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To fully generalize the concept, take Samuel Butler's formulation from Erewhon: If it were possible to know everything about the past, it would be possible to k

To fully generalize the concept, take Samuel Butler's formulation from Erewhon: If it were possible to know everything about the past, it would be possible to know everything about the future. Zoom out far enough and nature and nurture are unified into a deterministic historical timeline. Freewill is an illusion and the universe is a static four-dimensional entity.

catawbasam 8y ago
That's just a reformulation of Laplace's Demon, which repudiated long ago.
cortesoft 8y ago
That assumes that the universe is deterministic... the more we learn about quantum mechanics, the less likely that seems.
- lostmsu 8y ago
  QM is quite deterministic too, if you think of it like field theory.
hsienmaneja 8y ago
Doesn’t quantum mechanics leave open the possibility that our universe is fundamentally probabilistic? Also, how can we say anything about free will when we have not come to grips with defining the hard problem? Of course, if you want to model biological processes based on deterministic physics then free will does not exist. I’m simply suggesting that the fundamental assumption that are universe is deterministic is flawed.
- xelxebar 8y ago
  > Doesn’t quantum mechanics leave open the possibility that our universe is fundamentally probabilistic? Not really. A wave function propogates in a perfectly deterministic manner. There's not anything probabilistic baked into QM. Probability comes in at what's called the Measurement Problem. Right now, we ad hoc apply the Born rule to project complex amplitudes into probability distributions whenever convenient, but there's actually no good understanding of why the Born rule works at all. It's just sorta tacked onto QM at this point.
- teddyh 8y ago
  It really doesn’t matter if the laws of nature are deterministic or not. Consider the past. At no time did a die come up both two and five, nor did a photon’s wavelength collapse in two places. Why should the future be considered differently? Events in the future will happen one specific certain way – we just can’t know which way until they actually happen. But we don’t have to be able to (even theoretically) predict future events for those future events to still be fixed in a four-dimensional space-time.

catawbasam 8y ago

That's just a reformulation of Laplace's Demon, which repudiated long ago.

cortesoft 8y ago

That assumes that the universe is deterministic... the more we learn about quantum mechanics, the less likely that seems.

lostmsu 8y ago
QM is quite deterministic too, if you think of it like field theory.

hsienmaneja 8y ago

Doesn’t quantum mechanics leave open the possibility that our universe is fundamentally probabilistic? Also, how can we say anything about free will when we have not come to grips with defining the hard problem? Of course, if you want to model biological processes based on deterministic physics then free will does not exist. I’m simply suggesting that the fundamental assumption that are universe is deterministic is flawed.

xelxebar 8y ago
> Doesn’t quantum mechanics leave open the possibility that our universe is fundamentally probabilistic? Not really. A wave function propogates in a perfectly deterministic manner. There's not anything probabilistic baked into QM. Probability comes in at what's called the Measurement Problem. Right now, we ad hoc apply the Born rule to project complex amplitudes into probability distributions whenever convenient, but there's actually no good understanding of why the Born rule works at all. It's just sorta tacked onto QM at this point.
teddyh 8y ago
It really doesn’t matter if the laws of nature are deterministic or not. Consider the past. At no time did a die come up both two and five, nor did a photon’s wavelength collapse in two places. Why should the future be considered differently? Events in the future will happen one specific certain way – we just can’t know which way until they actually happen. But we don’t have to be able to (even theoretically) predict future events for those future events to still be fixed in a four-dimensional space-time.