Comments | leftwinger: (без темы)

leftwinger

(Untitled)

Jan 23, 2005 02:59

Is there a way to rectify the universe as a chaotic deterministic system with human free will? Are there truly no totally random events? Is the universe simply not chaotic (or deterministic)? Should I stop engaging in mental activity beyond midnight to the extent that it leaves me hopelessly unable to sleep?

Questions, questions.

Comments 6

incendiarymind January 23 2005, 16:39:12 UTC

The short answer is no. You can't rectify determinism and free will. However, since humans can't see the future and determinism is based on the fact that there are infinite variables the human conscious mind can't (or doesn't) comprehend, it's always a surprise what the deterministic outcomes are.

Hopefully that can help you sleep.

byzantinespy January 23 2005, 20:23:21 UTC

I'm not sure what you mean by "rectify" here. But anyway, I would say that the nature of the universe is ambiguous. To say that the universe is deterministic is to say that everything happens as a matter of cause-and-effect, but the cause-and-effects that we see are just our projection of our interpretation of the world onto the world ( ... )

Rx . . . falcon13 January 23 2005, 23:17:24 UTC

Jack Daniels

a_priori January 24 2005, 06:15:05 UTC

I've never quite understood why this bothers people (lots of people, not just you).
Let's state up front that any sentence beginning "the universe is..." is nothing but unwarranted speculation. A limited human intellect cannot possibly know enough about the universe as a whole to be able to intelligently say anything at all on the subject. So the best we can hope for is to say that it seems like such and such is true of existence itself. Let that qualification stand for everything that follows.
Anyway, it seems like the world is deterministic, i.e. that the spatial arrangement of matter and energy at any given moment determines the arrangement of matter and energy in the immediately subsequent moment. Assuming (again, this cannot be known, but it seems to be true) that human consciousness is constituted by, or at least utterly contingent upon, physical stuff, then it follows that one's actions, indeed one's very thoughts, are necessitated by immediately precedent states of affairs ( ... )

theacer February 1 2005, 03:57:39 UTC

While I (as usually) don't have paragraphs of solid scholarly support for what I am about to say, I heard it tonight in a lecture on Heidegger and immediately thought of this post ( ... )