tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post5182874409533559084..comments2024-03-28T21:32:26.550+00:00Comments on Bruce Charlton's Notions: A letter from Kristor on Free Will and DeterminismBruce Charltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-90571564612599462182012-01-07T05:58:43.493+00:002012-01-07T05:58:43.493+00:00Ok. At some point physicists have no other choice,...Ok. At some point physicists have no other choice, but to describe mathematically in simple terms what they "see".<br /><br />My two guesses:<br /><br />Mathematics might be ultimately too simple, too reduced and too "perfect" to describe strings or whatever underlies particles and forces. Too much have been taken away from numbers, too many qualities. One can describe equally well 1 particle, 1 cow, 1 car and 1 universe with number one. This is a huge advantage at the beginning when delving deeper into physics, but at some point, maybe at the level of strings, 1 and other numbers contain so much more than the said numbers, that they are not enough, not even when adding to the numbers increasingly more complex auxiliary mathematical descriptions, themselves suffering from the same simplicity. This in addition to the quantum uncertainty.<br /><br />String theory, if it is right, increases first mathematical certainty, i.e. determinism, in relation to quantum theory, but later, if it will be somehow possible to indirectly study strings, new uncertainties will arise.Valkeahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10835782570473516162noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-75435821400501705462012-01-06T22:22:35.953+00:002012-01-06T22:22:35.953+00:00@VLAI: What you describe as deterministic chaos do...@VLAI: What you describe as deterministic chaos does not seem to me to be truly deterministic; nor is it truly chaotic. A truly deterministic system could evolve along only one path, and so it would not really be proper to speak of it as a “system” that “evolved;” properly speaking, it would be a motionless unity. A truly chaotic state of affairs is likewise not a system at all, and cannot properly be said to evolve. <br /><br />Your logistic map is an instance of what John Holland calls a Constrained Generating Procedure, or CGP: a system that transforms inputs into a constrained set of outputs. CGPs are orderly, and generate orderly outputs, but they do not constrain the set of outputs to the point that there is only one allowable output, given the inputs.<br /><br />NB that noise and disorder are not instances of chaos. They are characteristics of otherwise orderly phenomena. You can’t get pure noise or pure disorder, because pure noise and pure disorder would be, like chaos, pure non-being. Noise is a feature of an orderly signal; disorder is a feature of a state of affairs that is at least a little bit orderly (even in a situation of immaculate heat death, there is a remnant of order: intra-molecular, intra-atomic, etc.). Take away the signal altogether, and there would be no noise; take away the basic order implicit in being as such, and you take away all disorder as well. <br /><br />NB also that freedom is not a form of chaos. It is not a derogation of order. Rather, it is a product of order. Freedom – the possibility of true optionality, of true alternatives – supervenes upon the constraint of sheer, untrammelled possibility. If simply anything might happen, without any limit or constraint of any kind, then if x should happen, it could not have come to pass because an entity chose it; rather, it could only be that x happened *for no reason at all.*<br /><br />None of this is to disagree with your suggestion that your logistic map shows how an ordered system can exhibit degrees of freedom. It does. <br /><br />Further, I agree with you that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Relation specifies the ineradicable bit of sampling error in our apprehension of the materially determined – i.e., ontologically complete and definite, and therefore apprehensible – past. The only way to know another thing perfectly and without any uncertainty whatsoever is to be that other thing; in which case, the thing known is not other, at all, but only oneself. Thus if an instant of knowledge or experience is really to exist as a disparate thing, it must be different from the instants that constitute its past, and that are the data of its experience. How different? For our causal order, the answer is given by the Planck length, which measures both the minimum amount of action and being, and also the greatest amount of knowledge or information it is possible for one particular thing to have of another.Kristornoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-62350873621425404852012-01-06T22:20:38.412+00:002012-01-06T22:20:38.412+00:00@ Valkea: String theory is cool, but I’m not sure ...@ Valkea: String theory is cool, but I’m not sure it’s science. That doesn’t mean I think it’s false, but that I think that it may just be that it’s not susceptible to experimental falsification. This is what I understand “pure geometry” to indicate: a pure geometry is a geometry that is not a geometry of a given physical domain, but that is rather a geometry of a type of physical being as such. And you can’t do an experiment on being as such. So, this would make string theory a theory in applied mathematics, I guess. And that would make it a department of metaphysics. <br /><br />If string theory is indeed a pure geometry, then the fact that no one knows what the strings really are is just what we should expect, because a pure geometry is by definition basic. The Calabi-Yau volumes and strings of the theory are not themselves physical, because if they were, they would then themselves stand in need of explication (in which case, string theory would not be a theory of everything physical – it would not be an ultimate theory). We are asking for such an explication when we ask, “what are strings and Calabi-Yau volumes, *really*?” If string theory is a pure geometry, then the answer has to be, “they are axioms of physical reality, and do not themselves therefore have any physical reality; their reality is purely mathematical.” This does not, NB, mean that they are unreal, or even that they are not concrete; it means only that they are not *physical.* Indeed, it is traditional to argue that mathematical reality is *more* real, *more* concrete than physical reality. <br /><br />Drawing an analogy to computer science, asking what strings and Calabi-Yau volumes really are may be like asking what computer language binary code is written in. The question is a fundamental misprision. Binary is *just math.* Likewise, string theory may be *just math.