Since, I am a firm believer in free will, I would say, I have a probability of certain choices to make based on a spectrum of rationality ranging from less to more rational. Each of our choices affects the universe. The needs of every conscious entity drive the decisions of the universe but if we change or make less rational decisions, the universe has to course correct which isn't easy. So I guess the universe is both probabilistic and deterministic if you follow this train of thought. But again, how could you test this??!??! Thanks for doing what you do Mr. Jaimungal.
If you adopt the very reasonable proposal of GR + QM being in harmony, then the Einstein 4D Block Universe is still sensible (it always was!). This tells you (or at least me) all the things we say are "living" or "psychological" and "have meaning" and "are conscious" are not physical. Nothing that is static or "given as fixed mathematical structure (the 4D Block Universe) can have "life".
So yes, you are right, our minds act upon the universe, but not from "within" like emergence theory (which is thoroughly physicalist and cannot admit free will, hence is morally wrong, if not wrong for many other consistency reasons).
It is a logical conclusion upon my suppositions here, that free will acts "from without".
Determinism reduces existence to a pre-written script, where every event, thought, and action was set in motion by a single, ancient cause—whether the Big Bang or some other primordial force. Free will is an illusion, and there is no true creation, stripping existence of genuine significance.
Indeterminism, however, allows reality to be dynamic—an unfolding process where agency and spontaneity are real. If the universe is not fully determined, then choice has weight, creativity has substance, and meaning is something we actively forge rather than merely uncover. For such a system to be coherent, where gaps in causality exist, a conscious force must sustain and guide existence—whether that be human agency, or a universal mind.
A meaningful existence cannot emerge from a frozen reality where all is already written. It can only exist in a living, evolving cosmos where creation is continuous, and consciousness plays an essential role in shaping what is to come. Indeterminism, therefore, is not just a more liberating view—it is the only metaphysical framework in which meaning is real.
True probabilities don’t exist. They are just our subjective understanding of uncertainty. Meanwhile facts are what they are, they are determined as a result of their reasons for existence. It’s not reality that’s incomplete, but our models of reality. Probabilities are a product of our incomplete models.
I agree that experimental confirmation of classical mechanics cannot conclusively rule out non-deterministic factors.
However, I don't accept your inference that determinism is not directly falsifiable.
To falsify a theory, an experiment must contradict it. A theory is falsifiable when there is a conceivable experiment that can contradict it.
Any experiment in which distinct outcomes can be obtained for the same initial condition can serve to falsify determinism.
(Of course, the phrase "the same" in the preceding sentence is imprecise. Are two fair tosses of a die "the same"? Are two quantum systems prepared in the same state "the same"? Are two nearby initial conditions for a chaotic dynamical system "the same"?)
Determinism is falsifiable. It remains unclear whether it has been falsified.
Also, I don't think that determinism is a "metaphysical add-on" to classical mechanics. The word "determinism" is merely an adjective for classifying theories.
What is metaphysical is jumping from experimental confirmation of a certain theory to the unwarranted conclusion that the universe conforms to this theory. (A 19th-century physicist was empirically justified in believing in classical mechanics, but concluding that the universe is deterministic is metaphysical.)
Yes! It could be the case that there are actually NEVER two initial conditions that are exactly the same. After all, two experiments are always separated by time or space. So, if you sit at the end of the Universe’s life, you could be looking backwards on a UNIQUE history. Which would mean determinism is true, although still unfalsifiable.
Determinism is falsiable upon a set of assumptions claiming why determinism is true.
Without such assumptions there is no falsification.
Determinism is however obviously nuts, with no big formality required. For that one only needs a soul. Zombies, like Dennett and Sapolsky, can emit strings or vibrations that "prove determinism true" in a formal system, and so should be patted on the back and fed brain spew to keep the little critters happy and occupied.
Determinism means that given initial conditions, the future evolves uniquely. Superb.
