I cannot demonstrate why humans are biological robots, in order to do that i would first need to explain the entirety of the human brain and how it works.
All i are inductions…
Is a single cell predictable based on its dna?
Is an ant predictable based on the rails of pheromones it follows?
Is a jellyfish predictable based on which direction the most nourishing bacteria are in?
Is a rat chasing down cheese in a maze predictable?
Is a dog running down a trail predictable?
Is a human going through the actions of life predictable?
It’s kind of ironic that where you bring up electron placement being random or uncertain and sue this to postulate the randomness of human nature.
It’s for the same sort of reason that we do not understand the space between electrons and what happens there that we do not understand how to calculate or predict the human mind itself.
In order to make a completely deterministic prediction, you have to know everything about everything.
Sure i make an assumption saying we all follow the laws of physics as they act on our bodies and minds, that we exist as recorded information echoing within itself like a recording on a record, grouped timed and organized.
I can’t hope to prove determinism, you can’t hope to disprove it.
Correct. And as I said, that means the jury is still out. There is reasonableness for both points of view. And hey, perhaps you believe in determinism because your view is determined by the age you live in, an age where we have associated technological advance with a confidence that what we currently know about our world is generally correct save for a few blanks to fill in.
Have you not heard of emergent and holistic properties, attributes that emerge fromt the aggregate of the whole that can’t be explained by looking solely at it’s component parts? Does a single brain cell think, or is it the collection that can be said to think?
There is a difference I thnk between the concepts of determinism and predictability such that they are not necessarily related. That x begets y can be said to be determined, but that doesn’t mean you can predict when x occurs to produce y. It is an inductive argument to say that if you see 100 cause and effect relationships in the universe then everything must be cause and effect, but not as strong as the induction that because the sun comes up today, came up yesterday, and came up for a thousand years it will come up tomorrow. The latter discusses the tendency of a single action to reoccur, the former says that when studying 100 different relationships, everything must therefore be boiled into a relationship.
Another induction you try to make is to go from ant, jellyfish, dog, and then to human. Again, you fail to take into account the notion or holistic properties or emergent properties that arise and cannot be explained solely by looking at the components alone. It is clear that human beings have emergent properties different from a dog or jellyfish, so that working up in this chain is not as inductively strong as you might think.
Here’s an equally strong (or weak) induction - electron placement is random. The properties of an atom are not static and possess to some degreee uncertainty. Molecules comprised of such atoms as a result have certain properties undetermined and unpredictable. Compounds, things do too by being composed of such atoms. Life is not 100% predictable. Humans are not 100% predictable.
Why not? What is weaker about my induction than yours, EXCEPT that yours fits in with the current world view and expectations of our current knowledge? When primitive humans believe that ligthning was anger from the gods, that was an induction. Faulty, but based on their current knowledge and world view.
If you can’t predict certain properties of an atom, you may (and I stress MAY) not be able to understand ALL the properties of that which atoms make. Or perhaps, the emergent properties of things do not depend on the components. Either way, it’s a toss up in a dispassionate analysis.
No, and here again is where you assume that determinism and predictability are related, as well as not taking into account the notion of emergent and holistic properties.
Not sure the analogy reflects a following of the laws of physics. What are the laws of physics? Do we know them for certain? Hasn’t our information been incomplete before?
Bingo. The point is to ascertain the reasonabless of a point of view, absent social influences. I think we’re too confident in what our current scientific knowledge - or even our current scientific approach - tells us about certain philosophical questions.
Useful for science, Wonderer, useful for science. There are many more things to be thought and felt that are not strictly scientific in foundation.
here, for all intents and purposes, is my inductive argument for determinism.
A1-P1 - most of what we observe seems to have a cause
make inductive leap here
A1-C1- Everything has a cause
A2-P1 - understanding how entities relate to each other and interact (i.e, causes and effects)enables us, according to the degree of our understanding to extrapolate the past and the future (make predictions)
make inductive leap here
A2-C1 - Everything is predictable (with enough knowledge and understanding)
I make no indications that our type of minds will ever be able to prove or use deterministic prediction. I don’t even think it’s possible.
The “uncertainty” of atoms as you like to say isn’t necessarily “random”. it’s a phenomenon we do not understand.
randomness is merely the lack of an ability to order or predict.
We can’t say either way if we will ever be able to predict the space between atoms or if they are even predictable, simply because we do not understand them.
No i don’t talk about emergent and holistic properties. Frankly I think the “random” issue is one resulting from a problem only you can see.
You say that i assume to much, that science has shown time and time again that what once was common knowledge accepted by all can be wrong, that in the future we will know better.
In fact i agree with you, in a quasi sort of way. One day we will know better (or not). We will understand atoms and be able to predict their randomness. At such a time we will find new frontiers, and people will make claims there as well.
It’s a sort of hop-scotch denial strategy. We will never verify determinism from my perspective, because we are limited (you can call that an assumption), but the fact remains, the inductive leaps i make like wagering that one day we will be able to predict atoms where now we see “uncertainty”, and that in order to predict everything with 100% certainty you would have to account for every factor, and thus need to know everything, which is obviously not going to happen for the human race…
It’s a realistic mindset for any scientist i think…
One day our children might learn about quantum fluctuations in grade school.
Your last post is a nice concluding remark on the whole issue. I induce from history that we’re not finished with Kantian “Copernican revolutions” in knowledge, but where those revolutions take us is anyone’s guess. Your arguments in favor of determinism are certainly reasonable within current scientific paradigms - in fact, in the current paradigms you actually have the upper hand. My instinct as a philosopher is to try to think outside the paradigmatic box and identify what is largely considered true by virtue of current paradigms and to evaluate the extent those paradigms are subject to change. Real Philosophy of Science, in my view, endeavors to find the “somewhere” in a discipline that tries to be the “view from nowhere”, because like it or not, our opinions and reflections are in large part dependent on the paradigms under which our learning has been imbued. The same collection of data can have several differentl models for explanation, and it’s the models that are influenced by our paradigms. There is a glimmer out there that may indicate that randomness or self-determination may be at the heart of our universe and that laws only reflect relationships that are true in most situations, much like Newtownian conceptions of time are true only in most situations.