Any attempt to assert an "I" merely displays a misunderstanding of Determinism and the illusions it creates. — Rich

As you know, determinism works both ways. What if the final conditions of the universe require agent freedom to have come into existence?

I mention this because perhaps determinism as it operates in reality, is not what you think it is.

It is a bit more complicated than this. In a deterministic world EVERYTHING is determined. Every single particle (including quantum particles, which is a different story entirely) is determined. The "brain" holds no privileged position. So, somehow in some totally unexplainable manner, all particles are coordinating in such a way as though it appears (to the particles) that they are making decisions. "Brain states" and the status of brains in human physiology are illusions that mysteriously arise out of the Big Bang. Permit me to be skeptical of this fabricated story. — Rich

You could even use the term SUPERDETERMINISM to emphasize that even quantum mechanics provides no loophole to escape the conspiracy theory that is Reality.

Anyway, an amusing corollary is that the theory of Evolution is false, and that we were indeed created.

What falsifiable, tested and long-unfalsified scientific theory says that?. — Michael Ossipoff

The theory is quantum mechanics, which is falsifiable, tested, and long-unfalsified. The principle the theory adheres to is the Church-Turing-Deutsch Principle, not to be confused with the Church-Turing thesis.

The deduction is that the human brain can be arbitrarily programmed; the Mind instantiated on the brain can be changed. This is a basic physical fact.

We already have several techniques for altering Minds, some rudimentary, some relatively sophisticated.

In order to erect a barrier to us being able to alter our minds as we choose, you will need to come up with a falsifiable, tested and long-unfalsified scientific theory that says we can't. Over to you!

There isn't free-will. It has been famously said that we do what we will, but don't will what we will. — Michael Ossipoff

According to science, we can change what we will. Also, it seems apparent that people do this all the time. It's not as if we can be genetically determined to be astrophysicists.

Thanks for the non sequitur. — charleton

According to science Schopenhauer was wrong.

Compatibilists often define an instance of "free will" as one in which the agent had freedom to act according to their own motivation. That is, the agent was not coerced or restrained. Arthur Schopenhauer famously said "Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills." — charleton

We know this is false. The human brain is a universal computing device, which can be arbitrarily programmed.

Yep, they are European. Except for those that aren't. — Banno

And you hate them too.

The English are almost exclusively the descendants of the Corded Ware Culture. When you call them "mongrels", which you must if you hate them, then you are relying on distinctions where there is no difference.

I find this channel entertaining and informative:

Ah, so if they are entangled, we wait until they are disentangled? Eventually there is the one Bob measured and the one Alice measured? Except now we don’t know which Bob and which Alice in which world branch as we have just duplicated them under MWI. — apokrisis

If you are about to measure the spin of a particle, what difference does it make if the particle is entangled with another or not? Alice still measures the particle in her apparatus, not the one in Bob's apparatus.

The only way to discover if the particles are entangled is to compare records.

In my extremely limited understanding of this subject, the fact that two electrons are in different quantum states does not mean they are not identical. — T Clark

Identical and distinguishable, particularly if they are separated by a few Bohr radii.

If they are entangled, do you think you can say which one is which? Is that A over there, and B over here, or vice versa? — apokrisis

The electrons will be in different locations, with non-overlapping wavefunctions, so you can label them as you wish. Usually they are labeled after the scientists who perform the measurements at the different locations: Alice and Bob.

Of course MWI "solves the problem" as ever. — apokrisis

Some people don't like solutions.

Mammoths do not have a moral code, yet humans' moral codes ofter are said to include considerations as to the health of the ecosystems and environments.
When humans colonise, areas as yet uninhabited by humans their impact of other creatures as a moral element. — charleton

When the Sun goes supernova, of a massive asteroid destroys the Earth, who is going to preserve biodiversity?

Human migration displaced millions of species habitats, rendered countless species extinct, and destroyed native and natural environments. — charleton

So did Woolly Mammouth migration. What's your point?

But still, if we agree that a person in two different multiverses who is exactly the same is the same person, then, by that same logic, all the electrons in the universe are the same electron. — T Clark

What logic?

No two electrons in the universe can be in the same quantum state - they are fermions, remember.

...from the thread, yes. Go make another thread if you want to shit on Feyerabend. — darthbarracuda

Translation: "I can't find a single scientist who credits Feyerabend with any influence on their work, particularly any Nobel Prize winners"

Hang on-

So you are saying there is a scientific method that is not algorithmic. A scientific method without rules.

