Fate, who believes.

[RedM]

You might need use quantum mechanics to experience true randomness,

 

blah de blah

 

..or not!

[lockys96]

for fate to be real, i must have been a mass murderer in a past life, as i have had no luck in over a year

[Tannhauser]

This is kind of why I find predeterminism to be a paradox.

Let's assume predeterminism is true (I don't think it is, but let's assume it is). In that case, it is already predetermined at what date (if at all) humans realise that it's true, and some go mad and hide in the corner, whilst others carry on as normal, and probably quite a few in between. From our viewpoint, I agree with you that going into a corner and going mad is not a sensible option, but who goes mad and who doesn't has already been decided, all the way down to individual people. Anything that anyone does won't make a difference to anything or anyone else, and doesn't change any future events, otherwise predeterminism would break down.

 

Predeterminism would mean that nothing you do will have any bearing on what will happen. Put another way, nothing you do will change the future. Your destiny is set in stone, and nothing you can do will change it, not even by a bit. Predeterminism sets out a future path for everyone from which they absolutely cannot deviate. I may think I've deviated from the path by choosing to go mad, but that was always my predestined path. Nothing I could have done would have either prevented it or made it worse.

 

Now if people knew what their chosen path would involve before it happened, that would really bake my noodle! You'd probably get people trying to deviate from the path, but they wouldn't be able to!

 

I’m going to try looking at this conundrum from another angle.

 

When a decision is made, such as ‘will I go to work?’ there are various methods of explaining why the decision to go is chosen. For example:

 

1) Social psychological explanation: decision results from the influence of cultural factors, such as a protestant work ethic, which form our moral framework.

2) Cognitive psychological factors: decision results from the methods in which the brain processes information

3) Personality explanation: decisions result from having a certain personality, which in turn results largely from early experiences.

4) Reductionist biological explanation, which explains the decision in terms of the passage of electrical impulses between neurons.

 

All explanations are human constructions. They just look at different levels. It’s no less ‘true’ to explain the decision to work in terms of cultural factors then it is to explain it as the movement of electrical impulses. In the same way, it’s not more true to say that an apple is made out of cells then it is to say it’s made out of atoms. Both are true, it just depends on what level you’re looking at.

 

When we are seeking to explain a given event, we pick the most useful level of explanation, because explanations are there to serve and inform. Explanations need utility as well as truth. If we want to explain why an apple is sweet, we explain it at a biochemical level, in terms of fructose content. If we want to explain why an apple appears so often in medieval paintings, we have to look at its cultural significance. We could say that this cultural significance ultimately reduces to movements of atoms at the beginning of the Big Bang, but that won’t help us very much with understanding. Granted, it’s a complete explanation that will satisfy a supercomputer, but it’s not actually useful in any way.

 

Ultimately, predetermism is only an explanatory system and out of the examples above, overlaps most with reductionism. Predeterminism is just another way of saying that no events happen without having causes.

 

As you eloquently explained it:

 

a hard-line determinist could say that all future events are decided a micro-second after the Big Bang. All the particles in our universe are created by that point, and they are given their respective energies (kinetic, chemical, rotational, etc).

 

To say ‘Whatever I decide has already been decided for me’ is only to say, ‘whatever I decide can be explained in terms of events that went before’. Furthermore, if we focus on the predeterminist explanation, focusing on tracing the antecedent causes, this does not help us at a human level.

[stevie_b]

in layman's terms, or not if you want, just that I won't get it, why cannot a simple computer give a true random function?

 

Because a computer can't be told to simply "think of a number". All computers do is perform maths (add, subtract, multiply, divide) on numbers, and store data.

 

Computers use a complex algorithm to produce a set of "random" numbers. The algorithm is often seeded with an unpredictable number, such as the number of milliseconds elapsed since January 1st 1970. Anyway, the seed kicks off the sequence. From that point on, the sequence of numbers can be known. Whoever wrote the random number function would be able to tell you exactly what the next number will be, before the computer gives it to you.

 

A computer's random number sequence is usually called "pseudo-random", because it's difficult to predict the next number, so it appears random but actually isn't.

[Carl_S]

Very interesting.