1. Major premise: Classical mechanics is falsifiable.
2. Minor premise: Determinism (as a hypothesis) is inferred from classical mechanics.
3. Conclusion: Therefore Determinism is falsifiable.
What am I missing? Why is concluding/inferring that the universe behaves in a deterministic manner a metaphysical conclusion rather than a theoretical one if, as shown above, Determinism is falsifiable?
Thanks for your reply, but I don't think this logic is correct. Let C be "classical mechanics is true" and D be "determinism is true". C implies D, but not vice versa. C being false does not imply that D is false. Even if evidence E implies that C is false, we cannot logically conclude that D is false. Falsifying classical mechanics does not succeed in falsifying determinism.
On the other hand, no amount of evidence confirming a deterministic theory guarantees that the universe is deterministic.
Nonetheless, determinism is falsifiable: it is conceivable that, in some experiment, "the same" initial conditions lead to different futures.
Given such an experiment, however, theory can finesse its interpretation to be consistent with determinism. For example, in the double slit experiment, a particle is repeatedly prepared in "the same" state, but the spot it causes on the screen behind the slits can vary in position. Does this experiment falsify determinism? Not necessarily. Quantum theory correctly predicts the probability distribution for the position---perhaps that's all the "future" we're entitled to know. Another view that preserves determinism is belief in unitary evolution of the wave function of the universe (no wave function collapse).
Very much agree! One's metaphysical commitments can only be taken as axiomatic.
FWIW, my guess is that reality is only approximately physically determined. Even given perfect knowledge of the current state, we can only approximate future states (albeit sometimes very closely). The perfect determination of classical physics is, I think, an idealization, just as spheres and the real numbers are idealizations.
Consider that, at the quantum level, things are probabilistic, and when we deal with large systems (like a volume of gas), we use statistical analysis. So, there seems a lack of perfect predictability in large systems, too.
There is also that reality itself may not have the physical precision needed for perfect prediction of future states. Reality might not contain enough decimal points for a current trajectory to predict a future location perfectly.
But this would be impossible to test, so it's just a WAG.
Often when an age-old unresolved question is: Is it A or B, it may be the wrong question. It may be both or either (e.g. wave particle duality), or something else, or neither.
I think that is a confusion of what "complementarity" means, no? The particle is never a wave. But the stochastic description of a particle can be effectively accomplished using a probability wave model. But do not mistake the model for the reality — Curt's point.
If you want to learn one way in which Schrödinger--Dirac mechanics could arise naturally from pure topology of spacetime (particles only) try my rambling blog: https://t4gu.gitlab.io/t4gu/ --- quite a bit of fun stuff there.
Once the spinor is set-up as a transformation instruction acting on a fiducial spacetime frame, then the particle dynamics of this *mathematical* object naturally obeys a wave equation. But because it is a wave equation does not mean the particle is a wave. It is still a particle. The spinor is a *transform* instruction, not the actual topology or "mass" charge of spacetime.
The probability that any computer or human could predict my thought of a particular well defined very, very, large, finite number (such as Pi to (prime-i)^(prime-j)^(prime-k)^(prime-l) places); is 0. Unless I give my particular choices using very large primes i, j, k, l.
I have the impression that a probabilistic quantized field theory is just the natural limit of observation in a given observable reality irrespective of the underlying mechanics behind it. That is to say that no matter what the actual TOE is, the universe - any universe - that you observe from within will appear as a QFT at the limit of your observational capabilities. Thoughts?
The classical equations of motion are deterministic, if applied in the absolute reference frame of dynamics. Throughout the universe only the Lab|ECEF ref frame is inertial. Not the distant stars of Mach, not the Newtonian abstraction of absolute space.
Yes, Curt, this is a test to see if you really read the comments
It seems to me that this line of epistemological skepticism applies to belief systems and JTB knowledge in general. Our horizon of understanding is ever limited by what we don't know we don't know. In this way, it seems to me that all proposed ontological substrates are fundamentally metaphorical, and at best excellent source metaphors that can function "as if" true.
