Science Forums 2

[Kriminal99]

Philosophy teaches us to deal with human reasoning itself and since all human endeavors use human reasoning to achieve their goals, philosophy allows us to come to universal conclusions that hold true regardless of the circumstances or what discipline they are applied to.

Here I will show that it is impossible to disprove determinism or reduce the likelihood that it is true.

The lesson learned from skepticism

Here is a statement about what philosophy has taught us regarding skepticism, or the limits of induction or lack of human knowledge or whichever name you want to use for it.

For every belief, there are infinite models of the universe that disprove said belief and are not mutually exclusive with the experiences that led the person in question to form said belief.

Each of these models are equally likely to be true as they are to be untrue, since by their very nature they explain how what you saw can be true and your beliefs still wrong.

Applied to determinism

With this in mind, we can see that any potential disproof of determinism can be ruled out by categorizing it as a simple lack of information. One need not be a quantum physicist in order to do this.

Now on the other hand we might try to say that the only reason we believe determinsim to be true is because the world we experience everyday (the macro world) seems to be deterministic and we have never been given a reason to doubt it. Then we could say that these experiences might not represent the quantum world.

Well it is not hard to show that many kinds of non deterministic worlds do not make any kind of sense, or at least, they seem to contradict the idea that "A=A" therefore making deductive reasoning impossible and since our consiousnesses are dependent on this being true it is useless to try and speculate on the nature of such an enviornment, if it ever could or did exist.

Abnormal Time

On the other hand, it could be that a certain definition of determinism could be used that depends on time behaving a certain way and it could be claimed that this kind of determinism fails when time fails to behave in that manner. IE if you could go back in time and effect the outcome of past events. However one could simply respond that this is still determinism, just a much more complicated kind of determinism.

Everything that happens still follows a set of rules, and can be calculated from start to finish with enough processing power using an objective time line that seperates a point in a subjective timeline into a point before and a point after it was influenced by future events in order to produce an usual effect.