 Determinism, Chaos, Universe and Free Will. You are welcome to this video. It is appreciated that you take part in this experiment. Note that our institution does not take responsibility for occurring existential crisis during the experiment. The experiment consists of three steps. First step, presentation of several academic findings and relevant definitions. This will allow those of you unfamiliar with the topic to get an overview of the covered conceptions relevant to follow the discussion. Topics covered will be Determinism, Chaos Theory, Astrophysics and Free Will. Second step, leading to severe presuppositions and a logical construct of arguments as a basis for the discussion in step 3. The debatable hypothesis will be derived in this step. Third step, discuss or perish. Now you, the participants, should reflect about your very existence. The first topic to discuss is called Determinism. Some states all events to be determined completely by previously existing causes, which mostly is recognized as casual determinism in a physical sense of cause and effect. This means that each event, the effect, we observe is triggered by a reason, the cause, based on physical rules. Events existing in a predefined paradigm are bound by causality, which means any state is completely determined by prior states. This can be interpreted as events completely being caused by the past and no other influence of any kind. Only past states or evolutions are responsible for the current state or event. If all properties of a system are disclosed and a loss of physics are known, one is capable of perfectly predict the future which is labeled path dependence. To formulate this differently, once we know about all the characteristics of the system and the evolutionary laws or rules the system is obliged to, we can perfectly predict the future. Know the game and its rules perfectly, predict the next step perfectly. This is labeled as path dependence. Past and loss of nature define the exact course of everything from that point onwards. True determinism means everything is determined. Thus, there are no other influences than the loss of nature. The opposite of determinism is indeterminism or randomness. There are different kinds of determinism. There is the casual, historical, nomological or physical determinism elaborated on earlier. Past and present dictate the future entirely by rigid laws of nature, nothing is uncourced or self-caused, for example, referred to as a plus demon. The future is only dependent on the past and present which is reflected by the depictions on the previous slide as well. The second kind of determinism is labeled necessitarianism which defies possibility and means there is only one true state of the world. This means that the concept of possibility and chance is neglected and only one true state of existence is given. Third, one can note predeterminism which means that all events are set and determined in advance. This basically means that all your choices and all events are predefined to happen. Fourth, one may note fatalism or theological determinism which states that everything is fated to happen, one has no control over their futures and casual or deterministic laws do not apply yet God does. This means that unless God wants something to happen, nothing does. You are just a pawn of a higher entity. Finally, there are many others which are not stated here. For example biological determinism which means your preset disposition in terms of genetics. Next will elaborate on chaos. Real world systems tend to evolve in a similar manner and occur repeatedly leading to a presupposition of predefined levels of plainness and predictability due to determinism. Real world systems are for example economic systems, nature or the weather. Highly complex feedback systems also exist in nature, rendering predictability seriously complicated in contrast to straight deterministic systems. Parallel to previous assumption that the noted examples are all highly complex feedback systems. Within a feedback system, the interconnections between these systems variables are not clear, thus leading to complicated predictabilities. A whole field of science revolves around this topic. Furthermore, chaotic behavior is seen as one major characteristic which is possible in such systems. Chaos constitutes a deeper reasoning about the essential characteristics and the underlying nature of the evolutionary processes thriving a system. This means that we are able to reflect on a deeper level of thought and factual arguments about the functioning of such systems. With chaos theory, such elaborations on the behavior of complex feedback systems is possible, thus enables us to describe evolutionary dynamics properly in some cases. Meaning, slight fluctuations or even marginal perturbations of the initial conditions render precise predictions on a long time scale meaningless. Furthermore, our planet and universe is such a system, implying that even though deterministic, no predictions are possible. This incorporates sciences through nightmare, namely, living in a predefined existence without the capability to forecast perfectly or at all on self's outcomes in the future. Nonetheless, the question is imminent, what is chaos? According to Edward E. Lawrence, chaos is, when the present determines