Stating that the existence of a deterministic equation implies deterministic physics assumes that the equation exactly models the physics. Hidden in that statement is a faith-based assumption that standard geometry and real math are more fundamental than physics.
That is an odd faith principle since real mathematics is an infinite-limit exaggeration of the continuity, orthogonality, and metrical concepts of naïve 1700s classical physics. Since discovering quantum and relativistic physics, we might want to revisit some of those assumptions.
Absolute constancy and absolute variation compete in a relative configuration and phase space of analog and digital computation. Motion and emotion are generated.
Why make things more complicated than they are?ðŸ«
Even pure (poor?) Aristotle's logics works perfectly well when it goes about the reasoning behind determinism: there cannot be any event without a cause. BY DEFINITION OF A PROCESS. There's ALWAYS a chain of events for ANY HAPPENING PHENOMENON. This is the simplest possible way of reasoning, isn't it? So, who should defend their claims? Yes — the ones that bring in something ELSE above the basics. Right?
Luckily, it is merely a theorem. Yet in 2018 its quantum version was proved to hold true, not to single constituents the exact states of which can't be precisely discovered but at the level of some collective quantities.
To make recurrence work at even a theoretical level, one must assume that no true novelty is introduced into the system. Modern day cosmologies don't have problem with that as models of continuous creation have been all but flushed own the physics toilet decades ago. Still, some physicists continue proposing theories where there is true novelty appearing: something that is not limited to Markovian processes - based on the present state alone - nor even something determined by the past evolution of the whole system. I may have misunderstood Tim Palmer when he talks about p-adic numbers in one of Curt's interviews but to me it sounds as if he claims the system is finite and not bound, but rather increasing, in size.
Talking in terms of the phase space, growth is natural also compatibly with determinism. The number of possible states does increase, it's tantamount to say that the entropy of the system increases. To me however Tim was talking about something else, growth in terms of something tangible or ontologic.
Novelty also is a tricky concept to play with. Lee Smolin uses it to accommodate statistical non-deterministic changes while for me novelty is more kin of choices made independently along the history of the system, a sort of a free will. Here's another position where I agree with Tim Palmer: the counter-factuals. Once we have a measurement outcome, it's of no use speculating what the outcome would have been were something changed in the measurement setup. With a specific outcome, all the other options become counter-factuals that are incompatible with the system where that outcome was realized. This is why unitarity actually can work also with choices that are not only somehow disguised within random fluctuations under the error margins of the experimental setup.
It's a shame the podcast with the two Tims (Palmer and Maudlin) got stuck in a disagreement about this rather basic argument. The reasoning Tim Palmer makes about counter-factuals, non-necessity of Hilbert spaces in quantum physics, and about aptness of rational numbers instead of real numbers makes totally sense to me. Presently, there are not enough people involved in such an approach that could de-stuck the whole area of study in quantum mechanics from issues that have been left unresolved for decades because of - possibly - entirely flawed mathematical axioms used at the ground level.
If you haven't already check out the "hyper chaos" of philosopher Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude - it's the idea that true randomness would not be stochastic, that both the left & right of your illustration could be the same until the right side changes.
Alternatively Thomas Nail, in On Being & Motion, suggests the insight from QM is instead that Nature moves in a "pedetic" way, neither deterministic nor random.
I feel like these two "New Materialists" are philosophers actually trying to grasp what QM results might actually mean for Philosophy of Causation.
Anjum & Mumford's Dispositional Causation is also good stuff - I really liked their Causation is Not Your Enemy paper.
Finally I recommend A Place for Consciousness by Gregg Rosenberg, his argument against Physicalism is cited by Kastrup in his PhD Philo thesis though sadly AFAICTell Kastrup ignored the bigger questions re: Causality that are the main focus of the work.
Since, I am a firm believer in free will, I would say, I have a probability of certain choices to make based on a spectrum of rationality ranging from less to more rational. Each of our choices affects the universe. The needs of every conscious entity drive the decisions of the universe but if we change or make less rational decisions, the universe has to course correct which isn't easy. So I guess the universe is both probabilistic and deterministic if you follow this train of thought. But again, how could you test this??!??! Thanks for doing what you do Mr. Jaimungal.
