Determinism Definition and 125 Threads

My personal belief if you will is that we have free will. Anyway my question relates to the so called deterministic behaviour of a coin toss as opposed to a quantum decay. I think that we all agree that quantum physics displays truly indeterminate random behaviour. However I have heard it...

"Determinism often is taken to mean causal determinism, which in physics is known as cause-and-effect. It is the concept that events within a given paradigm are bound by causality in such a way that any state (of an object or event) is completely determined by prior states" -- from wiki Does...

If I got the general idea correctly, Bohmian mechanics is completely deterministic regarding particle positions. But can it also do the same for spin or polarization? How does entanglement work out in it, considering that it should be able to give predictions along any measuring angles, not just...

Hi all! I am wondering if there is an interpretation of QM where the future is "set in stone" (for lack of a better phrase). It can be unknowable (the future)...but it shouldn't be random in any way. Edit: basically I'm looking for a hard determinism type of QM interpretation.

Hi, some time ago I read the book “The black hole war” by Leonard Suskind and I became aware of the issue of the lose of information in the black holes. Since then there is a question that is racking my mind but I am not smart enough to find the answer. Is about determinism. Lets say that we...

Laplace’s demon knows all forces and “positions of all items of which nature is composed” and enjoyed the knowledge of the future just like the past to be “present before its eyes”. Acording to Wikipedia, also the source of the first quote, “Due to its canonical assumption of determinism...

hi i read some text about causality and determinism, but i can't exactly distinguish between them. what's really difference between them? does not quantum mechanics respect one of them? i read this phrase in article of S.Carlip about quantum gravity "Quantum field theory includes...

The way I saw it, we lived in a deterministic universe. And all the claimed randomness in the quantum world was just hidden factors about the nature of reality that we didn't know. Then I heard about Bell's inequality and how it takes out the possibility of hidden factors. So i saw this video...

Can somebody explain the implications of the well known Andromeda paradox in a metaphysical sense? First, does it state that all events are determined? If one observer already knows what happens on the Andromeda galaxy, could it be possible that that event still happened in an indeterministic...

I found a really awesome article on determinism in science as a general concept, but I can't seem to find it anymore. It explained how certain differential equations can have the same "past" but different "futures," and vice versa, and used that as a model to discuss determinism.

This came up at lunch today when a friend of mine brought up that he had recently watched the Nova episode of Fabric of the Cosmos where they talk about spacetime as a sort of loaf where relative motion has the effect of cutting different angled slices out of the "loaf" of space time (for those...

Logically, doesn't it seem rediculous to postulate that the past "could have" occurred differently than the way it did, as if choices were being made by something outside of the governance of causality?

Hi everybody, there is this question that is bugging me and since I neither seem to know enough about physics to find out the answer myself nor to have the time to acquire said knowledge I will try to ask it here. Objects of the microscopic world famously behave in an indeterministic way...

Given a Universe abiding solely by deterministic laws, Laplace's reasoning seems to make perfect sense. So let us take this deterministic Universe and imagine within it a scientist to whom the, let us call it: the ultimate formula, was made accessible. So, being capable to plug this hypothetical...

Gerard 't Hooft has just uploaded a new paper on arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.3612 Summary: Ideas presented in two earlier papers are applied to string theory. It had been found that a deterministic cellular automaton in one space- and one time dimension can be mapped onto a bosonic...

Greetings, Most of the people I know are not scientific, so they'll often ask me random questions about scientific subjects. One of the questions I get a lot is for a general overview of what quantum mechanics is. What I usually want to communicate to them is that it's a probabilistic theory...

After watching a Sam Harris conference a question came to my mind. Maybe it's been discussed several times, but I couldn't find any of that. The starting point is that, according to determinism, the state of the universe in instant $t_1$ could be theoretically determined knowing its state...

im currently writing a paper for one of my classes, and part of that paper requires me to "Discuss also the question of determinism in Newton’s theory: explain why Newton’s mechanics suggests the “Clockwork” Universe. Briefly mention resolution of these issues in the modern developments of...

Is classical mechanics deterministic? If so, please explain this. Suppose we collide two bodies with each other. Assuming they are point particles and using conservation of energy and momentum this gives us a set of equations. Unfortunately these aren't enough to predict their...

Einstein strongly believed in determinism. Some physicists today like Michio Kaku are leaning toward indeterminism. I have many of my own reasons but I'm on Einstein's side. I want to discuss, not fight. Listen to what other posters have to say before refuting it.

As of late i have been musing upon the nature of free will. However i disagree with the standard interpretation of the link between Determinism and free will. Incompatibilism states that Free Will and Determinism cannot co-exist, and i agree with this stance. Where i disagree is with the...

Please bare with me, I have A-Level physics (barely any Quantum physics) and hence no idea on the subject, just general crap. I at the moment am an advocate for causal determinism but have never had a proper answer to why quantum mechanics disproves the idea of determinism. What I...

Hello :smile: I think my question is clear... Another questions that need to be asked: What about the deterministic interpretations of QM? and Do indeterministic interpretations PROVE that there is really no causality on subatomic level ? Please help me! I am more than a little confused...

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle only seems to have implications for our understanding of the body of knowledge produced by science, not reality itself. The uncertainty comes from the inability to make two separate measurements, since each measurement will disturb the system and change the...

I think I have seen this question a few times before, but I have never read a specific answer. Before I knew any quantum mechanics, I assumed that if you knew enough information about a system, you could predict how it would be at any point in time, and therefore complex things like human...

