Are All Events Predetermined By The Big Bang?

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The discussion explores whether all events are predetermined by the Big Bang, asserting that the movement and interaction of particles since then have been dictated by physical laws. It argues that while everything can be traced back to the Big Bang, living beings possess the ability to think and make choices, which introduces the potential for altering predetermined outcomes. However, the Uncertainty Principle in quantum mechanics suggests that not all actions can be predicted, as some events are fundamentally random. The conversation highlights the tension between determinism and free will, emphasizing that while many actions may seem predetermined, the complexity of variables and human consciousness allows for unpredictability. Ultimately, the debate centers on the interplay between mathematical determinism and the unpredictability of conscious decision-making.
  • #31


Originally posted by olde drunk
Why must we complicate every concept. The mere fact that "I choose whether or not to punch you in the mouth" is proof enough for me. LOL,
www.determinism.com

"A man can surely do what he wills to do, but cannot determine what he wills."
- Schopenhauer

"I am a determinist. ...The real issue, so far as the will is concerned, is not whether we can do what we choose to do, but whether we can choose our own choice, whether the choice itself issues in accordance with law from some antecedent."
- Brand Blanshard

Still so sure?
 
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  • #32
Originally posted by DrChinese
First, your starting premise is wrong. QM denies your view of the universe explicitly. You need to read up on it more and familiarize yourself with these concepts: indeterminancy, uncertainty, etc. It is NOT conceptually correct to say: if you knew all the variables you could predict all the outcomes, and we just don't know all the input variables. Reality is not like that. See for example: EPR, Bell's Theorem and Alain Aspect.
What happens if we drop the 'knew all the variables' phrase and just stated that the universe is all the variables and as such acts accordingly. We don't need to know anything about it for it to act in a predetermined way, it just needs to act so. Even if we never can calculate it.
 
  • #33


Originally posted by Another God
www.determinism.com

"A man can surely do what he wills to do, but cannot determine what he wills."
- Schopenhauer

"I am a determinist. ...The real issue, so far as the will is concerned, is not whether we can do what we choose to do, but whether we can choose our own choice, whether the choice itself issues in accordance with law from some antecedent."
- Brand Blanshard

Still so sure?
Great quotes. But the first is unproved (and rather incoherent imho) and the second simply restates the question.
 
  • #34
well in my mind they justify the skepticism over free will perfectly. Oh sure, it 'seems' like we make our own choices...but where do those choices come from? How do we know what it is that we want?

I am just responding to Olde Drunk;s claim that the answer is obvious to him. I'm just providing a different angle on it so that he can understand why it isn't necessarily so easy in the big picture.
 
  • #35
I think he's got a point. After all what reason do we have to doubt that we have freewill? The fact that we can't explain it? It's a bit of a feeble reason really.
 
  • #36
how about the fact that as far as we can see, every action has an equal and opposite reaction? The fact that for every event, there is a cause? The fact that even human actions, although much more complicated, can in general still be predicted.

If you are my friend, then I will predict you will be nice to me. If you are my best friend, then chances are I will even know mannerisms that are common to your behaviour, I will expect certain utterances to escape your mouth. I will expect you to behave a certain way. Even in this world where we all believe we are choosing every action we undertake, we still act in an entirely predictable way. Why is it predictable, because we are acting in accordance with, and in responce to our determinants. Our genetic makeup, our social situation, the people who we hang out with, our parents, our culture and our economic situation to name the obvious.

We are chemical reactions, reacting to external physical stimuli in predictable ways. No matter how pretty the outcome is, the reality remains.

That is why I do not believe in free will.
 
  • #37
Fair enough. I don't think that there's any way of proving you wrong.
But regularity of behaviour dosn't disprove freewill. Neither does the fact of everyday physical cause and effect. If you think it doesn't exist then you're making an assumption on less evidence than the opposite assumption.
 
  • #38
nother god: Still so sure?

drunk: why not? the basic premise was that if everything was created at the big bang then all probabilities exist.

can you envision that the big bang happened in nothing? no matter how you look at it you end up saying that the 'physical world' was created at the big bang. the universe(s) include the physical.

while all physical probabilities may have been created at the bang, our choice of which future to experience is infinite. the odds of the physical being broken down and/or combined into other forms is infinite. IOW, the future moment to be experienced is a matter of choice (freewill).

predetermined future can only occur within a closed system.

our physical world is nestled within our universe, I suspect that our universe is nestled within another universe(s). even our universe expands. expands within WHAT?


