Any experiment that fulfils those criteria would suffice — Kenosha Kid

Your criteria are Chinese to me. Give me one example of an experiment that could disprove determinism. The question is very simple.

Certainly it would prove it incorrect in this instance. For example some cheating could well be at play.

And how to falsify them. By experience.

Your chances to draw 10 times 'head' in a row are 1/1024.

Your chances to draw 100 times 'head' are 1 / 10^30 or thereabouts.

Your chances to draw 1000 times 'head' are approximately 1 / 10^301. That's

0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 if I'm not mistaken.

You think you can draw heads a billion times? You want to calculate the odds of that?

In practice it does. Because that result is so improbable as to be next to impossible.

It may not be what the members want, but it's what they can get and agree upon right now... What they have been able to agree upon until now. Of course if Merkel could invade the other EU countries and manage the whole thing coherently, it would go faster... but she can't.

A probabilistic theory still makes predictions, testable with statistics.

The discussion is now on whether determinism is falsifiable in Popper's sense, and hence whether it is a scientific theory. Ken contends it is (but has failed to show how); I contend that determism is not falsifiable, and hence a non-scientific question.

More precisely, we will never know for sure. Like we will probably never know for sure if gods exist or not.

You mean, if only we knew the true and exact laws of nature, we could tell whether they are determinist or not. Well, that's true, but we will probably never know the real and exact laws of the universe. We certainly don't know them now. So your proposal doesn't work.

Let's see if he can explain.

These criteria seem to come from nowhere and go nowhere. I didn't ask about any of that. I asked you to imagine an experiment that could disprove determinism. And you have failed to do so.

It only has to be known to the requisite precision of the experiment. — Kenosha Kid

If you don't know exactly what the original conditions are, how can you expect your predictions to be exact?

Even if you say (as actually done in real science) "we can predict a result within a certain margin of error commensurate with (or calculated based on) the margin of error in initial conditions", what you are testing in such an experiment is just whatever law or principle you're testing, the deterministic law you use to derive final conditions from initial conditions. But you're not testing all the other possible deterministic theories that could be invented, are you? Therefore, if your prediction is not exact, if it is off by a greater margin than expected, it won't disprove determinism at all. It will just disprove that particular law you tested.

Do you want to refer back to my criteria for falsification? — Kenosha Kid

Yes. Let's do a little bit of analytical work here on your criteria for falsification. Especially since I've never come across those criteria before, and yet have read 90% of Popper's opus, and he's the guy who came up with the criterion of falsifiability in the first place... which means that your criteria appear very much to be your criteria. So let's see some definitions.

high precision. — Kenosha Kid

High precision is different from full precision, and you know it. Or you should know it. Perfect precision of measurement of initial conditions is impossible. So you will have to think a bit more creatively than starting with "fully known initial conditions". That's never going to happen.

Balls have been thrown up and down before, and we do seem to have difficulties predicting their trajectory. You've heard of the Galton box?
— Olivier5

Yes, and that is a great example of unknowability in a chaotic system yielding unpredictable behaviour at a classical scale, but it is not shown to be an example of non-deterministic behaviour. — Kenosha Kid

So, 1) you propose throwing a ball as an attempt to falsify determinism, 2) I show you some balls being thrown and landing on the ground haphazardly, and 3) you say: "no no no this doesn't count".

Ergo, determinism is not falsifiable. It's metaphysical.

only takes one observation where the initial state is fully known — Kenosha Kid

Fully known? You have any example of something that can be fully known?

Or it could just be throwing a ball in the air and seeing it change trajectory mid-flight — Kenosha Kid

Balls have been thrown up and down before, and we do seem to have difficulties predicting their trajectory. You've heard of the Galton box?

In my view the EU would have to understand it cannot be the US of Europe, it indeed is a confederacy of independent states, and it is wrong and actually harmful to try to reach something more.

It comes back to the fact that if you are willing really to unify Europe under one political rule, you have to use force, just like Napoleon, Charlemagne, and just like the Romans. And the military has to be dominant and always on the alert, otherwise it will break up. This is something that the EU is not willing to understand. — ssu

Who wants another European war? If the EU has any advantage, it's in offering a peaceful way to do some level of integration. It's the value proposition of the EU. And yes, the price to pay is slowness and hence patience. It's a long-term project.

Maybe another thing than internal war will speed up the creation of a European spirit. I'm thinking of a scenario in which European countries fight together against a common aggressor from outside.

a model relies on determinism to function. — Echarmion

That's a good point. We seem to project our need for predictability onto the word.

Indeed, determinism cannot be a scientific theory if it is not falsifiable. It is a matter of belief, and your belief in the matter seems quite strong.