You had best tell us what it is, then. — Banno

Perhaps you get the idea that the scientific method is an algorithm, because you confuse it with the purported inductive algorithm for obtaining knowledge. Anyway, it is clear you are unfamiliar with the Logic of Scientific Discovery, and that your secondary sources are suspect. This sadly, is the normal state of affairs.

I'll point out a few highlights from LSD that may surprise you, and indicate particular aspects of the scientific method which mean it cannot be made into an algorithm.

Humans, and all our decisions are fallible.
It is logically impossible to falsify a scientific theory.

The first part of the scientific method is to find a problem - THERE IS NO METHOD FOR THAT.
Then we propose a solution - THERE IS NO METHOD FOR THAT.

Because most conjectured solutions are themselves errors, all DECISIONS to reject or modify theories are TENTATIVE: they may be reversed by further argument or experimental result.

The scientific method does not specify any criteria for accepting or rejecting a theory.

Go ahead, make an algorithm out of that!

There is of course more to Popper's scientific method than that, and some interesting subtleties, but I think that's enough to be going on with.

Why would I, when that would just distract from the point of this thread? — darthbarracuda

Examples of Feyereband in action is a distraction?

So, after we follow Feyerabend and reject the notion of an algorithmic scientific method, we can go in several directions, one of which is the left-leaning democratisation of science advocated by Feyerabend himself. — Banno

Precisely, he did not understand the Scientific Method. It is not an alogorithm!

Why are you changing the topic of discussion? ↪Bacchus
just wants other theorists that are similar to Feyerabend. — darthbarracuda

OK, so why don't you give a few examples of where Feyerabend's theory was applied fruitfully?

I'm aware of Popper, but I can't say that I give much credence to his work. I could probably write a book on my problems of his theory of falsifiability, — Bacchus

So why don't you give a few examples of your problems with Popper's "theory of falsifiability"?

Migration is responsible for human habitation outside of Africa. I don't know what reasons one could have for thinking it immoral. — Michael

Not quite sure that is the latest chronology, but humans did migrate in the past into places where there were no humans, not genociding or displacing other humans, because there were none there.

I have not encountered any scientist who follows, or credits her discoveries to following Feyerabend. The opposite is true of Popper. Several Nobel Prize winners attribute his method to their discoveries.

Furthermore, there may have been advances to Popper's method in the service of one of the most difficult areas of scientific research, in this brilliant paper. https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.02048. I have not encountered any similar progress with Feyerabend.

I have limited exposure to Feyerabend, but it strikes me that he never understood the scientific method, or at least his radical relativism prevented him from doing so.

You have made various claims, all of which are refuted. Oh, and this scientist saved over 1,000,000,000 people from starvation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug

Within very narrow span of universal events, science can make some approximate predictions simply because the universe does develop habits. People tend to get carried away with what science can approximately predict based upon repetitive observations, all if which are still subject to the unpredictable nature of the universe — Rich

In 1915, when gravitational waves were predicted, what habits had the universe developed, and what were the repetitive observations?

Bertrand Russell once quipped, "Science is what we know; philosophy is what we don't know." While I know that this is not only inadequate, but misleading, I think it's funny as a response to the question. — Mitchell

Fortunately, since the Principle of Demarcation, we now know how to distinguish science from philosophy.

Science reports on what is happening, philosophy tries to explore why it is happening. — Rich

"Science reports what is happening"?

What about all of sciences predictions? Do I really have to list them? That would take months, but here are a few:

Gravitational waves (predicted 100yrs before observation)
Gravitational time dilation (predicted 50yrs before observed)
...
Quantum Entanglement (50yrs before observed)
Solid state electronics (predicted only a few years before first device)
Many fundamental particles, notably the Higgs (predicted 50yrs before observed)
...
DNA was a prediction!

How can this happen if science only "reports what is happening"?

On the contrary, it is clear that scientific theories are explanations: accounts of what exists in reality, how it behaves, and why, in a form that permits testable deductions.

"Philosophy tries to explore why it is happening"?

Maybe you could offer a few examples of the success of philosophy in this respect?

Popper has been upgraded from "useless" to "not useless". — Bitter Crank

Popper is still at the core of science: https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.02048

Scientists get paid more and are, in general, more useful than most philosophers. There are more people calling themselves "philosopher" now than in all the previous centuries of philosophical activity. Hey, I'm a philosopher! Someone working on new antibiotics for Pfizer is NOT more useful than Heraclitus or Aristotle or Hume or ,,,take your pick. But the scientist investigating bacterial genes Bayer is more useful than the slew of recently decanted philosophers running around university hallways. — Bitter Crank

Actually several Nobel Prize winners have attributed their achievements to following Karl Popper, so philosophers can be useful even in science.