IMHO, freewill exists as a function of what i want to experience. it is an attribute of my consciousness.

peace,
 
  • #39
DrChinese you are right I do not have knoledge of QM, hell I am not 100% certain I know what you even mean by QM. So I will trust you that knowing more about it would lead me to a better insight into this question. However, QM, relativity or any other concept all may be proved with some beautiful math and logic but from the things I have read most of them fall apart when approached from a different slant. I just read the book Faster than the speed of light and they feel they have some convincing evidence that the speed of light varies which blows relativity out of the water or not. Yes some people falling on the VSL side are trying to work it into Relativity. Also in the physics journal I looked at yesterday they had an article about a double quasar and all that it meant. Well two groups looked at the exact same data and came to two opposite conclusions. So I think that it is important to keep an open mind. I will look into QM as you suggested.

Another God your reasoning is why I tend to believe that there is cause to believe in free will. That human interation is predictable to me proves that it cannot be the result of just cause and effect. To think that external factors, internal chemical interations and physical effects all combine and result in people working in an organized way just does not make sense to me. What factors would cause people from all over the country to end up marching in line in front of a drill sergent as they get ready to go off to war.

Or take the instance of a football game where everyone there is exposed to very similar situations. Yet everyone reacts differently. I agree that my reasoning is not conclusive. However even though I believe that there is such a think as free will I have to admit that all our actions are realted to real physical cause and effects which seems to be a contradition to my belief. But I believe that there is some process that allows us to choose a or b and that choice is not just a chain reaction that given the same circumstances will always net the same result.
 
  • #40
accepting that the physical universe obeys strict physical laws, them to propose free will to propose something that acts outside those strict physical laws.

There is no way that the chemical complexes which give rise to our brain are able to 'choose' which interaction to do next. Chemicals behave like chemicals. If you want to believe you have a 'choice' in the matter, than you are proposing that there is some force which alters physical reality.

Simple as that.

And I am not yet ready to propose such a thing.
 
  • #41
Raptor

I think you've got a point. I haven't come across your argument in the literature, it's always taken as obvious that our brains are so complex and so free of mechanical error that it is sufficient to explain explain every detail of our behaviour. But it is a bit remarkable when you think about it.

Originally posted by Another God
accepting that the physical universe obeys strict physical laws, them to propose free will to propose something that acts outside those strict physical laws.
Not at all. It all depends on the nature of those physical laws. If freewill exists it is presumably the result of fundamental laws.

There is no way that the chemical complexes which give rise to our brain are able to 'choose' which interaction to do next.Chemicals behave like chemicals.
OK. Nobody would argue with that.

If you want to believe you have a 'choice' in the matter, than you are proposing that there is some force which alters physical reality.
Exactly.

And I am not yet ready to propose such a thing.
Fair enough, it's your choice.
 
  • #42
Not every event has a physical cause. What is the physical cause of the big bang?

If this universe came out of nothing, there isn't any information about how it will turn out inside the nothing. If it came out of a god then there is your information but it isn't physical.

This aspect of quantum mechanics shows up very clearly in the big bang theory because a cause has to preceed the effect but space and time were created at the moment of the big bang. There is no "time before time".
 
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  • #43
i don't know what caused the Big Bang, neither do you, or anyone else for that matter. I don't consider such details to be an argument, because they are inconclusive. I am still far from convinced that the Big Bang is even the beginning of the universe. It seems unignorable that it happened, but claiming that it was the beginning of everything is a huge leap IMHO.
 
  • #44
Is there any need to believe in a larger universe or preceeding universe than what is derivable from observation?

Scientists thoerize a universe out of nothing using quantum mechanics. This contradicts the first post on this topic. The universe and its outcome, and our actions need not be predetermined at all.
 
  • #45
It seems to me like you are using an argument derived from something that no one really knows anything about (Who really knows how the universe started?!?) and ignoring the way the universe is right now: What we can directly see and measure without doubt.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction... that sort of stuff. Everything working like clockwork. Cause to cause to cause...
 