the future, but the approximate presence does not approximately determine the future. Imagine a game you play. You know the current state of the game and all its rules by heart, thus you are able to determine the outcomes perfectly. Now, if you do not know those instances perfectly, yet just approximately, you will not even be able to approximately determine the next turn to come. This is primarily contraintuitive, since you may believe that if you start marginally close to each other, you would end up marginally close to each other some steps ahead. But in chaos theory, this is not the case. Chaos reveals apparent randomness of complex systems, yielding underlying patterns, interconnectedness, feedback loops, recurrence, self-similarity or fractality, and self-organization capabilities. To put this into perspective, you are faced with two time series, for example, taken out of real-world system observations. Both appear random, so modeling with stochastic processes seemed a proper course of action. Nonetheless, one time series is chaotic and hidden under a cloak of randomness. For the observer, without specialized methodological tools, there is no distinction between randomness and chaos possible. Yet, the chaotic time series incorporates all the denoted properties. Chaos yields three dominant characteristics, namely, sensitivity to initial conditions, topological transitivity, and density of periodic orbits. The latter two are mathematical properties, neglected in this video, while the first property, namely, sensitivity to initial conditions, is perfectly reflected by the presented citation of Lawrence. Therefore, chaos means that a chaotic deterministic system in which cause and effect applies perfectly is not predictable. Imagine the presupposition of the previous slide stating the researcher's worst nightmare. Existence in a predefined system which is not predictable. Get more technical, several concepts need to be elaborated on, namely, the phase space. Phase space maps the state of systems at various points in time and one can describe the systems evolution in time with iterative points or so-called snapshots in time. The phase space can also be seen as the space where all the states live in. Imagine a house with cats living in it. You are not able to grasp the house in its entirety. Nonetheless, you may track a cat via GPS, providing a position each second. Thus, you may not observe the house, yet are able to follow the path of the cats, which is the resemblance of the snapshots or trajectories. Systems may exhibit patterns called attractors, which means no matter what the initial conditions are, the systems end up evolving into attractors. But even on an attractor, no pattern or no path will intersect nor repeat twice. Previously, we learned that sensitivity to initial conditions means that not approximately the presence is received, but for a predefined combination of such conditions, the same set of outcomes will be derived, namely, the attractor. Referring back to the cats, each cat entering the kitchen door, even several centimeters apart, will end up circling the table and finding its way to the cat food suspender. Each cat has its own way and will never intersect with another cat's path, particularly, no cat will ever take the same route twice, meaning, system has preferred set of states, the attractor, but the same state is never repeated, leading to fractal structures as only way of describing such structures. If one wants to quantify such attractors, one requires a mathematic which allows non-intersections and non-repetitions leading to fractals. Slicing through an attractor reveals a fractal set. Note that there are attractors which are not fractals, yet those are not chaotic, except one regards Hamiltonian systems which are excluded in this video. Therefore, chaos implies that chaotic deterministic systems are not predictable, yet evolve into strange or fractal structured attractors on which states are never repeated. As implied before, the universe will be explained in more detail in the following step. Next to those examples of real-life systems such as economic systems or the weather stands our whole universe. Economic systems are everywhere and in fact dominate our universe. Our universe turned chaotic 10 to the power of more than minus 40 seconds after the Big Bang. This means practically immediately our universe, that is the place you exist in, turned into a predefined unpredictable system. At the moment, our universe is no longer chaotic, yet it may return into chaos and cause the big crunch which contradicts the big cold assumption of other researchers. Chaotic systems are also referred to as dissipative systems. Such systems have a significant positive maximum Lyompunov exponent measuring the exponential divergence of nearby points in phase space and reveal a negative Lyompunov exponent spectral sum. The phase space of such a system deflates. The deflation leads to the phase space to collapse towards its strange attractors. Now referring to the big crunch, should the universe turn chaotic again, it may deflate and collapse. The big cold is the contrary assumption, namely that the expansion of the universe continues in such a manner that every object in it will be so far away from each other that everything is just freezing to