 

Is this why they have that elaborate machine for the National Lottery, and not some hyped up IBM PC somewhere choosing the winning numbers?

 

Also, I wonder if the lottery winners generally start believing in fate and destiny after they have collected their millions in winnings if they did not before.

[stevie_b]

All explanations are human constructions. They just look at different levels. It’s no less ‘true’ to explain the decision to work in terms of cultural factors then it is to explain it as the movement of electrical impulses. In the same way, it’s not more true to say that an apple is made out of cells then it is to say it’s made out of atoms. Both are true, it just depends on what level you’re looking at.

 

When we are seeking to explain a given event, we pick the most useful level of explanation, because explanations are there to serve and inform. Explanations need utility as well as truth. If we want to explain why an apple is sweet, we explain it at a biochemical level, in terms of fructose content. If we want to explain why an apple appears so often in medieval paintings, we have to look at its cultural significance. We could say that this cultural significance ultimately reduces to movements of atoms at the beginning of the Big Bang, but that won’t help us very much with understanding. Granted, it’s a complete explanation that will satisfy a supercomputer, but it’s not actually useful in any way.

I completely agree. It's beyond humans' current (and foreseeable future) capabilities to explain an apple's sweetness in terms of its composite atoms.

 

Ultimately, predetermism is only an explanatory system and out of the examples above, overlaps most with reductionism. Predeterminism is just another way of saying that no events happen without having causes.

 

To say ‘Whatever I decide has already been decided for me’ is only to say, ‘whatever I decide can be explained in terms of events that went before’. Furthermore, if we focus on the predeterminist explanation, focusing on tracing the antecedent causes, this does not help us at a human level.

Absolutely. Humans will never have enough computing power to be able to calculate what will happen a few seconds from now, let alone far, far into the future.

[stevie_b]

Is this why they have that elaborate machine for the National Lottery, and not some hyped up IBM PC somewhere choosing the winning numbers?

Yes. Given a huge (probably much much larger than all the computers in the world put together) computing power, you could observe how the balls fall when they drop into the machine, how the air currents in the machine behave, and exactly how the machine spits out the balls at the bottom, and accurately predict which balls would come out. But we're probably a few hundred or even thousand years from developing that kind of computing power!

[Carl_S]

Unreal! So if God was a computer, he would be pretty big, to know all that.

 

Would not fancy a game of chess with him.

[Carl_S]

When looking at the list of reasons "why do you go to work", it's nice to see such a big list, of possible ways of explaining it.

 

Makes a change from the usual "keep the wolf from the door", "keep me off the streets", and the "pay the mortage" ones.

 

Just looking at your cell vs atom description of an apple, yes both are true, but when we talk about why someone goes to work my own mind cannot compute why or how that can be described in an electrical way. If it was how do the charges and chemical states interplay and exist during the decision making process of going to work, then I undestand that way.

 

It's just that when you ask why you go to work I feel it cannot be explained electro-chemically, let alone exclusively electro-chemically.

 

Unlike the exlusively atom vs. cells description of an apple, both can stand on their own as valid descriptions not needing the other to hold water, as it were, whereas the why of going to work, is dependent on many factors that interplay, and none of which that really stand alone as the sole reason.

 

So for me it is description of something like an apple which can be done on one level, culturally, physically, chemically, etc,

 

But as soon as you ask whyabout a particular action you take - like going to work, then the answer I feel always spans a multitude of different disiplines that all interplay, and that none of which can exclusively stand alone as the only factor becuase of the meshing of many different domains that psychology has to take into account of.

 

I hope this makes some sense.

 

Perhaps I am missing a vital link, or my brain is just not big enough to grasp your meaning.

[Tannhauser]

I completely agree. It's beyond humans' current (and foreseeable future) capabilities to explain an apple's sweetness in terms of its composite atoms.

 

 

Absolutely. Humans will never have enough computing power to be able to calculate what will happen a few seconds from now, let alone far, far into the future.

 

Well, I'm not saying that it isn't theoretically possible, and 'never' is a long time. It's just that it's a spectacularly useless level of explanation to pursue, in terms of its heuristic value at a human level.

[Tannhauser]

Carl - it's a great question. I'll reply tomorrow.