I think that's confusing the map with the territory. Time, whatever it is, just is. The modeling of time via mathematics requires a variable often labelled 't'. Time existed long before the letter t. Variables are a historically contingent abstract idea of humans. In fact letters of the alphabet used as symbolic variables in mathematical expressions didn't come about till relatively recently, in the 13th or 14th centuries. — fishfry

If time just is what it is, then why does it move at different speeds at different places? Or are we not allowed to enquire why, because it just is?

It is my understanding neither multiverse is accepted by the physics community. — T Clark

The cosmological multiverse is accepted by all those who accept our best theory of how our universe began, including Hawking and the other luminaries.

As far as I can tell, the only justification for belief in the cosmological multiiverse is as a solution to problems caused by the so-called strong anthropic principle. — T Clark

No, it is an inescapable consequence of our best theory of how the universe began.

Those problems have always seemed to me to reflect a misunderstanding of probability. — T Clark

What is that misunderstanding, and how does it apply to a deterministic multiverse?

It certainly isn't true that the quantum multiverse is uncontroversial. The way it is typically formulated, it is neither true nor untrue, since the other universes aren't even theoretically detectable. — T Clark

That is simply false. We routinely interact with the quantum multiverse.

Are the other universes in the cosmological universe theoretically detectible? If not, then the theory doesn't mean anything. — T Clark

You could have asked the same question of gravitational waves for 100 years.

Here are some questions not answerable by science - Why is there something rather than nothing? How do I know I exist? What is the right way for us to treat each other? Can you name a metaphysical question that is answerable by science? — T Clark

There might be even more mundane and immediate questions, that science cannot answer, even though everyone thinks it can.

Do animals possess qualia?

How are qualia created?

I think these might be philosophical questions.

Epistemology is generally included in metaphysics. The scientific method is a method, a set of procedures, to gain knowledge. It isn't knowledge itself. It is a process. It's metaphysics. As with all, almost all, metaphysics, it isn't true or false. It's something we have agreed on as one of the rules. Or maybe disagreed about. — T Clark

What does the scientific method tell you to do in order to gain knowledge?

Anyways, back to the OP. Everyone agrees that they are different people (including me). So there's no point of discussing it anymore, unless you want to talk about something else. — Purple Pond

Everyone apart from Leibniz and everyone who agrees with him, oh, and physicists who understand indistinguishability and its consequences.

Really? I thought the MWI of quantum mechanics was just that - an interpretation. — Purple Pond

Many Worlds is a physical theory. It is quantum mechanics with no collapse. We routinely interact with the other worlds - in quantum interference experiments, interaction free measurements, via quantum entanglement, superposition, and most remarkably when we perform quantum computations.

It would also be equally unlikely that we are on another planet. In an infinite multiverse everything that happens will be extremely unlikely. But just because something is unlikely doesn't give you justification for believing it's not true. Unlikely things happen all the time. — Purple Pond

As I mentioned in another thread, many of the most eminent cosmologists claim that something like this situation obtains: there is an infinite multiverse where all physical configurations consistent with the conservation laws exist. They do this because it is a deduction from the best candidate theory of the creation of the our universe.

You have got to be a bit careful when using probabilistic language to talk about the multiverse. While it is the only way to talk about and analyse the grand ensemble, nothing probabilistic physically occurs in the multiverse.

As I also mentioned in the other thread, there is no evidence for this cosmological multiverse, yet it is the one most people are quite willing to accept. On the other hand, there is overwhelming evidence for the quantum multiverse, yet this is supposed to be controversial. I find the psychology of this situation utterly bizarre. To add to the irony, if the cosmological multiverse exists, the quantum multiverse adds zero complexity to our view of reality. Very odd situation!

This is a cut-and-paste, but it's far from random. It states a radical view from the 1880's on the entanglement of empiricism and values which still hasn't been absorbed by most scientists. — Joshs

Please explain.

Suppose that there are an infinite amount of universes and that everything that can happen does happen in some universe. So there's a universe just like ours with a planet identical to earth (lets call it earth-2), and everything on earth-2 is identical to earth to the last atom. So there's a Purple Pond user just like me typing this thought experiment. I'm atom for atom identical to the Purple Pond on this different universe. The question is: even though I'm separated from by an unimaginable distance, and we belong to different universes, am I the same person? — Purple Pond

This question was solve by Leibniz in C17.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-indiscernible/

Here's Nietzsche on free will and determinism. — Joshs

Do you have a point, or is this just a random cut-and-paste?

Realistically? — Rich

Realistically, this is about as close to an argument as you will ever get. Realistically, I might recommend some textbooks, but realistically, you are out of your depth.