If you adopt the very reasonable proposal of GR + QM being in harmony, then the Einstein 4D Block Universe is still sensible (it always was!). This tells you (or at least me) all the things we say are "living" or "psychological" and "have meaning" and "are conscious" are not physical. Nothing that is static or "given as fixed mathematical structure (the 4D Block Universe) can have "life".
So yes, you are right, our minds act upon the universe, but not from "within" like emergence theory (which is thoroughly physicalist and cannot admit free will, hence is morally wrong, if not wrong for many other consistency reasons).
It is a logical conclusion upon my suppositions here, that free will acts "from without".
Determinism reduces existence to a pre-written script, where every event, thought, and action was set in motion by a single, ancient cause—whether the Big Bang or some other primordial force. Free will is an illusion, and there is no true creation, stripping existence of genuine significance.
Indeterminism, however, allows reality to be dynamic—an unfolding process where agency and spontaneity are real. If the universe is not fully determined, then choice has weight, creativity has substance, and meaning is something we actively forge rather than merely uncover. For such a system to be coherent, where gaps in causality exist, a conscious force must sustain and guide existence—whether that be human agency, or a universal mind.
A meaningful existence cannot emerge from a frozen reality where all is already written. It can only exist in a living, evolving cosmos where creation is continuous, and consciousness plays an essential role in shaping what is to come. Indeterminism, therefore, is not just a more liberating view—it is the only metaphysical framework in which meaning is real.
True probabilities don’t exist. They are just our subjective understanding of uncertainty. Meanwhile facts are what they are, they are determined as a result of their reasons for existence. It’s not reality that’s incomplete, but our models of reality. Probabilities are a product of our incomplete models.
I agree that experimental confirmation of classical mechanics cannot conclusively rule out non-deterministic factors.
However, I don't accept your inference that determinism is not directly falsifiable.
To falsify a theory, an experiment must contradict it. A theory is falsifiable when there is a conceivable experiment that can contradict it.
Any experiment in which distinct outcomes can be obtained for the same initial condition can serve to falsify determinism.
(Of course, the phrase "the same" in the preceding sentence is imprecise. Are two fair tosses of a die "the same"? Are two quantum systems prepared in the same state "the same"? Are two nearby initial conditions for a chaotic dynamical system "the same"?)
Determinism is falsifiable. It remains unclear whether it has been falsified.
Also, I don't think that determinism is a "metaphysical add-on" to classical mechanics. The word "determinism" is merely an adjective for classifying theories.
What is metaphysical is jumping from experimental confirmation of a certain theory to the unwarranted conclusion that the universe conforms to this theory. (A 19th-century physicist was empirically justified in believing in classical mechanics, but concluding that the universe is deterministic is metaphysical.)
What’s in your parentheses is on point.
Yes! It could be the case that there are actually NEVER two initial conditions that are exactly the same. After all, two experiments are always separated by time or space. So, if you sit at the end of the Universe’s life, you could be looking backwards on a UNIQUE history. Which would mean determinism is true, although still unfalsifiable.
Determinism is falsiable upon a set of assumptions claiming why determinism is true.
Without such assumptions there is no falsification.
Determinism is however obviously nuts, with no big formality required. For that one only needs a soul. Zombies, like Dennett and Sapolsky, can emit strings or vibrations that "prove determinism true" in a formal system, and so should be patted on the back and fed brain spew to keep the little critters happy and occupied.
I am trying to wrap my head around this.
Determinism means that given initial conditions, the future evolves uniquely. Superb.
1. Major premise: Classical mechanics is falsifiable.
2. Minor premise: Determinism (as a hypothesis) is inferred from classical mechanics.
3. Conclusion: Therefore Determinism is falsifiable.
What am I missing? Why is concluding/inferring that the universe behaves in a deterministic manner a metaphysical conclusion rather than a theoretical one if, as shown above, Determinism is falsifiable?
