Would a constructive proof of determinism be useful?
Any answer to an age old question would be useful.
A perfectly rational donkey starves between two identical hay piles because it has no reason to choose one
That's kind of a different question to the main question. It could be relevant to determinism because some people think a little indeterminism could fix a Burridan's ass.
Science now constructively proves the universe is fully deterministic—no “could have done otherwise.” Do your choices and fights still matter.
Not in the same way.
Determinism allows you to cause the future in a limited sense. Under determinism, events still need to be caused,and your (determined) actions can be part of the cause of a future state that is itself determined, that has probability 1.0. Determinism allows you to cause the future ,but it doesn't allow you to control the future in any sense other than causing it. (and the sense in which you are causing the future is just the sense in which any future state depends on causes in he past -- it is nothing special and nothing different from physical causation). It allows, in a purely theoretical sense "if I had made choice b instead of choice a, then future B would have happened instead of future A" ... but without the ability to have actually chosen b.
Under determinism, you are a link in a deterministic chain that leads to a future state, so without you, the state will not happen ... not that you have any choose use in the matter. You can't stop or change the future because you can't fail to make your choices, or make them differently. You can't anything of your own, since everything about you and your choices was determined by at the time of the Big Bang. Under determinism , you are nothing special...only the BB is special.
(This is still true under many worlds. even though MWI implies that there is not a single inevitable future, it doesn't allow you to influence the future in a way that makes future A more likely than future B , as a result of some choice you make now. Under MW determinism, the probabilities of A and B are what they are, and always were -- before you make a decision, after you make a decision , and before you were born. You can't choosee between them, even in the sense of adjusting the probabilities).
By contrast, Libertarian free will does allow the future to depend on decisions which are not themselves determined. That means there are valid statements of the form "if I had made choice b instead of choice a, then future B would have happened instead of future A". And you actually could have made choice a or choice b....these are real possibilities, not merely conceptual or logical ones. That in turn means that the future is not inevitable, and can be shaped, but merely caused...a free agent can create or steer towards a variety of futures. For a free agent, doom does not have to be inevitable.
It's like the difference between a car and a train. The train goes somewhere but it can't jump off the tracks
So with the machine comes something with enough power to, at the very minimum, stop everyone with the intent of disproving the machine from getting a prediction from it. Now one solution is just that there is no mystical power
No power beyond determinism is needed in a deterministic universe. You will do whatever you are determined to do, which will be whatever a perfect predictor predicts. (think Death in Damascus) You can't have (libertarian) free will in a deterministic universe, so you don't need a mystical power to override it.
The time, and/or space, needed to compute a prediction is so large that no output will be observed, the event will have occurred by the time the prediction is made.
Determinism doesn't depend on prediction, prediction depends on determinism.
So we know the universe is deterministic and there is a machine that can compute the future with certainty (it's efficiency is another matter).
No. Or maybe "efficiency is key to the matter". The universe could be deterministic, but so complicated that there is no possible machine (such that the machine is a subset of the universe, predicting another part) which can predict very much at all.
In other words, it's quite reasonable to believe that the universe is its own best model. Anything smaller than the universe will be lossy.
Agreed, this is likely the actual case but this was a thought experiment where the question involved the assumption that the proof for determinism was constructive, in other words, someone constructed a machine that worked to assist their proof.
That being said, what I meant by "its efficiency is another matter" was that I'm assuming we will be able to get at least one perfect prediction from it and then have some amount of time between reading the prediction and the event actually occurring to do something about it. Yeah, I guess I should have said that though.
I guess I'm confused. There are many things we can predict with very high confidence, and this hasn't proven (though it does hint at) a deterministic universe. can you give an example of the prediction in your thought experiment that proves determinism while only making one (or some feasibly small number of) predictions?
I don't think it would be able to predict much then, I think we'd figure out a way to interfere. But the assumption was that it was able to predict anything. If you're saying it is able to take human action into account, ultimately its prediction must be something that human will cannot override, a power higher than human will but less in strength than the laws of nature - but human will seems to be leading us pretty close to the laws of nature so that gap is very tiny.
Posting with the purpose of sparking some intriguing conversation.
Question:
A perfectly rational donkey starves between two identical hay piles because it has no reason to choose one. Science now constructively proves the universe is fully deterministic—no "could have done otherwise." Do your choices and fights still matter? Would you keep acting as if they do?
First off, if a perfectly rational donkey got stuck on choosing haystacks, whether to take a step in this direction or in the other and all these minor decisions, it would eventually (out of boredom) come to the conclusion that there are more important things to do (if not, Ubermensch) and in order to do them, you have to ignore all these trivial details? After all, does it not value it's life as having more value? If a perfectly rational donkey starves to death precisely because of it's rationality, I choose to believe that it is not a perfect rationalist, it is a perfect donkey.
"Science now constructively proves the universe is fully deterministic"
So we know the universe is deterministic and there is a machine that can compute the future with certainty (it's efficiency is another matter). The thing is, proving this to be false is incredibly trivial if we lived the same life we do today. That is, all you need is a prediction for something to be at some position and time (or anything trivial, there are several logical approaches from here that focus on figuring out these trivial events and then hinging on those to gain information about the machine, but I don't think I'll get into any of that), and you just have to ensure that isn't the case, whether it is a molecule of
The only way it wouldn't be easy is if we in fact did not live the same life we know today, particularly with such a machine, if we are indeed able to retrieve predictions something with tremendous power must exist. So much power that it will at least have enough power to not allow any human with the intent to disprove the machine to either not be able to obtain a prediction from the machine or have so much control over them, that they are not able to take the step(s) needed to disprove the machine.
If a human were intent on disproving it, they would first need it to make a prediction and gain knowledge of it and then prove it to be false. Now this power is able to stop us either before or after we learn of the prediction (which could be literally anything trivial). Stopping us before the prediction would be much easier than after, so we can probably ignore the second case (if you think not, comment).
So with the machine comes something with enough power to, at the very minimum, stop everyone with the intent of disproving the machine from getting a prediction from it. Now one solution is just that there is no mystical power, depending on what you think mystical means, but rather it is time/space that is the issue. The time, and/or space, needed to compute a prediction is so large that no output will be observed, the event will have occurred by the time the prediction is made.
I suppose this is the most intuitive obstacle at first glance, but I'm sure there are a few more, I guess some ideas are: power over consciousness, inability to output full prediction completely.
To those who scrolled all the way down to see the conclusion
If a machine that can compute predictions is built, there's probably no way to get a prediction from it, even for things that you and I can predict very easily.