determinism

This post has me wondering. Without question, everything that goes into a coin flip is physical and measurable - force, air currents, uneven weight of the sides, etc. In theory, it could all be modeled. Could we do it in practice? Is it foreseeable that we would ever be able to measure...

Probability in her various guises comes up a lot at ISF. We cite statistics and percentages, mention things like relative risk, and point to studies with p values to justify our positions. We invoke Bayes and Occam. But I'm often troubled by just what probability is supposed to mean. Is it, for...

Transient global amnesia is a condition in which a person temporarily loses the ability to create new memories. One of the hallmarks of the disorder is that the patient's short term memory periodically resets, frequently resulting in the patient getting stuck in a loop. Unlike Phil, Bill...

In the free will and omniscience thread, a lot of attention is being paid to the subject of omniscience but very little to the nature of free will. Some definitions have been given, but many of them not very useful. Such as "the ability to alter events". So I thought I'd start a separate thread...

This is an informal proof that Determinism does not hold sway in our universe. Determinism is the idea that any state of the universe is causally determined completely by the previous state of the universe. For brevity, without detailed analysis, here are some theorems I have developed. I...

I've created this thread because I disagree with these last two statements completely (and didn't want to derail the thread they were posted in). While it may be impossible to prove, given our current understanding of physics, whether or not the universe is deterministic or not, there are no...

This may make no sense whatsoever, as determinism and associated philosophies has taken up about 1 X 10-563rd of my thinking so far, but I do like cards, and got thinking about the two subjects together. Aside from uranium whatever it is, determinism seems to be fairly widely accepted as...

I thought this article was apropo to link to this forum. It turns out that believing we can control our actions leads us to take different actions. In particular, people are less likely to cheat or steal if they believe in free will. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080129125354.htm

I apologize in advance for the length of the imbedded quotation, but I prefer, in this case, to let people speak for themselves when it comes to their positions. The content and questions of diverge from the topic of the thread in which the post occurs, so I am starting this thread.

For the purposes of the poll; Compatibilist = one who believes free will and determinism are compatible Incompatibilist = one who believes that free will and determinism are not compatible Libertarian incompatibilist = one who believes that at least some persons have free will and that...

Plato spoke of shadows: a reality perceived by every individual that is, in theory, only a reflection of reality- reality corrupt by disillusionment and ignorance. If one were to philosophically claim that reality was a series of effects which stemmed from a series of causes, and that every...

Just for the record: I'm neither into determinism nor into astrology (and I don't know either very well), but since astrology is discussed on this board (from a skeptic's view) I thought about this recently: If you have a wholly deterministic view of the world that would mean that: a.) If a...

It was the discussion between JJ and another, I believe Lucy that led me to these thoughts. The Coulomb effects states that the repulsive forces between similar positive charges rises as the inverse of the square of the distance between them, I hope that is right...

From this thread Well, look at it this way, if things change, the rules have to already be set in place that allow them to do so. And what else could that possibly mean, except that the rules have always been set in place? Which is to say, everything was scripted beforehand and, that nothing...

Determinism continued... The purpose of this thread is to better understand what determinism is vs. randomness and hopefully to get some insight into the concept of free will. As in the case of any theory, we should start off fresh by defining some of the terms relating to what we are...

Here is the classic determinist argument: (1) The laws of physics dictate how matter behaves. (2) Therefore, the present doesn't branch out into a multitude of possible futures. There is only one possible future and nothing that you do is your choice. Question 1(a): According to the laws of...

http://www.drchinese.com/David/Hume's_Determinism_Refuted.htm Whoa! Deep man.

Which one is it? If it is a scientific theory, what is the evidence that the universe is completely deterministic? If it's a philosophical theory (which would make it a metaphysical one I suppose), what are the arguments for it? Does any physicist today hold a strict deterministic theory...