No! I don't wanna! Do you realize how boring the game would be under those conditions? :eek: :D

Me too. Of course I ended up spending it all (and a lot more :rolleyes:) on custom cues. I found out the hard way that they're a lot like Lay's potato chips. You can't have just one. :D I wish I had room for a table these days. There are several very close to my apartment, but they are of dismal quality, poorly maintained, and placed too close to one another. I had to (temporarily) stop playing to avoid picking up bad habits compensating for lousy equipment.

Hmmm … I don't believe I've seen that one.

I agree completely.

What if the theory describes the soul as an outside force? One that comes from a fourth, fifth, or other dimension? Where is it written that the same laws of physics that we observe in our three dimensions must be present in the other dimension(s)? Isn't it possible that randomness and the existence of free will might not be intertwined in another dimension whose laws are different from ours?

I don't think that would help, because I'm not sure it makes sense. a simplistic example: let's say we're trying to predict what's going to happen in a room, and what happens is determined by our friend Ben flicking one of five different switches. if we have a theory that can determine precisely which switch Ben will flick (even if that theory uses all sorts of weird and esoteric dimensions) then Ben's behavior is completely deterministic, because it is completely contained within our theory. you can't write a theory that explicitly refers to things it can't account for. that would be like saying that the equation for a line is 'y=mx+b+S' where S is unknown; fine where S is a constant, not so good where S is 'x^2'.

I'm not suggesting that you can have a theory describing what switch Ben will flick. I'm suggesting that you might have a theory describing how Ben is able to flip a switch in his room and have an effect in your room. Your room is completely deterministic, with predetermined responses to the switches Ben flips, but Ben's room may not be! It might be completely random, or Ben might have free will.

;)

cool. in which case you have a theory that tells you absolutely nothing. :) well, that's not quite fair... you have a theory of the form "once I know A, I can determine B", but since you can't ever know A, what can you do with it?

Well, since A is the mind's will, you can decide what it is that you want to accomplish, and bring that about.

I'm just offering hope that we can have a unified theory of everything and free will as well!

This was super fun to read myself talk about determinism more than a year ago before I had any determinism vocabulary or physics background. I cant believe determinism was spinning in my head like that before I knew how to describe it.

pro-determinism)Everything (Including human actions) is a function of antecedent states of matter.
anti-determinism)Everything (Including human actions) is completely random.

the truth is, determinism or pure stochasticity.. both leave a picture of reality in which humans have no control of their actions.

Name a vegetable :D

Wow... that is a really great conclusion. though I don't hear it from people very often.

this is great I can understand what everyone is talking about now.
University Physics departments are great for this.

Has anyone seen the Dilbert cartoon where an accounting troll shows him their random number generator? It's a troll who keeps saying "Nine, nine, nine ...".
Dilbert asks if it's really random. The troll concedes that, with random numbers, you can never be sure.

Gödel, consciousness and the Unified Field Theorem
 

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I don’t see why that follows. I’m not a physicist, but I understand that a Unified Field Theory would be a coherent understanding of the structure of things. That does not in any way imply that it can "predict everything".

Perhaps Kurt Gödel’s Completeness Theorems have some relevance here...

I find it difficult to imagine that a Unified Field Theory can explain consciousness. But perhaps you see consciousness as an unproven hypothesis? :cool:

-- ArcticStones


PS. Perhaps determinism can only apply to systems without conscious elements? In other words, an individual can be free only to the extent he/she is conscious. To not be aware is to be reduced to a sleepwalker, whose path and behaviour is determined uncontrolled factors.
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What I always find interesting about determinism discussions is the way the entire issue has morphed into a physics question when in fact (historically and philosophically) it's a spiritual question. The problem of determinism starts in middle-ages Christian philosophy, when theosophists had to try and rationalize God's (assumed) perfect omniscience against man's (assumed) perfect free will - i.e., how can God be all-knowing when humans can make free (unknowable) choices. in fact, almost every other culture and faith has taken the reasonable and pragmatic approach to the issue, thinking that people make conscious choices bounded by contextual circumstances. This is neither fully deterministic (though it is constrained by deterministic forces) nor stochastic (since it is always assumed that people make their choices through some form of moral apperception, not through random processes).

Honestly, I think this whole realm of philosophy is guilt-driven: the idea that we humans can make bad, immoral decisions triggers guilt-anger in nearly everyone, because it implies that we should put more effort into and take more care with the decisions we do make. it's much easier (mentally) to believe that stuff just happens and we don't have any control over it. that way (in one of the more peculiar and common twists of human logic) we all can feel free to choose to do what we want to do - regardless of consequences - because we don't really have any choice about what we choose to do, so we might as well do what we want to do because it's what we were going to do regardless.

and yes, tat will make your head explode if you think about it too much.

Alternatively, perhaps an individual's claim not to be a sleepwalker is a phenomenon deterministically created by pre-existent states of matter?

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In some cases, undoubtedly. Isn’t that what “religion as mood making” is all about?

Ah, yes. Life is but a question of mind and matter...
Someone once phrased this as: “You don’t matter and I don’t mind.” ;)
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Snarkier the other way round.

Or:
What's matter? Never mind.
What's mind? No matter.

Not that I believe this; I regard 'mind' as an emergent state of brain activity, and as such, deterministic. It has been demonstrated that the electrical phenomena leading to bodily movements commence before the conscious acts of volition that the owner of said body imagines launches the show. This suggests a system in which the movement and the act of volition are parallel effects of a common antecedent, not effect and cause.

I favor this viewpoint except for its assumption that people actually think about what they do. It's been my long experience that a huge swath of humanity avoids thinking (or are too emotional/dumb/drunk/drugged/etc. to think clearly) and their actions are therefore somewhat semi-random.

really, the word 'random' doesn't fit right in this discussion. people who are too emotional/dumb/drunk/drugged/etc are actually far easier to predict than people who aren't (making them - statistically speaking - far less random), but people who think soberly and clearly are not by any means random (despite the fact that they are not statistically easy to predict). The problem here is not randomness, which would by definition be neither good nor bad in the long run, but irrationality, which is as a rule harmful to the person in question or to others. and irrationality is often very highly structured. in sort:

• irrational people react, and their reactions are consistent and insensitive to context. as they old saw goes, they keep doing the same thing expecting to get a different result.
• rational people respond, then their responses vary widely according to what's appropriate in the situation. to reverse the above quip, they keep doing different things expecting to get the same result.

I think it was J Krishnamurti (though he is by no means the only spiritualist to say this) who used to go on about the insanity of the conventional mind: that it takes an experience from the past, imposes it as the outcome of any similar future situation, and then ties itself in knots in the present trying to avoid what it has already decided can't be avoided.

I wish we had those forums were you could thumb up a comment.