Thanks for your reply, but I don't think this logic is correct. Let C be "classical mechanics is true" and D be "determinism is true". C implies D, but not vice versa. C being false does not imply that D is false. Even if evidence E implies that C is false, we cannot logically conclude that D is false. Falsifying classical mechanics does not succeed in falsifying determinism.
On the other hand, no amount of evidence confirming a deterministic theory guarantees that the universe is deterministic.
Nonetheless, determinism is falsifiable: it is conceivable that, in some experiment, "the same" initial conditions lead to different futures.
Given such an experiment, however, theory can finesse its interpretation to be consistent with determinism. For example, in the double slit experiment, a particle is repeatedly prepared in "the same" state, but the spot it causes on the screen behind the slits can vary in position. Does this experiment falsify determinism? Not necessarily. Quantum theory correctly predicts the probability distribution for the position---perhaps that's all the "future" we're entitled to know. Another view that preserves determinism is belief in unitary evolution of the wave function of the universe (no wave function collapse).
Very much agree! One's metaphysical commitments can only be taken as axiomatic.
FWIW, my guess is that reality is only approximately physically determined. Even given perfect knowledge of the current state, we can only approximate future states (albeit sometimes very closely). The perfect determination of classical physics is, I think, an idealization, just as spheres and the real numbers are idealizations.
Consider that, at the quantum level, things are probabilistic, and when we deal with large systems (like a volume of gas), we use statistical analysis. So, there seems a lack of perfect predictability in large systems, too.
There is also that reality itself may not have the physical precision needed for perfect prediction of future states. Reality might not contain enough decimal points for a current trajectory to predict a future location perfectly.
But this would be impossible to test, so it's just a WAG.
Often when an age-old unresolved question is: Is it A or B, it may be the wrong question. It may be both or either (e.g. wave particle duality), or something else, or neither.
I think that is a confusion of what "complementarity" means, no? The particle is never a wave. But the stochastic description of a particle can be effectively accomplished using a probability wave model. But do not mistake the model for the reality — Curt's point.
If you want to learn one way in which Schrödinger--Dirac mechanics could arise naturally from pure topology of spacetime (particles only) try my rambling blog: https://t4gu.gitlab.io/t4gu/ --- quite a bit of fun stuff there.
Once the spinor is set-up as a transformation instruction acting on a fiducial spacetime frame, then the particle dynamics of this *mathematical* object naturally obeys a wave equation. But because it is a wave equation does not mean the particle is a wave. It is still a particle. The spinor is a *transform* instruction, not the actual topology or "mass" charge of spacetime.
The probability that any computer or human could predict my thought of a particular well defined very, very, large, finite number (such as Pi to (prime-i)^(prime-j)^(prime-k)^(prime-l) places); is 0. Unless I give my particular choices using very large primes i, j, k, l.
I have the impression that a probabilistic quantized field theory is just the natural limit of observation in a given observable reality irrespective of the underlying mechanics behind it. That is to say that no matter what the actual TOE is, the universe - any universe - that you observe from within will appear as a QFT at the limit of your observational capabilities. Thoughts?
The classical equations of motion are deterministic, if applied in the absolute reference frame of dynamics. Throughout the universe only the Lab|ECEF ref frame is inertial. Not the distant stars of Mach, not the Newtonian abstraction of absolute space.
Yes, Curt, this is a test to see if you really read the comments
.................Robert Bennett, ph.D.
Don't test me.
It seems to me that this line of epistemological skepticism applies to belief systems and JTB knowledge in general. Our horizon of understanding is ever limited by what we don't know we don't know. In this way, it seems to me that all proposed ontological substrates are fundamentally metaphorical, and at best excellent source metaphors that can function "as if" true.
Stating that the existence of a deterministic equation implies deterministic physics assumes that the equation exactly models the physics. Hidden in that statement is a faith-based assumption that standard geometry and real math are more fundamental than physics.
