Multiple Pasts Theory Pt. 2

Now with diagrams!

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• determinism
• causality
• metaphysics
• past
• empiricism
• knowledge
• epistemology
• ontology

[modelmark]

I think a persons beliefs are not as relevant as the method he used to get those beliefs. If he used tarrot card reading, I am not so interested in his beliefs, if he uses the scientific method, I am.

Yes, determinists believe that cause and effect are universal, so it holds for all events in space time, including the one's you mentioned.

[spiggitybap]

Thank you. Also, that was confusing, as I'm not interested in their reasoning (which I can learn if I choose to elsewhere).

Are you saying that determinists believe that the choices my potential son will make were determined before I was born? Do determinists believe that whether I will even have a son was determined before my great great grandparents were born?

[modelmark]

it is irrelevant what people believe, if you do not know why they believe it. How would you determine it is true? Taste the believe in your mouth and see if it 'feels' right?

yes, determinists believe that cause and effect holds for all matter, both carbon atoms in your head and outside your head obey cause and effect and this means there is no free will in the sense of a will 'free' from cause and effect.

[spiggitybap]

Don't bother "putting it" any way, it was a simple question. I'm not interested in debating, I'm just wondering what determinists believe.

Obviously, the course of matter is influenced by the course of other matter. I'm wondering if determinists carry that over from non-thinking matter to rational purposeful human action. Particularly, do they reject free will?

[modelmark]

i'm afraid you did not get what I was driving at, but I have no better way of putting it.

Do you believe reality is consistent? That the laws of nature remain constant?

[spiggitybap]

I'm not asking whether past events have bearing on future events; like you said, that's a given. I'm asking whether determinists hold that future events are already and always predetermined, or whether they believe that at any given currency, I can willingly influence future events such that they were not predetermined before my willful action.

[modelmark]

one can not be valid without the other. in the future your current future events will be in the past. According to the first statement they ought to be defined by their past.

[modelmark]

I think this is false because of the way you defined the rules. If your rule is 'two numbers add up' than you know that 1 and 3 result in 4, but going back in time from 4 you do not know if it came from 2+2, 1+3,3+1,0+4, etc. Your rule destroys information. I don't think this happens with particles. At least not with balls, there is conservation of momentum.You can calculate back the exact date of a solar eclipse 2000 years ago. It is only limited by the limit of accuracy of your data.

[danielsondanielson]

But by saying previous I am not waving the idea of multiple pasts aside completely. If the hard determinism is true, then the state of universe at any moment T is a function F of its state at the moment T-dT. But it doesn't automatically imply, that F is a bijection, i.e. that also some inverted function f exists, for which it is true, that the (T-dT) state of universe is a function f of the T state. At the end of a day, we'd have to ask Laplace's demon, if it works that way in "real" universe.

[danielsondanielson]

I'd like to modify my previous comment a bit. Sure, in your ball example you can introduce some arbitrary rules, under which you can get to particular state of such universe in more than one way. Indeed, if the balls become adjacent, you can even stop them. But such arbitrary rules would differ from the laws of classical mechanics, let alone from the principles of quantum mechanics. I can't help myself, I am still afraid you will stay quite lonely in your "multiple past - single future" theory.