Why cant i see the future ?

[The 3rd eye]

Imagine the universe as a game of pool or snooker. If you know the weight of all the balls, the coefficient of friction, the table and the air around the balls, the velocity of the white ball before the break. Could you not determine the resulting change in position of all the balls on the table?

So life isn’t as simple as a game of pool but if you knew all the factors and how they reacted with other could you not determine the results.

Do people really have a choice, or are they programmed by there experiences in life ultimately determining the reactions to choices there for no choice exists only the illusion of choice.

And as were all in the universe/pool table together could the human brain not sense the world around it as some sort of sixth sense. One third of a person’s life is spent asleep, the body is of flesh and bone but the mind is so much more.

I rarely post on this forum and I am not very good at explaining my theory’s but '' I foretell a 'smart ass' reply from some one on the forum and strangely look forward to it.

 

[Dr Aardwolf]

You pose some very interesting questions. I don't have all the answers, but will take a stab at some of them.

One big problem to fortelling exactly what will happen in the future is that chaos theory shows it is well nigh impossible to account for all variables with total accuracy, so predicting complex things like weather will inevitably be limited by this. The 'free choice' question is a very tricky philosophical problem which may never be resolved. The sixth sense, if it exists, would have to be relegated to the seventh sense as proprioception now seems to be regarded as a perceptual system in its own right. As a skeptic, I strongly doubt we possess any psychic abilities that could pass a proper scientific test. The mind 'seems' so much more than physical, but this could very well be an illusion caused by our frustration at being 'skin-encapsulated egos' or merely clever animals. I'm sure the others here can give you better answers than these, but I thought I'd start the ball rolling.

 

[Loss Leader]

So life isn’t as simple as a game of pool but if you knew all the factors and how they reacted with other could you not determine the results.

Aardwolf's explanation of chaos theory is very good - we cannot know all of the variables. But chaos theory actually goes beyond that to say that even if all of the variables could be known, the same result would not recur. There is an essential randomness built into the universe at a fundamental level. And there is an essential randomness built into the workings of the mind.

A donkey standing equidistant from two buckets of oats will not starve to death. He will pick one. And he will do so at random.

Once this ability to just make a random decision is understood, it introduces a complexity into the system of human interactions that can never be overcome. Do you switch lanes or don't you? What does the person behind you do if you switch? What does she do if you don't? How does her actions affect her cell phone call or cause her to spill her coffee and stain her blouse?

The answer is not just hard to know, it cannot be known. There is an essential randomness that cannot be accounted for.

 

[Kopji]

Hi 3rd eye,
There's sort of a perpetual 'free will' thread that goes on in the R&T forum. You might enjoy one of them. I do believe that they serve cookies, but it helps to bring a cat with you just in case. (I like your metaphor with the pool table and balls).

A metaphor that I compare my life in the universe to is that of a gardener who for whatever reason, has a large pesky rock outcrop in his garden (hey, like mine!). The gardener wants to nurture the garden and help it be enjoyed, but what to do about the outcrop? The gardener could spend a lifetime wondering about it, or digging and dynamiting it, or leveling the ground, bringing in new dirt... get it out of sight - or the gardener can work the landscape so it becomes part of the beauty of the garden. Accept and work with the hand that he/she was dealt by nature instead of obsessing over it.

To wonder if the rock and the gardener were destined from the beginning of the universe to be brought together - or that the game was rigged from the beginning - is the kind of thinking that makes my head hurt. Sheesh there may be an answer but could I ever really know? So whatever the answer is, why not just act? I am willing to be held responsible for how I act, and that will have to do. I may revisit this great question of philosophy from time to time, but life seems too short... and after all, the enjoyment is in the living not the thinking about it.

 

[SirPhilip]

So life isn’t as simple as a game of pool but if you knew all the factors and how they reacted with other could you not determine the results.

If you mean predicting the outcome of a decision, like will John go to Costco or WalMart on Saturday, or which swear words will people prefer when Ashley Simpson does another half-time show, there will always be a potential margin of uncertainty involved.

Do people really have a choice, or are they programmed by there experiences in life ultimately determining the reactions to choices there for no choice exists only the illusion of choice.

This has been discussed before in other threads. When they arise from simple motivations, obviously humans can be little more remarkable as animals in this regard. That doesn't mean a potential doesn't exist (although neither determinism or free will could really be said to exist in absolute terms, at least not potentially in human behavior). You could say that just as it does in nature, order and chaos arise spontaneously in human behavior though.