death. Thus, researchers argue about whether we will collapse or freeze to death in the future, cheering, right? However, following Idina 2018, proposing a chaotic universe model, state strange attractors between dark energy, dark matter and matter, stating the time evolution of parameter densities to follow chaotic Lotka-Volterra type equations. The Lotka-Volterra equations describe biological systems, namely the chaotic behavior of predator-prey relations. This could solve problems such as singularity, cosmic coincidence, big crunch and many others. Now, to not only theoretically refer to attractors, the system depicted in Idina 2018 will be shown next. As you can see, the interaction between dark matter, dark energy and matter is graphically displayed and the attractor of the system shown. Note that each initial set of conditions lead to another trajectory which never repeat nor intersect. Please note further that even if intersections are graphically indicated, that those are not possible. There are systems of higher dimensions which simply cannot be displayed properly in our three-dimensional world. To elaborate on the universe further, following Shevchenko 2011, calculates the Lyonpunov time for our universe, meaning the time after which a system collapses into chaos and states that chaos has a velocity or diffusion time, which means that adiabatic versus non-adiabatic chaos has to be discussed. The Lyonpunov time is the inverse of the maximum Lyonpunov exponent, which can either be interpreted in standard time or in the academic notation of the time units of the underlying dataset. It is further my personal assumption that the diffusion time and the Lyonpunov time are related. If any of you has an astrophysical background or can help me out with this, I would be more than thankful. Shevchenko 2011 states that most parts of the universal chaos plane thus exhibit non-adiabatic or fast-diffusive chaos. This would simply mean that if the universe turns back chaotic, the deflation would happen rather quickly. Since you now have a theoretical background, enabling you to follow the main debatable presupposition, the second part of the experiment will now be initiated. Step 2. Leading to severe presuppositions and a logical construct of arguments We stick to the universe a little longer and elucidate some academic statements. Alternate AL 2019 states that the existence of a non-infinite, which means smaller, fractal dimension, in this case the correlation dimension, in a time series implies a non-zero deterministic part of the world decomposition, thereby proving the existence of a non-zero deterministic part to be mandatory. The correlation dimension is a measure applied to time series data favorably. In short, if this measure is not turning infinite and is small, determinism as discussed before is mandatory be given. This further means that events are prone to determinism and physical loss, leading to cause effect relationships. Following Ekman et al. 2003, a set of galaxies in the universe should settle to a fractal dimension between two or three. Therefore the universe's deterministic part is assumed non-zero in this sense and is shown to be fast chaotic in nature. This would mean the academics nightmare becomes more real than one may anticipate. Lastly, the concept of free will has to be discussed. Most of us feel as though we can freely choose our actions. But what if this feeling of free choice is an illusion? Is your life following a set fixed path? Are you merely a puppet on strings or can you decide your own fate? One may also refer to the early Matrix movies elaborating on the freedom of will, furthering following Professor Griffith. If determinism is true, everything is determined. Since we are beings in the physical world, our own brain states and behavior will be determined too. If determinism is true, what I choose to type next seems to be an inevitable result of the loss of nature plus every event from the beginning of time leading up to my moment of choice. As initially discussed, if determinism is true, nothing you have done so far would have been the result of your actions yet could be predefined from the very beginning voiding your existential weight into nothingness. Suppose I convince you right now that determinism is true. Would I be able to convince you that you've never actually done what you wanted? We now enter the third phase of the experiment. Which is it? Determinism or free will? I will now propose an argumental chain to be discussed and reflected upon by you. First point. The universe is chaotic. Implication 1. Chaos implies nonpredictable deterministic systems, which means some sort of path dependence due to preset paths on attractors. Second implication. Determinism means everything is predefined and due to cause and effect. Second point. We are part of the universe and once the fractal dimension of system is in acceptable terms, the deterministic part has to be non-zero. Implication. The universe has an acceptable fractal dimension, thus leading to the existence of determinism in our lives. Which is it? Determinism or free will? Before opening the debate, I would like to state the applied references. Do you exist as a puppet on strings or do you exert your own free will? 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