particular, the universe has an infinite
>     number of nearly autonomous levels of explanation in which the natural
>     laws at any level must admit irreducible fluctuations which are only
>     explicable by the laws of that level's substratum; likewise, the
>     emergent properties of a higher level exist on their own terms and are
>     not totally inferrable from the laws of the substratum:

This has been obvious to nearly everybody; no reputable
biologist tries to ignore those attributes of reality
that pertain specifically to his field but not to the
supporting fields of chemistry or physics.

Bohm really was trying to salvage determinism (but not
that of our forefathers).

There is much more that could be said to refute much
of the mystical nonsense in the latter part of the
article, but I tire of this.  Could you "philosophers"
PLEASE quit cross-posting this sort of stuff to the
technical newsgroups such as net.math and net.physics?