 

[athon]

Determinism scares me. It says that the free will I experience is an illusion.

Free will scares me. It says that there are some things in the universe beyond prediction, that are the result of something truly random, that on some level, there is no rule dictating what should happen.

Until I have good reason to go for one or the other, I choose to conveniently ignore both ideas. At least, I try to.

Athon

 

[PixyMisa]

Imagine the universe as a game of pool or snooker. If you know the weight of all the balls, the coefficient of friction, the table and the air around the balls, the velocity of the white ball before the break. Could you not determine the resulting change in position of all the balls on the table?

Only statistically.

This is due to a combination of physical and mathematical effects described by Quantum Mechanics and Chaos Theory, as others have mentioned.

So life isn’t as simple as a game of pool but if you knew all the factors and how they reacted with other could you not determine the results.

No, you could not.

Do people really have a choice, or are they programmed by there experiences in life ultimately determining the reactions to choices there for no choice exists only the illusion of choice.

Well, conscious free will has been shown to be an illusion by psychological experiments, which have demonstrated that decisions are made a few hundred milliseconds before you become aware of them. Whether the decision itself is really free depends on your definition of free. What we can say for sure is that free will is not bound by either physical or mathematical determinism. It is impossible to know either the initial parameters or the function itself well enough to determine the outcome in advance.

So the answer to your question really does come down to "Because it hasn't happened yet."

 

[The 3rd eye]

But! But! But! But!

So in short (about the length of a piece of string) your saying its not possible to predict the future cause of the chaos theory. So what if you can’t predict it accurately but can refine it to a few possible out comes. In a way you’d be playing the statistics. It might explain why its never been proven truly to predict the future because its only possible to be so accurate. Like if I said what’s the value of pie you could tell me its 3.14……. you’d be right but I could say your wrong cause you didn’t give me the full answer.

 

[roger]

Aardwolf's explanation of chaos theory is very good - we cannot know all of the variables. But chaos theory actually goes beyond that to say that even if all of the variables could be known, the same result would not recur. There is an essential randomness built into the universe at a fundamental level. And there is an essential randomness built into the workings of the mind.

Actually, this is not quite true. Chaos theory describes deterministic, but unpredictable systems. Randomness does not enter into it. If you start with the same initial conditions, you will end up with the same end state. The issue is that we can not measure with infinite precision, and chaotic systems are sensitive to initial conditions beyond what we can measure.

 

[Loss Leader]

Actually, this is not quite true. Chaos theory describes deterministic, but unpredictable systems. Randomness does not enter into it. If you start with the same initial conditions, you will end up with the same end state. The issue is that we can not measure with infinite precision, and chaotic systems are sensitive to initial conditions beyond what we can measure.

I disagree. Chaos theory describes probabalistically predictable or grossly predictable systems in which any given unit within the system is unpredictable. Brownian motion describes generally how currents of water in a glass will move when a heat source is introduced at the bottom of the glass. Howeve, the exact position of any individual molecule of water will be unkowable. Still, the general position of any molecule of water can be known (it stays in the glass as opposed to suddenly taking off for the pub three blocks away).

I see no authority to confine chaos theory to determinism. It is an element of quantum mechanics that some events are actually random - utterly unpredictable and unknowable. Randomness introduced at the sub-atomic level radiates outward and creates randomness at all levels.

This provides an actual mechanism by which chaos theory works. Otherwise, chaos theory is simply the reitteration of "we don't know enough about the variables." And that, to me, is a cop-out.

 

[fuelair]

So life isn’t as simple as a game of pool but if you knew all the factors and how they reacted with other could you not determine the results.

.

In essence, why no, no you couldn't - even if you knew at one point in time the direction of movement of every particle of matter and the level of every kind of energy and every possible interaction of these.

 

[Cuddles]

Could you not determine the resulting change in position of all the balls on the table?

No. If three balls hit each other at the same time it is not possible to calculate the outcome. Since it is not possible to accurately predict the future in a system as apparently simple and deterministic as a pool table, trying to do so for a system the size of the Earth, with or without free will, would be rather silly.