That is an odd faith principle since real mathematics is an infinite-limit exaggeration of the continuity, orthogonality, and metrical concepts of naïve 1700s classical physics. Since discovering quantum and relativistic physics, we might want to revisit some of those assumptions.
https://nautil.us/kolmogorov-complexity-and-our-search-for-meaning-237158/
Here is an interesting article related to this.
Absolute constancy and absolute variation compete in a relative configuration and phase space of analog and digital computation. Motion and emotion are generated.
Why make things more complicated than they are?ðŸ«
Even pure (poor?) Aristotle's logics works perfectly well when it goes about the reasoning behind determinism: there cannot be any event without a cause. BY DEFINITION OF A PROCESS. There's ALWAYS a chain of events for ANY HAPPENING PHENOMENON. This is the simplest possible way of reasoning, isn't it? So, who should defend their claims? Yes — the ones that bring in something ELSE above the basics. Right?
Is it an either-or question at all?
We know where a purely probabilistic option takes us - Poincaré's Recurrence Theorem tells that waiting long enough, one will find the system back to its previous position. And if we add a supposition that the processes in the system are Markovian, it means that the system evolves in a perfectly circular fashion, repeating all the states in between, too!
Luckily, it is merely a theorem. Yet in 2018 its quantum version was proved to hold true, not to single constituents the exact states of which can't be precisely discovered but at the level of some collective quantities.
To make recurrence work at even a theoretical level, one must assume that no true novelty is introduced into the system. Modern day cosmologies don't have problem with that as models of continuous creation have been all but flushed own the physics toilet decades ago. Still, some physicists continue proposing theories where there is true novelty appearing: something that is not limited to Markovian processes - based on the present state alone - nor even something determined by the past evolution of the whole system. I may have misunderstood Tim Palmer when he talks about p-adic numbers in one of Curt's interviews but to me it sounds as if he claims the system is finite and not bound, but rather increasing, in size.
Talking in terms of the phase space, growth is natural also compatibly with determinism. The number of possible states does increase, it's tantamount to say that the entropy of the system increases. To me however Tim was talking about something else, growth in terms of something tangible or ontologic.
Novelty also is a tricky concept to play with. Lee Smolin uses it to accommodate statistical non-deterministic changes while for me novelty is more kin of choices made independently along the history of the system, a sort of a free will. Here's another position where I agree with Tim Palmer: the counter-factuals. Once we have a measurement outcome, it's of no use speculating what the outcome would have been were something changed in the measurement setup. With a specific outcome, all the other options become counter-factuals that are incompatible with the system where that outcome was realized. This is why unitarity actually can work also with choices that are not only somehow disguised within random fluctuations under the error margins of the experimental setup.
It's a shame the podcast with the two Tims (Palmer and Maudlin) got stuck in a disagreement about this rather basic argument. The reasoning Tim Palmer makes about counter-factuals, non-necessity of Hilbert spaces in quantum physics, and about aptness of rational numbers instead of real numbers makes totally sense to me. Presently, there are not enough people involved in such an approach that could de-stuck the whole area of study in quantum mechanics from issues that have been left unresolved for decades because of - possibly - entirely flawed mathematical axioms used at the ground level.
Great introduction to Philosophy of Causation!
If you haven't already check out the "hyper chaos" of philosopher Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude - it's the idea that true randomness would not be stochastic, that both the left & right of your illustration could be the same until the right side changes.
Alternatively Thomas Nail, in On Being & Motion, suggests the insight from QM is instead that Nature moves in a "pedetic" way, neither deterministic nor random.
I feel like these two "New Materialists" are philosophers actually trying to grasp what QM results might actually mean for Philosophy of Causation.
Anjum & Mumford's Dispositional Causation is also good stuff - I really liked their Causation is Not Your Enemy paper.
Finally I recommend A Place for Consciousness by Gregg Rosenberg, his argument against Physicalism is cited by Kastrup in his PhD Philo thesis though sadly AFAICTell Kastrup ignored the bigger questions re: Causality that are the main focus of the work.