Is the term as it applies to reality still a valid term being as little science is now coached in classical terms:
Sciences such as
Thermodynamcis
Electromagnetism
Quantum mechanics in general
Chemical reactions
Biological reactions
Optical mechanics
Particle physics
Wave mechanics
general relativity
special relativity
Interpretations of physics
Entropy
Chaos theory (somewhat classical but meh)
Many forms of statistical analysis
And I could go on but you get the point.
In these spheres many of the experiments produce far from causal results. Even the temperature of an object is not considered thermodynamically consistent in time backwards or forth. Or to put it another way a does not always lead to b.
So what future has determinism and is it still a viable concept inside and outside science?
While people live at the scale they do, determinism has a place. If you want to design an engine or build a plane or prune your tree, you’re going to work with causal concepts. The very vast majority of human experience fits a causal model; the concerns of a few scientists with million-dollar apparatuses and philosophers who couldn’t tell you which end of a nail goes first won’t change that in a great hurry.
This whole topic and every response to it so far is confused, particularly Smears.
Caldrid: Terms can’t be valid—only arguments can. If you have some argument to a deterministic conclusion, present it and then ask if it’s valid. (But if it is, that won’t necessitate the conclusion being true).
Only_Humean: Universal causation is not the same as determinism. I mean, it doesn’t entail determinism. To think it is would be to hide a bunch of intermediary premises—including the premise that when A is the cause of B; then given A and the laws of nature, B could not have failed to happen. In other words, A causally necessitated B. That’s probably false.
Smears: You’re confused again. What are on about with your talk of degrees?
Anyways, glad to be of service to friends and interlocutors. I am a river to my people.
While there may be alternatives to what can be, there are only so many alternatives. A the very least there is a limit at the point where something cannot be what it is not. So, within a certain set of possibilities, there are alternate possibilities, and to that degree determinism is not “valid”. But if you stand back and say, "it is determined that one of these possibilities will be realized and not instead an impossibility, then you’ve got some “validity”.
Fundamentally there’s chaos beneath order. At that level there is a confusion of continual creation, destruction, and transformation.
Above this confusion, limiting the forms that it can take, are a set of conservation laws that specify what cannot happen. Everything that is not forbidden by these permissive laws actually happens.
I’ve wondered about this for a while now, what has become of Determinism, how it seems to have lost favor or respectibility in the philosophical community. Didn’t Einstein have something to do with it? The fact is that Determinism as I understand it makes pretty good sense: the universe as one great big machine, all of us as cogs and gears; the belief that what comes before determines what comes after, that freedom is an illusion of our consciousness, which is no less determined. It was a perfectly sensible way of looking at things. Then these meta-physicists had to come along and ruin it for reasons that most of us don’t understand. Something about little worms on the sub-quantum level, probabalistic theory, etc.
I want someone who has a little better grasp on these things to give a crash course. Contra Only_Humean, I do believe it matters. We’re not interested in a merely practical philosophy. We want to know what the world is like.
You are living in a world of your ideas and imagine that you exist there as the entity that is controlling everything. This is a distortion of what is in fact a very rare and unreasonable thing. Life’s continuation depends upon the maintenance of an unstable situation. The second law of thermodynamics states that everything tends to become more and more disorderly until the final and natural state of things is a completely random distribution of matter. Thus, any kind of order, even the arrangement of atoms in a molecule, is unnatural and happens only by chance, and it eventually encounters the reverse trend. These events are statistically unlikely, and the further combination of molecules into anything as highly organized as living organisms is improbable. Consciousness, as a byproduct of such an extraordinary event as life, imo, should be regarded as the very epitome of the most marvelous phenomenon and as such, remain unsullied and not be consumed by too much thinking on matters that determine what it can or cannot contain.
Once you understand that ‘determinism’ just is the thesis that the laws of nature and current state of the world admit of only one possible future state of the world, you’ll stop thinking that this is all a matter of degrees. If there are any alternative possibilities whatsoever, for the future, then determinism is false. —At least, according to the definition of determinism that nobody doesn’t use.
In a universe with 1 sextillion stars there is nothing special about life at all. in fact you could argue the reason life exists because quantum mechanics makes it likely to more than causal determinism. The laws of nature actually make life more likely to exist. Not that I’m arguing the tired anthropic argument, there could of been an infinite number of universes before or even existing at the same time as this one where all possible values of the constants exist.
Yes determinism ran out of favour even macro events such as heat transfer are not causal, it only works in very limited systems but that doesn’t bother philosophers because what they can see is all there is.
Except I gave you several examples where at our level where there is no causality so that would tend to make this statement false. Thermodynamics: heat transfer, entropy itself and radioactivity being 3 examples that have visible/tactile consequences.
Well sure if I jump out of a window on the fifth floor I’m pretty sure I’m going to fall downwards towards the centre of gravity, but is it a valid term outside of rigidly defined systems?
This is of course a false axiom as anyone who actually is an engineer will tell you, working out heat tolerances requires non causal maths as does working out electrodynamics if you want to design a system to power homes or a computer for that matter. Sure we can make certain assumptions when building a bridge but that the world is causally determined is certainly not one of them.
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