Hmmm. I hope you will understand my slight nervousness at posting on the philosophy forum with all of its tight rules and circling, predatory mentors. My hope is that by following your instructions closely I’ll avoid the awful finality of those thread closing talons. So, moved from the...

1. How do we know EM radiation is a wave? Also, how do we know that the magnetic wave is exactly orthogonal to the electronic wave? 2. In the into to A Brief History of Time, SH says that wave-particle duality refutes determinism. How is that conclusion made?

I don't think these three: {Determinism, Stokes' Theorem, Relativity Theory}, are compatible. The notion of determinism, as applied to spacetime physics, means that if we know everything on an R3 spacelike hypersurface at time ta, we can predict what will be will be the state of things on an...

It seems everyone think that Bell Inequalities rules out any hope of ever getting a local and deterministic account of reality. This need not be so... Gerard 't Hooft (Nobel Prize winner of 1999) has been working on a theory that may explain the quantum behaviour in a classical way...

I'm a layman. I understand the basic of the Hilbert Space and can imagine what are basis vectors and eigenvalues (allowable values) and observables (properties like spin, position, momentum, etc) and know operators are operations that involve observables. I also know the basic of the...

I am disappointed. This take on determinism comes from the Stanford Encyclopedia: "Determinism: The world is governed by (or is under the sway of) determinism if and only if, given a specified way things are at a time t, the way things go thereafter is fixed as a matter of natural law. The...

A thought popped into my head today regarding biological determinism and possible consequences of such, and more specifically, how plasticity of the brain plays some role in this. Many purport that once we reach a great enough level of expertise in the natural sciences--specifically...

Determinism is the belief that every event is caused by a preceding event, the universe is governed by fixed physical laws, that there is no such thing as chance, and that there is one determinable future. Essentially, it is like a domino effect; the future of the universe has been determined...

Does anyone know the stances of prominent physicists (Susskind, Hawking, others) on hard determinsm?

Hello, I've used the search button but the topic I found on it didn't quite answer my questions, so here is my go at it: (I have done one year of maths at college, to know my level in case it's important for formulating your answer) So I've started reading "The End of Certainty" by Prigogine...

As you might know, determinism basically says that the universe is not random, and it is impossible to have a completely random event. So there are arguments against this stance that lie in quantum mechanics: they say that quantum mechanics describes a probabilistic and random set of rules...

This is kind of an offshoot from: https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=369328 Assume for a second that the controversial experiments are valid and Bell's theorem is true of the universe. I have often seen the philosophical analysis that if Bell's Theorem is true then either local...

A giganitc wavefuntion of the universe = determinism?? So the wavefunction offers a much more simplistic and perhaps more beautiful way to describe a system when compared to the kernel since all effects of the past history of a particle can be defined in terms of a the wavefunction. If we were...

Just a thought: If we could identify the position and velocity (via weak measurements) of a particle at some instant, and its future evolution is fully determined (at least in principle, not in practice), then can we extrapolate this to surmise that all events are are inherently deterministic...

This won't be an in depth discussion because I've already got one of those going on in the relativity forum. Let me start by saying I hate the idea of the uncertainty principle! From what I understand it basically comes from the concept that waves can be thought of as particles and the chances...

There are four commonplaces that I am not sure how to mesh together, or if this is not possible, which one(s) is/are an () oversimplification(s)/wrong, and why. (1) the wavefunction is deterministic. (2) a collapse or decoherence or splitting into worlds (take your choice) makes the wave...

I read many threads in this forum (in QM section), and in many cases I witnessed the same logical flaw over and over again. People conclude that, for example, if world is deterministic, than there is no free will, because our consciousness is deterministic too. Why? Because our brain is nothing...

Recently ( http://arxiv.org/abs/0903.3680 ) has been pointed out a relationship between QM and periodic dynamics, generalizing the old approach to QM due to de Broglie at.al. In particular it is claimed that imposing periodic boundary conditions to a field (on flat spacetime in the free case)...

First, I'll start with the analogy of GR approaching the Newtonian Model under weak field conditions. Likewise, could somebody give an explanation of how the probabilistic nature of QM approaches the seemingly deterministic nature of classical mechanics in the macroscopic domain?

Hello there! I've been reading Brian Greene's book, 'The Fabric of the Cosmos', and I've stumbled upon a troublesome statement regarding determinism: In the chapter about Einstein's conception of time, he discusses the determinism of spacetime and comes to the following conclusion; Imagine...

I am writing an essay on determinism, i was just wondering what peoples opinions on it are, my argument is going to be that it is possible, but i would like to include other peoples opinions and reasons. Thanks Steph.

With the assumption that the Big Bang model is correct, is it conceivable that perhaps the initial state of the universe would in fact determine every single event that ever happened thereafter? In other words, given the same initial starting condition, could it have possibly resulted in...

Watching our black lab dreaming last night made me wonder was he "thinking".Made me question is there any real thought (or consciencious) without language ? We think "outloud" ? Had "thought ?" that brain is a complex yet essentially efficient piece of machinary.Any thought processes would...

If I remember correct, some quantum mechanic principle says that you can't know the position of a particle at the same time as its velocity. Why's that? And what about the double-slit experiment where you send photons and they go through both slits at the same time and create an interference...

If you could travel to the future wouldn't that mean that the outcome of every action and the resulting reaction were already determined? I know that we are constantly moving to the future, but I am talking about a situation similar to back to the future except he doesn't go back in time again...