  • #46
i like the Slaughterhouse V take on things...

in the book Billy, the main character, is being held by 4th dimensional beings of time. realizing that they have unlimited knowledge he asks...
"do you know how the universe ends?"
"yes" respond the beings
"does the Earth cause it?"
"no far from it, in your year 2021 one of our experimental flying saucers was using a new warp drive, and when the pilot presses the ignition button... the universe ceases to exist..." said the aliens

stunned billy asks "if you know this why don't you stop it? there is still 50 years!"
----(punch line)----
"because billy, the pilot always will press the button, he did press the button, and he is pressing the button. it is right for the moment..."

if the universe has a beggining (big bang) let's call it A. and an end wether utter entropy or big crunch there is still an end B let's say.
then there is a course from start to finish. we being players in this universal game cannot control the pathof happenings to reach B, but to someone not bound to time... there is a set order of operations from a to b. Time is defined as the change of position of objects in an XYZ universe. we can't see or control where the objects go for the most part, but in the end, the story of the universe is that of a novel with individual pages that contain set information of the position of the universe particles.
 
  • #47
And that is precisely how I currently understand our universe.

I think of TIME as the fourth dimension literally...Just like driving from Sydney to Melbourne: When I leave Sydney, I know I am heading for melbourne. Melbourne exists at coordinates xyz, sydney exists at different coordinates, but they both exist. My presence in either city though also includes the variable t...time. Give me any t value, and the universe will tell you the xyz values appropriate for my position.

That t value was written the second our universe started. Our apparent 'travelling forwards' through time is an illusion. Time is. Just like Sydney and Melbourne are. (at least they are at this particular instance of t)
 
  • #48
It seems to me like you are using an argument derived from something that no one really knows anything about (Who really knows how the universe started?!?) and ignoring the way the universe is right now: What we can directly see and measure without doubt.

Quantum mechanics describes the way the universe is right now very accurately.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction... that sort of stuff. Everything working like clockwork. Cause to cause to cause...

Quantum mechanics doesn't work like clockwork at all. It has randomness built into it. So does the universe.
 
  • #49
if the universe is random, then why is everything so damn coherent and predictable?
 
  • #50
Originally posted by jackle
Quantum mechanics describes the way the universe is right now very accurately.
What does quantum mechanics have to say about how you know that? Or isn't the fact that you know it part of the way the universe is right now? Quantum mechanics explains next to nothing. It describes the behavior of quanta, not their existence or essence.
 
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  • #51
Originally posted by Another God
if the universe is random, then why is everything so damn coherent and predictable?

If you spin a billion billion dice and plot them on a bar chart, the bar chart will be damn coherent and predictable. It will look exactly like:

1/6 landed on 1
1/6 landed on 2
1/6 landed on 3
1/6 landed on 4
1/6 landed on 5
1/6 landed on 6

It is simply statistics. You will not notice any randomness until you look at it in a tiny level of detail. The universe is the same. Examining it at a tiny level of detail (sub atomic detail) it is actually very unpredictable. If you doubt me research the uncertainty principle.
 
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  • #52
Originally posted by Canute
What does quantum mechanics have to say about how you know that? Or isn't the fact that you know it part of the way the universe is right now? Quantum mechanics explains next to nothing. It describes the behavior of quanta, not their existence or essence.

Quantum mechanics explains lots of things. Famous examples include:
.Stability of the atom
.Black body radiation
.Photo electric effect

Actually the list is almost endless and quantum mechanics does also teach us about the existence and essence of sub-atomic particles. For example, they exhibit:
.wave-particle duality
.uncertainty
.tunneling
 
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  • #53
It's not a big issue, but if you look closely you'll find that this does not disagree with what I said.
 
  • #54
Originally posted by The Opiner
Still, it seems that the great majority of physicists believe in subatomic "randomness" (read "indeterminate behavior").

One way to look at quantum theory is that it is random in classical dynamical variables (position and momentum, time and energy, components of angular momentum,...). But a way to rescue determinism is to turn the question upside down: What's so damn special about classical variables that I should expect the universe to respect them?

