Determinism Question - possibility of scientific explanations for human behaviour

Ken Natton

Ryan has, of course, answered it better than me, all I was going to say it that this seems like a bit of pedantry to me. Interesting to review this thread though. I began by expressing my wish to know Ryan's opinions on this, but I came to regret to that. I still find it very depressing, and I still have to cling to the belief that, for all the science, it just could be that Ryan is wrong...

Ryan_m_b

I could very well be; my opinions/beliefs are based on a combination of what I currently understand to be true and what science currently understands to be true. Either of those can and probably will change in future though to what no one can say. With regards to whether or not it is depressing that really is an artefact of personal aesthetic.

You are right though it is interesting to read back through the thread after so long.

ThomasT

Not necessarily. Novel protectorates and organizing principles can emerge given the assumption of strong determinism (insofar as strong determinsim refers to fundamental dynamical laws of nature).

Agreed. But that doesn't disprove the notion that our universe is evolving in accordance with fundamental dynamical laws that pervade and permeate all scales of behavior. It just means that scale-specific organizing principles do emerge. And that in talking about a specific behavioral scale it's better to refer to the organizing principles specific to that scale than to try to explain things in terms of fundamental dynamical laws.

apeiron

So taking that view, where do fundamental dynamical laws come from?

From a practical epistemological point of view, you can just shrug your shoulders and say "they exist". But from a metaphysical and ontological point of view - which was the OP - you would want to be able to explain how laws arise as your global constraints.

So you are talking about organising principles that arise at some level. You seem to find that uncontroversial.

But why would you stop there and not extend this to the idea of global organising principles that arise at the global level (and so are all-encompassing as they act on every scale in downward causal fashion).

Maui

If scale specific organizing principles can emerge, we may have to rethink the notion of purposeless reality and existence. IMO, the classical scale mode of reasoning(this pushes that and sets it in motion) is awefully inadequate and crude and quickly fails to explain everything adequately - from matter to consciousness. I don'think anyone entertains the idea that something as sophisticated as an Airbus A380 was an inevitable occurence in nature.

ThomasT

Imo, that would be an unanswerable question.

Yes. A fundamental dynamical law (or laws) would be assumptions. But it seems to me that that approach implies that our universe is evolving deterministically. That is, lawful evolution = deterministic evolution.

Can global constraints be explained in terms of an assumed general dynamical law (or laws) without explaining the origin of the dynamical law (or laws)?

I think it's been pretty well established. Eg., the understanding and control human behavior is done, for the most part, at the macroscopic level of human behavior, and not at the submicroscopic level of subatomic particles, or in terms of wave mechanics. But then, scientists have found many connections between the mesoscopic realm and the realm of human behavior. And there are interesting connections between the mesoscopic the microscopic, and between the microscopic and the submicroscopic. All of which leads me to think that there might be some sort of fundamental dynamical law or laws at work.

Exactly. This is what the assumption of a fundamental dynamical law (or laws), encompassing any and all scales of behavior, would do. But this isn't the current paradigm of fundamental physics.

ThomasT

Why? The notion that scale specific organizing principles have emerged from, say, countless iterations of a fundamental wave mechanical dynamic would seem to me to obviate teleological explanations.

If one assumes a lawful universe, then whatever exists in that universe is an inevitable consequence of the initial conditions and the evolutionary laws.

MarcoD

I am not worried, I am pointing out the old debate on whether we are 'zombies' or not. We either have free will, or we don't, and the latter case is philosophically lousy since that would imply that we don't have responsibility for any actions we take. The amount of complexity of the system, or the amount of freedom, is irrelevant.

I.e., if you are a robot/zombie/fully deterministic and you go out and kill someone, nobody can really blame you for it since you have no free will, you are just running a program. No free will would kill off all ethical considerations since nature/physics doesn't have ethics, only laws.

Most scientific evidence points at that we don't have free will, so it's free game for everyone since there are no ethical considerations. Of course, it doesn't work that way, but at the moment the natural sciences tell us is that human behavior is pre-programmed, devoid of free will, therefor things like ethics are an illusion.

ThomasT

Responsibility is a human-level imperative, the practical consideration of which is independent of whether or not what we call free will is a function of a deterministic or indeterministic universe.

I agree.

The concepts and practice of responsibility and ethics are behavioral controls, not illusions.

MarcoD

You equated ethics to behavioral controls which -historically/philosophically- means that there are no ethics, only laws of nature. Behavioral controls follow no guidelines except for those (pre-)programmed, the term ethics becomes meaningless in that context.

ThomasT

I meant man-made behavioral controls. In which context the terms ethics and responsibility are meaningful.

MarcoD

Oh, well, only in a context of free will. Fortunately, personally, as an absurdist, I believe life cannot be understood. So to me it's an whatever.

ThomasT

It's also possible to be an absurdist in a deterministic universe.

Containment

While it may not be possible for a human to understand the physics behind an experiment enough to predict it fully I wonder if it's possible for the universe? Or more to the point could it be possible even the laws of physics them selves do not fully "understand" what will happen in an event with 100% accuracy? I think it would be interesting if someday in the future scientists found this to be the case.

Pythagorean

Thats pretty much the definition of determinism.