[Carl_S]

ok. Sweet dreams. I look forward to your reply...

[Tannhauser]

When looking at the list of reasons "why do you go to work", it's nice to see such a big list, of possible ways of explaining it.

 

Makes a change from the usual "keep the wolf from the door", "keep me off the streets", and the "pay the mortage" ones.

 

Just looking at your cell vs atom description of an apple, yes both are true, but when we talk about why someone goes to work my own mind cannot compute why or how that can be described in an electrical way. If it was how do the charges and chemical states interplay and exist during the decision making process of going to work, then I undestand that way.

 

It's just that when you ask why you go to work I feel it cannot be explained electro-chemically, let alone exclusively electro-chemically.

 

Unlike the exlusively atom vs. cells description of an apple, both can stand on their own as valid descriptions not needing the other to hold water, as it were, whereas the why of going to work, is dependent on many factors that interplay, and none of which that really stand alone as the sole reason.

 

So for me it is description of something like an apple which can be done on one level, culturally, physically, chemically, etc,

 

But as soon as you ask whyabout a particular action you take - like going to work, then the answer I feel always spans a multitude of different disiplines that all interplay, and that none of which can exclusively stand alone as the only factor becuase of the meshing of many different domains that psychology has to take into account of.

 

I hope this makes some sense.

 

Perhaps I am missing a vital link, or my brain is just not big enough to grasp your meaning.

 

Yes, it makes sense. Psychology as a discipline would indeed take your viewpoint that a decision like going to work is best explained by an interaction of different factors. For example, the decision could be seen as a result of evolutionary factors (e.g. a brain that has evolved to value social groupings), environmental factors (e.g. learning experiences) and cultural factors (e.g. social norms).

 

Reductionism is a kind of theoretical mindset that has grown from the physical sciences. For example: a table is hard because it’s made out of wood. The wood is made from tough xylem tissue (biological explanation). The principal material in this is lignin, a complex polymeric compound (biochemical explanation). The lignin is tough because of the way the links between the component ‘monomer’ molecules are formed (chemical explanation). The monomers have to link in the way they do because of their structure, which in turn is partly a function of the valency of the constituent atoms and the energetics of chemical reactions that form them. And these factors in turn are a consequence of atomic structure (physics level explanation), which in turn is a consequence of the fundamental laws of how matter is built, at which point physics and maths fuse and I bow out gracefully.

 

So each level is explained by the ‘level’ below it.

 

Brain scientists apply the same logic to the areas, such as consciousness, traditionally seen to be the realm of philosophers and artists. Over 50 years ago, Penfield (?) demonstrated that electrically stimulating someone’s brain during surgery results in them having very strong perceptions whilst the current was flowing (he believed them to be memories). They ceased when the current was turned off. This is a crude demonstration that consciousness emerges from the buzz of electrical impulses along neurons. The argument would be that if you could analyse every single one of those messages, then you would indeed know what the person was thinking, feeling and deciding at the time.

 

100 years ago, there was no inkling of how to relate consciousness to physical processes. But a wealth of brain science research has made some progress on this. In my view, they tend to overestimate their reach at present, but the pace of research continues to increase.

[Carl_S]

Yes the mind is a vastly underexplored subject. Like a vast dark lake, we try to fish in it with a rod and some normal bait and get nothing, then we try a very odd bait and stuff comes up.

 

 

ECT for example works sometimes, though we are not quite sure why.

 

I still feel that reductionism will not be able one day to, for example read our innermost thoughts by analising electrical patterns.

 

I'm not usually a pessimist like that, it just reminds me more of science fiction, for example michael crighton's "timeline" where humans were faxed to a paralell past universe.

 

Anyway, at the moment we can agree that the best way of finding out why someone goes to work is to talk to them and find out.

 

As for fate. No I can't say I believe in It but there is something fishy and unexplained going on, which we will have to bear just not knowing what the hell it is, or else our one and only life may just slip us by if we spend our energies searching. That's my note to self.

 

Fate seems to have a bit of a negative connotion eg "he was resigned to his fate"'whereas destiny has a positive one "it was our destiny that we met that night".

 

I would say never accept your fate, and strive to find your destiny.

 

 

 

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[a98pmalcolm]

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