> WEll
> that is only if you take the popular interpretation of Heisenberg's
> uncertainty principle which says the uncertainty is due to the observer's
> interference.(Einstein with his "God doesn't play at dice"statement took
> that interpretation. bust most think him wrong.)
> But a deeper more subtle, and many physicists believe more correct
> interpretation is that
> there is a real indeterminism with repect to canonically conjugate
> variables. In popular words the universe is loose-jointed at the quantum
> mechanical level, and therefore really not any more than probabalistically
> deterministic & probabalistically causal.
> Vid. Penrose, Roger, various recent books.
> GB.
> At 17:13 28/06/98 +0200, you wrote:
> >Norman K. McPhail wrote:
>
> >
> >I didn't really want to start a thread about free will, because that
> >causes always a lot of emotional discussion. What I mean is that I am
> >deterministic. So, I claim that whatever is considered as an example of
> >'free will', can be shown to be determined by billions of previous
> >interactions, events.
> >
> >Due to our lack of precise measurement and of computation capacity,
> >due to technical reasons, (probably WRONG see above)
> this determinism does not lead to
> >predictability.
> Chaos theory(a mathematics -not a physics therefore irrelevant)
> >is deterministic: the smallest initial
> >difference can lead to very different outcomes (something which - quite
> >strange - has been interpreted as a proof for freedom). So, any
> >difference matters in determining the final outcome.
> (which is why quantum uncertainty makes the world indeterministic!)
> >Our problem is that
> >we cannot sufficiently precisely measure these small differences
> NO.WRONGXXX!
> >account all the possible differences which determine the final outcome
> >(due to limitations in data storage and computation capacity). Although
> >chaos theory is superdeterministic, it also shows how we cannot make
> >predictions about complex systems, due to technical problems. There is
> >nothing free about it.
> >
Dear Gary,
We may keep quarreling about it, but I've read recently (in Scientific
American, I believe) that quantum physical uncertainty 'leaks out' when it
comes to macrophysical events, and that therefore, maybe due to some asymmetry
or whatever, we do not seem quantum physics at work in our world (whatever
Penrose claims about quantum physics and consciousness). We might need an
expert here to explain whether this is right.
So, the macrophysical world, the one I am really interested in to understand,
could be deterministic, (if only as a special case of physics).
After all: thus far (and fortunately for me with my limited mathematical
capacities) I did not need quantum physics to come to my current understanding
of the world, however limited that understanding may be.
Mario