For me, it can easily be disposed of as an non-necessary hypothesis. We don't know for a fact, and will never know, if everything in the universe is predetermined or not. It shouldn't bother people, therefore.

If one thinks for instance that free will is incompatible with determinism (which is how this discussion started), well that's no big deal because determinism is pure metaphysics. You can easily dispose of it and retain your sense of free will.

Nothing cuts it. You cannot fathom an experiment that would help conclude one way or another on the philosophical idea of determinism.

The point remains that unpredictable is not an exact synonym of undetermined, and that testing the former is not testing the latter...

You cannot falsify full determinism. It would require two universes, absolutely equal at time t, and then the ability to compare them at time t+x. We don't have two universes absolutely identical at time t. Ergo determinism is essentially a metaphysical position, and always will be. It brings no scientific value, it can make no significant difference to anything. We are talking about the sex of angels here.

if god exists and he's the one behind all creation in general, evolution in particular, and if his preferred method is trial and error, it must be that god is not a genius who understands the ins and outs of creation and life but is actually a simpleton as herein defined. — TheMadFool

Also, it took Him millions of years to figure it out... He can't be that bright.

Do you understand what falsifiability is? That nature is deterministic can be falsified by the discovery of a phenomenon which is knowable, tractable, but at any scale unpredictable. — Kenosha Kid

But you said it yourself: unpredictable is different from undetermined. Something could be fully determined but unpredictable. For example the three bodies problem in classic physics is I think deterministic in the sense that it can be proven (I think) that there is only one solution to the equation. However we cannot compute the solution, we don't know how to do it, and therefore the behavior of three bodies interacting through Newtonian gravity cannot be successfully predicted with the tools at our disposal. It doesn't mean it's not deterministic.

If it undergoes some collapse mechanism (Copenhagen) or other probabilistic means if producing singular measurement outcomes (e.g. transactional QM), it is non-deterministic, specifically it is probabilistic. — Kenosha Kid

Well then, we agree.

I doubt you have read the book, so I will ignore your uninformed attempts at a critique.

the widespread acceptance of deterministic interpretations of QM. — Kenosha Kid

There is no such thing. QM are generally interpreted as indeterministic.

determinism is falsifiable — Kenosha Kid

How would you go about falsifying determinism, then? Please propose an experiment that could prove it false.

The meaning of a sentence consists of more than one thing. — creativesoul

Aka polysemia.

Indeed, but poetic. Perhaps determinism is just the small gaps between the wheels of randomness. Except that I'm pretty sure this randomness, large or small, calls for a more rigorous explication. I'll read if you care to write - but I'm not asking. — tim wood

I could write about randomness and indeterminism, but you'd be the only reading.

The Open Universe by Karl Popper, is a a series of arguments in favor of an indeterminist outlook in (of course) quantum mechanics but also in classical physics. It's a serious, thick, argumentative and as always crystal clear book that pretty much disposes of determinism. Highly recommended to the dogmatic medieval thinkers here (but you could read it too).

French biologists Monod and Jacob wrote about randomness in evolution, e.g. in "Hasard et Nécessité" by Monod or "Le Jeu des Possibles" by Francois Jacob (not sure what the English titles are) in the 1960/70s.

Closer to us (and to you culturally), Stephen Gould writes well about how evolution is stochastic by nature.

Something like that, yes.

The scientific concept(s) of "degrees of freedom" is interesting here as it suggests that freedom is something that can be quantified. And thus that freedom could have started very small among bees and other species similarly "simple" and then grow up progressively.

The mechanical meaning of "degree of freedom" also suggests (to me anyway) the idea that a little bit of "play" is necessary for anything to move. This is an esoteric idea perhaps but a guy interested in mechanics should be able to relate. In mechanics, "play", also called "backlash" or "lash", is the gap between the parts of a machine. Without it the machine will grip (it won't play, it will have no degree of freedom), but if there's too much play, the machine will lose in efficiency.

I see randomness as the universe's "play", the little gap between the wheels of determinism, that allows the whole thing to get some degree of freedom and move ahead, instead of gripping.

Italians think that Brussels tends to be unfair to them. Or Germany. Or France. That we French look down on them. That the Americans summarize them as pasta e mandolina. That nobody takes them seriously, whereas Dante and Michelangelo, whereas Galileo and Marconi, whereas Albinoni Vivaldi Verdi Puccini Rossini !

Likewise; most welcome.

It may be that some other species has consciousness, perhaps porpoises. If so, it is not because they can process data, but because they are aware of some of the data they process. — Dfpolis

Superior animals look purposefully for data, in an active manner, they don't collect them passively. They are looking. This indicates an awareness of the world out there and of their presence in it.