* <br /> <br />Drawing an analogy to computer science, asking what strings and Calabi-Yau volumes really are may be like asking what computer language binary code is written in. The question is a fundamental misprision. Binary is just math. Likewise, string theory may be just math.Kristornoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-50309501729203497022012-01-06T01:33:37.981+00:002012-01-06T01:33:37.981+00:00Is determinism really incompatible with free will?...Is determinism really incompatible with free will? At this point one might ponder the concept of deterministic chaos: if the assumption is taken that the laws which govern reality are indeed deterministic, but the sets upon which these laws operate might be varied infinitesimally and the consequent behaviour would be totally different (compared to the sets not being altered), then randomness might be reconciled with determinism. <br /><br />If Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty is taken to be a fundamental principle of nature (that is to say, quantities like momentum and precise location of a particle or energy and time cannot be known in detail at the same time) then it might turn out in the following way: the "white noise" of the system (which must occur in a system where some form of sampling takes place, i.e. where a continuous function (which would be the underlying eternity, unity) is broken down into values that are both discontinous in time as well as in the associated value of the function) alters the values in such a way that the resulting output is utterly different to the one that occurs without noise. <br /><br />For example, let us think about the logistic map which is a very simple relation characterised by the following equation: x_{n+1} = r*x_{n}*(1-x_{n}), 0 < r <= 4; n = 0,1,2,...<br />The logistic map maps the interval [0,1] onto itself. Between r=3.5699... and r=4 deterministic chaos takes place: minimal variations of r lead to a very different output (the logical map might be used for example to simulate the growth of a population of animals where r is the supply of food). The output is predictable if all necessary values are known with perfect precision. By taking into account the principle that nature can never be known and measured with ever increasing accuracy, determinism in effect becomes an integral part of chaos. As our material self is subject to the laws of nature but is fundamentally corrupted by noise which by principle is random, the deterministic processes of our brain might yield random results obtained in deterministic ways. Material determinism does not necessary mean that free will is impossible. It rather strengthens free will. Deterministic chaos that accompanies some nonlinear equations which govern the physical world is thus a fundamental part of nature. It might explain the sheer diversity of living objects and forms, and at the same time explain how this diversity could develop although only a couple of laws (and not infinitely many) govern nature. It is the symbiosis of randomness and determinism. <br /><br />By the way, I have been reading your blog for quite a while: this way I want to thank you for your great thoughts that often provoked heated discussions within myself. <br /><br />VLAIAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-86323110675687679662012-01-05T23:55:29.938+00:002012-01-05T23:55:29.938+00:00Kristor, what do you say about string theory; it s...Kristor, what do you say about string theory; it says that quantum probabilities are produced by deterministic processes in the same way that two right angled swinging pendulums produce probabilities, and that reality (particles and the four forces) is an illusion of continuous generation of "surfaces" and "membranes" by the moving strings and coiled strings? Thus, according to string theory particles and the four forces are "pure geometry", whatever it ultimately is. Nobody knows what the strings really are, and no strings, "surfaces" and "membranes" has ever been detected directly or indirectly because of too high energy requirements, although the theory has opened new avenues, and to some extent mathematically and geometrically explained old unsolved problems, like black holes as "fuzzy balls" as big as the event horizons; quantum particle-field dualism; the combination of gravitation and quantum mechanics; a single geometrical cause and explanation for the four forces and multiplicity of particles; illusionary nature of quantum action-at-the-distance, e.g. when photons are send to opposite directions at the same time by the same light source; rebounding nature of the Planck's constant, the smallest possible size of energy quanta, thus impossibility of black hole singularities and infinite masses etc.; etc.Valkeahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10835782570473516162noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-8373088006034750882012-01-05T13:52:23.340+00:002012-01-05T13:52:23.340+00:00Kristor takes the argument a step or two further o...Kristor takes the argument a step or two further or deeper than I think the early Greeks would have gone. <br /><br />His argument seems rigorous and watertight to me (I can follow it although I could not have made it myself) - so the question is to what extent arguments of this type are compelling - and to what extent they are limited by their abstraction (hence their intrinsic selectivity and simplification) <br /><br />My own preference, these days, is to use philosophy as a 'single step back' kind of procedure to reconcile spontaneous common sense in-your-face 'how things seem' with apparent contradictions and paradoxes. Rather as Plato did when trying to include both unchanging eternal reality (which is necessary for any knowledge to be real) and the change and time of this (commonsense) real world. <br /><br />Plato answers this problem, but the extra step back of philosophy which Aristotle introduces answers problems arising from this Platonic perspective. <br /><br />However, I am not convinced that it is necessary to deal with the problems of the Platonic perspective in a philosophical way - at that point we can admit to the mystery of things, and cease philosophy - because going down the path of further, two-steps-back philosophy brings further problems of its own. <br /><br />Deep waters! This is related to my belief that (Platonic) Eastern Orthodoxy is more nearly right in its general approach than (Aristotelian) Roman Catholicism. I think Platonism gives us enough of the advantages of philosophy, without stepping onto the slippery slope of scholasticism (as I perceive it).<br /><br />Maybe it is simply a matter of the fact that anything more complex than Plato is incomprehensible to the inexpert? Plato stands at about the limit of common sense, and is perhaps about as far as humans were 'meant' to go?Bruce Charltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.com