Re: Fatalism

The short answer is that both free will and determinism apply only to the fictitious "I" or ego that we have already labeled as too metaphysical to be taken seriously. So there is no free "I" or fated "I." There just isn't an "I" and so these concepts no longer apply!

The longer answer: Humans most certainly do have a tendency to stand back and observe nature and declare, "ah yes, it all works like a machine." But ongoing observations have shown the scientists that actually, at least at the quantum level, reality is not mechanical at all (ie, it is not determined or Newtonian). At the smallest level, particles pop in and out of existence randomly and behave in a way which can only be measured probabilistically, even in principle (meaning it is not because we just aren't quick enough to catch their exact position and velocity that they are probabilistic, but because the act of measurement itself interferes with what we would like to find out). So the physical universe is non-deterministic, at least as far as we know. When we get to the level of molecules and biological organisms, even if the level of particles were determined, we would still not be able to explain biological activity in a deterministic way. This is due to something biologists call "emergence," which is used to refer to systems that have a global property not reducible to any of its component parts. Organisms do not break physical law, but they do exhibit behavior which is not reducible to particle collisions. Before the first group of molecules "emerged" into a living organism (a self-producing or auto-catalytic system which forms a permeable membrane around itself), there was no way to predict, based solely on a determined interpretation of physical law, that they would have or could have done so.

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Tags:

• biology
• fatalism
• physics
• quantum
• free
• will
• determinism

[HaleyMary]

The whole being greater than the sum of the parts. Does that mean how atoms themselves don't make organisms that are living things as a whole, but go through processes to evolve into a being?

[0ThouArtThat0]

Basically, yeah. Emergence is about how the atoms are organized, not about how many atoms their are.

[cosmanthony21]

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. That still does not resonate with me. The parts constitute the entirety of the whole, without the parts there isnt one. How can something be MORE than what it takes for it to be whole. Its like saying 1 + 1 = 2 and two is greater than 1+1.

[0ThouArtThat0]

You can wiki "emergence" for more detail, but the point in an emergent system is that the organization of the parts give rise to a property not found in the parts themselves. So in other words, in the case of an organism, taking all the molecules which compose it and heaping them together in a pile would not give you the living creature. The emergent property is more than the sum of its parts because of the organizational pattern created by their interaction.

[SynerJetics]

Mu! Just be. let go of the mumblings of other people. Just be, flow on.

[Dimitri0809]

But that is the thing though!

Even if particles move in different directions they can still alter the course of realty in at least 5 different ways.

[snarge]

The fact that you used the word "connected" when you say "particles are connected at a distance," is evidence enough for me that we cannot know the answer to this question. And further, since no human can provide any other word or idea better than "connected" it's obvious that we are wildly incapable of doing anything at this level.

Just because our logic can't predict doesn't mean that it can't be predicted.

[teaparty111]

I have heard all these concepts before by others. Who is this WE? Us as in all or scientists and such? I have taken the college courses and they tend to be very narrow--even in the whole put-it-into-common-cant- physics that has become popular. There are fads in the intellectual world and it seems that mixing physics and theology (free will and fatalism) are becoming an armchair phenomenon of huge proportion-janitors are pondering it. Postmodernism is broad. Are there absolutes?

[teaparty111]

It depends on the model or system of fatalism if it jibes with modern physics and other sciences; there is a deterministic system I have developed that I will write up. It allows for both fatalism and current or future human conditions (both scientifically and theological). Imagination can take us far.

[Rybot9000]

I say "soft-wiring" because the basic structure, size and dimensions of various cortices is influenced or epigenetically determined by genes such as PAX6 and EM6.

[Rybot9000]

Sorry, anteceded by a cause according to specific rules. For example, the specific structure of the VMPFC following adolescence is determined by the availability of growth factors and activation patterns of the cortex. The entire "soft-wiring" of the brain is determined by the same rules. At birth we have up to 400 trillion synapses, through this "pruning" or "natural selection" we are reduced to 100 trillion synapses specialized for functioning within our environment.

[Rybot9000]

Within the human brain there is nothing but deterministic causality at work. The depolarization of a nerve cell may be influenced or determined by the density of particular ions in the extracellular milieu, and those ions may be chaotically determined to be there or not by such variables as oxygenation of hemoglobin or of ion synthesis, but rest-assured, each variable is anteceded by a cause, thuse making it deterministic.

[Rybot9000]

The brain is deterministic and so is quantum mechanics. Not to be confused with predictable. Choatic events are not predictable but are deterministic. The unpredictable nature of QM is an artefact of measuring QM not of the wave-function its self. Because the wave-function becomes "entangled" with the measuring device. Murray Gell-Mann explains in Quarks and Jaguars that QM is irrelevant to the behaviour of a Jaguar or of a human for that matter.

[Rybot9000]

Free-will is really a matter of contra-causality. Whether will is anteceded by deterministic or indeterministic causes is irrelevant to the question of whether or not it has a cause. In order for it to be free, it must not have a cause, it must be contra-causal. It must violate the law of conservation mass-energy.