 

[Ripley Twenty-Nine]

So in short (about the length of a piece of string) your saying its not possible to predict the future cause of the chaos theory. So what if you can’t predict it accurately but can refine it to a few possible out comes. In a way you’d be playing the statistics. It might explain why its never been proven truly to predict the future because its only possible to be so accurate. Like if I said what’s the value of pie you could tell me its 3.14……. you’d be right but I could say your wrong cause you didn’t give me the full answer.

I think that statistics are useful if you're making very general 'predictions'. For example, "a large hurricane will devistate the east coast of Mexico in 2007". Or, "Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes will break up in middle to late 2007". I'm using well established factors to say these things. But am I forseeing the future? No.

If I said 'Flight 177 will crash over the Atlantic on June 18th, 2007', that would be a very specific prediction. But let's keep in mind that a specific prediction made before the event such as this has never come true. Not once. There are way, way too many variables involved.

A meteoroligist can't accurately tell me what the weather will be like in my area a week from today, and they're scientists specializing in their field, using state of the art computers and up to the second weather pattern models.

How likely is it that a psychic can incorporate trillions more variables, and tell me accurately that I'll find happiness and a new job in the next year?

 

[flimflam_machine]

I think Roger is right about chaos theory: if you start with exactly the same conditions you get the same result. From my very limited knowledge I recall that the Mandelbrot set is actually described by a relatively simple, but non-probabilistic, equation. It is chaotic because starting points that are infinitesmally different from each other lead to hugely different outcomes (sensitivity to initial conditions). In a real-world chaotic system, except for certain areas of the set, you cannot start from exactly the same conditions. That's not just a limitation of precision, I think you cannot measure accurately enough (anyone have a proof of this?).

 

[roger]

I disagree. Chaos theory describes probabalistically predictable or grossly predictable systems in which any given unit within the system is unpredictable. Brownian motion describes generally how currents of water in a glass will move when a heat source is introduced at the bottom of the glass. Howeve, the exact position of any individual molecule of water will be unkowable. Still, the general position of any molecule of water can be known (it stays in the glass as opposed to suddenly taking off for the pub three blocks away).

I see no authority to confine chaos theory to determinism. It is an element of quantum mechanics that some events are actually random - utterly unpredictable and unknowable. Randomness introduced at the sub-atomic level radiates outward and creates randomness at all levels.

This provides an actual mechanism by which chaos theory works. Otherwise, chaos theory is simply the reitteration of "we don't know enough about the variables." And that, to me, is a cop-out.

No, no cop out. Chaos theory is a specific branch of mathematics dealing with systems that have the properties I deliniated. Randomness is not part of it. Specifically, they are nonlinear dynamic systems with sensitivity to initial conditions, topologically mixing, and the periodic orbits must be dense. The systems are entirely deterministic.

Now, certainly, if you place a chaotic system in an environment where the initial conditions are affected by truly random inputs, then the outputs will be seemingly random. But that is true of linear systems, such as f(x)=x. We would not say f(x)=x is random or chaotic merely because the input X is random. It's a linear equation, and entirely deterministic. The same holds true for chaotic systems.

Note that this is no way an argument that truly random events do not occur. As you point out, they appear to happen in the quantum environment. But 'chaotic' when used in the mathematical and physics sense, not the collequal sense, refers to specific kinds of nonlinear dynamic deterministic systems.

Some references:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
http://www-chaos.umd.edu/
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Chaos.html

Hope this clears things up!


ETA: chaos theory is so interesting, and so surprising, because you can have a deterministic system, with deterministic inputs, and yet not be able to predict it's state for very far into the future. It's a specific property of these systems. Because of it, specific kinds of predictions are doomed to fail, and in itself is a sufficient answer to the opening post. There are of couse other reasons for why we can't see into the future, such as the truly random events that Loss Leader mentions.

ETA2: here is a nice little java script exhibiting the very simple, yet chaotic equation f(x) = rx(1-x). http://www.geocities.com/moellep/chaos/chaoticjavaapplet.html
Deterministic, but chaotic and unpredictable (for any length of time).

 

[Loss Leader]

No, no cop out. Chaos theory is a specific branch of mathematics dealing with systems that have the properties I deliniated. Randomness is not part of it.

Alright, I surrender the point.

But I reiterate that the future cannot be foretold both because: 1) to the extent that the universe is deterministic it is chaotic; and 2) there is an essential randomness that undergirds the universe.

As to which of these makes precognition least likely, I have no idea.

 

[c4ts]

It's the atomic swerve which is responsible for downward tendency...

Oh wait, I'm a few thousand years behind.