All data has a source and a cost (beyond the most basic and passive systems) and therefore it has a darwinian advantage, or it wouldn't be collected and analysed in the first place. It wouldn't exist if it wasn't useful. There's no data without some import or another, and therefore there's no data without some possibility of a referent. Data is always about something, or it won't get collected by a living organism at all.

What you are saying is that the mental system of a porpoise or donkeys may not include this mirror effect we call consciousness. That means they may be aware of something (as proven by their displaying behavioral signs of knowing of a nearby predator for instance, or showing interest for a potential mate) but not aware that they are aware.

I conclude tentatively that superior animals could well be self-aware but not self-self-aware. Their awareness is (perhaps) not reflective.

I'm making that up as I speak of course. Still chewing on it.

Data in a computer is simply a physical state, typically accumulations of electrons or sets of magnetic orientations. — Dfpolis

Yeah but somebody keyed it in, or connected to the computer a camera or another sensor, itself designed by some folk at pointed somewhere by another. Data means "given" and it's given by something or somebody. There's always a source to the data and it is always collected for a reason or another.

Overlaying rocks protect underlying rocks without a hint of intent or awareness. — Dfpolis

Rocks are not been chased by predators. It's easier for them.

We weren't talking about QM. We were talking about theories where it doesn't just resolve into determinism at the scale of biological processes. — Isaac

I am not aware on any scientific theory saying that the fundamental indeterminism of quantum mechanics resolves somehow into determinism at the biological scale. That makes very little logical sense to me, to start with. What process would be at play, to achieve that?

We are talking here about determinism in the context of behavioural causality or neurological decision-making processes. What 'current' experts use your approach? — Isaac

Modern biologists wouldn't typically pretend that life is fully deterministic. They are more modest than that. More humble. It's a big claim to make when in biology all you can ever measure is a mean and its variance, and the only tool you can use to establish causality is statistics.

Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators. — Richard Dawkins (The Blind Watchmaker)

(emphasis added)

Survival has it's own sources of randomness, like genetic drift.

Mating is generally viewed as random by default, and population genetics therefore draw on probabilities. Eg gametes released in the ocean and meeting one another, or a butterfly meeting another butterfly, or some polen spore blown by the wind to one pistil among many... Hard for me to think of those things as anything else than random events. When a species is rare / endangered, a few generations of unfortunate matings can lead to the species demise by genetic drift into extinction. A species can survive longer when mating is random over large numbers because the probabilities of rapid genetic drift from one generation to the next are lower then.

There is no warrant for imbuing data processing systems, whether organic or artificial with such human attributes. To do so is anthropomorphizing them. — Dfpolis

Data means something. It's provided by the senses, and it therefore refers to the world out there, or rather to our perception of it.

Self preservation requires a sense of self.
— Olivier5

No, it does not. — Dfpolis

Logically, it does... To protect something, one needs to be aware of that something.

people have come up with ideas that unite them, don't think that it makes them fake — ssu

Forced in a top down manner on the people, I mean, recent, not cast in stone. In fact the Scott's voted against Brexit and whether they will stay in the UK remains to be seen.

I guess only France and the Benelux countries see themselves as being in the heart of Europe. — ssu

Germans and Italians too. By and large it's the old Charlemagne empire who feels European. The others are more opportunistic in their adhesion to the project.

You're still using random as a synonym for unpredictable. And it is still irrelevant to my point. — Kenosha Kid

No no. Random as in quantic randomness that leads to random mutations that lead to random changes in the environment... Random random.

optimisation problems — Kenosha Kid

Evolution is not just a question of adapting to an environment. It's about adapting to and competing in a constantly changing environment. The environment changes for a number of reasons, including of course the effect of life and evolution themselves on it. So your noise generation is random, and the algorithm with which you process it is randomly changing at all times.

we can take that as a given. — Kenosha Kid

Indeed, we can take a great deal of randomness for granted. And without it, evolution would not work. I rest my case.

You seem to have taken some sketchy and speculative theories at the fringe of very specific fields and decided that their existence should shift the presumption of cause and effect on which our entire interaction with the world is built. I just wonder if it's worth it. — Isaac

QM is a little more than "a sketchy and speculative fringe theory", I think. I would rather integrated QM in my world view than consider it a mere detail, unworthy of my attention... I think it's worth it.

But to each his own. Your philosophy is quite classical, verging on the medieval sometimes. Mine is more current.

The generation of genetic 'noise' as you say is what powers evolution. It matters quite a lot. And gene expression at phenotypic level is random to a degree because the whole environment has some inherent randomness. So one cannot predict how a gene will play out in its environment.

But if there is no freedom then learning would also be an illusion. — Pantagruel

Even error would be an illusion.