Quantum mechanics is a deterministic theory. It is just deterministic in a different set of variables, namely the wavefunction and its conjugate. Its time evolution is completely determined by the Hamiltonian, and it satisfies a differential equation that is identical to the heat equation (albeit with imaginary time).

edit: typo
 
  • #55
Yeah, but then there's that non-unitary "collapse". That was the dilemma that lead Everett to his own interpretation: the beautiful deterministic wave function never collapses, but observations coexist, orthogonal to each other.
 
  • #56

Quantum mechanics is a deterministic theory. It is just deterministic in a different set of variables, namely the wavefunction and its conjugate. Its time evolution is completely determined by the Hamiltonian, and it satisfies a differential equation that is identical to the heat equation (albeit with imaginary time).

edit: typo [/B]


So as a scientist Tom, where was the information that determined everything hiding at the moment of the big bang?
 
  • #57
Even if our actions are predetermined, from our perspective we still have the impression that we make choices.

Since we can never view any situation from both perspectives at once, it is therefore our illusion that we have freewill. We can never know...
 
  • #58
free will and legal systems

Legal systems tend to rely rather heavily on the concept of free-will.

"I was pre-determined to kill them, why should I go to jail?" doesn't usually work. There have however, been court cases where people have killed someone accidently in their sleep and have been let off.

The decision making part of their brain wasn't active, so it makes no sense to punish them for their sleep walking. Making an example of them wouldn't reduce the number of occurances and I don't think it is likely that they would be unlucky enough to do it again. The concept of free-will seems like a useful one in this context.
 
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  • #59
The usefullness of the free will concept to the legal system is irrelevant to the natural laws of the Universe. Besides the law is built on that system because that is the system that everyone assumed to be the way things are. If you start looking at how things are slowly changing in the legal system though you will notice that more effort is being put into reformation that 'punishment' though... What is the point of reformation if people can just choose to break the law again?!

Have a look at www.determinisim.com[/URL] and you will find the society of natural science which is an advocate of acknowledging that people are determined in their actions, and as such all legal consequences of breaking the law should be fine tuned towards reforming the people who broke it, and not in any way dedicated to 'punishing' the individuals. They did afterall break the law on account of the fact that ...the company they kept was bad company, their parents were drug addicts, they had no money, they were addicted to some drug...etc whatever. It was only for their situation (combined with their genetic dispositions) that they did what they did. Instead of punishing them for their situations, change it. Put them into a better situation where breaking the law isn't so possible.
 
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  • #60
The approach that free-will does not exist and that we are all pre-determined is still shaky. The assumption is, every single relevant measurable object from the large to the infinite can be measured by some sort of equation, for ease let's say 2+2=4. Now though this might explain simply the efforts of those who support determism, there still is the underlying problem, which is no different than the people who advocate that we possesses free will which is: assumption. Assumption underlies the entire argument from the very beginning. Another God stated that agruing that what caused the big bang is irrelevant because the answer to what came before is inconclusive, however, that is rather hypocritical of the fact that the arguing that we are all determined is also inconclusive.

Lets look objectively at some statements.

Another God: Everything in the universe is determined because the universe is all the variables of the universe, and if known, we could predict every single action implying that we are all pre-determined.

I'm not sure why no one caught this, but this has a much relevancy to prove the position that we are determined and that free will is inconsistant with physical laws as I am to say

Qurious: The entire universe can be codified into a matematical equation, except for our coinciousness and the will to choose. These equations (the equation of free will) were specifically made by god itself and are entirely random. The very essence of being, the very essence of god, of an emergent property bound by no determinism except of an emergence from nothing is tantamount to consciousness and our ability to choose.

Now logically thinking, you cannot seriously say that Another God's position holds any more sound reasoning than mine. The assumptions of the determinists: we can codify the entire universe into an equation and that no equations within the one that would be part of the larger equation are completely random and this implies that we are completely determined.

Finally, the fact of the matter is that to believe that we don't have free-will seems counterintuitive. Though I accede the fact that it is POSSIBLE that we are determined, until I have overwhelming evidence I will follow my feelings because though we might be determined I cannot predict what is going to happen next and therefore I perceive that I have free-will, and perception is all that matters, its what describes our reality.
 

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