Does the Principle of Sufficient Reason imply Determinism?
There seems to be a common intuition, but not a universal one, that the Principle of Sufficient Reason, if it were true, would imply Determinism is also true.
(Please note that the poll question isn't asking you if you think the PSR is true - only if you think that if it were true, it would imply determinism. You can answer 'Yes' to the poll and still think the PSR and Determinism are both not true)
I've seen arguments both for and against this intuition. Apparently Liebniz believed that the PSR produces Determinism, but his approach was, from what little I know about it, very alien to me, as it was very much God-based.
I think part of the disagreement might come from different interpretations of what 'sufficient' means in this context. If there is "sufficient reason" for something to happen, or for something to be true, does that mean it MUST happen, MUST be true? I don't think everyone answers that question the same.
(Please note that the poll question isn't asking you if you think the PSR is true - only if you think that if it were true, it would imply determinism. You can answer 'Yes' to the poll and still think the PSR and Determinism are both not true)
I've seen arguments both for and against this intuition. Apparently Liebniz believed that the PSR produces Determinism, but his approach was, from what little I know about it, very alien to me, as it was very much God-based.
I think part of the disagreement might come from different interpretations of what 'sufficient' means in this context. If there is "sufficient reason" for something to happen, or for something to be true, does that mean it MUST happen, MUST be true? I don't think everyone answers that question the same.
Comments (124)
A sufficient reason I'm interpreting to be something like "an explanation for why this occurred instead of something else".
For some, perhaps most, interpretations of qm, yes but not all.
But the PSR doesn't have to be true. If a non deterministic interpretation of qm is true, then the response isn't necessarily to revise the PSR, it might just be to reject it. "The world isn't deterministic, and there are things that happen that have no sufficient reason - they just happened"
I think I'd be more inclined to accept the inference from determinism to the PSR than the inference from the PSR to determinism just because reasons and causes need not be one and the same, so it seems obvious to me that one can hold that everything has an explanation without everything having a cause.
If we look at some event that, given all the facts about the universe, could have gone one of two ways, and we ask "why did it go this way instead of that way?", well if indeterminism is true then you can't answer that by pointing to any fact about the universe. That seems very anti PSR to me, you know?
Isn't "That's a self-caused event" a sufficient explanation for an uncaused event? Or "These events are the stochastic events"?
Self caused why though? Right? Why did it cause itself?
The PSR can be considered the underpinning of science: the pursuit of answers to why something is the way it is. So I think there's something worth salvaging.
How about grounding? A quantum collapse is grounded in the quantum system, and possibly the entity that it becomes entangled with that results in the collapse.
I imagine that the explanation is unsatisfactory, generally speaking, but we'd reach for it in the event that we have reason to believe such-and-such a kind of event is, in fact and not just because of how we calculate things, stochastic.
So if we simply accepted "Self-caused" for all events then that's deeply unsatisfactory, and there I'd say yeah pretty much amounts to denying what the proponent of the PSR is wanting to say.
But given the difficulties there are in claiming quantum events being deterministic that seems to me the most obvious example that we'd reach for. Why did it cause itself? For the same reason that A necessitates B -- that's just how it works.
In a way the explanation in operation in both cases, be it deterministic or stochastic, is an appeal to an events being -- the kind of being it is is what explains how it behaves. Deterministic events necessitate, and stochastic ones do not, and the PSR could be taken as a regulative rather than factual principle whereby the termination of thought into self-caused events is acknowledged as unsatisfactory, and so be on the lookout to see if we missed something after all.
Quoting flannel jesus
In the case of a stochastic event I'd imagine we have to say "The conditions were sufficient for 50%A/50%B, and we observed A this time" -- or B. And then, if truly stochastic, you'd predict that with repeated measurements of the same system-event you'd begin to see the distribution emerge, whatever distribution that happened to be for that phenomena.
Science certainly is searching for explanations, but I don't think science strictly needs it to be metaphysically true for EVERYTHING to have an explanation.
And the "A this time" would still be insufficiently explained, that's the problem, that's the disconnect between indeterminism and PSR.
Like I totally agree that you can have a determined and explained probability distribution in QM, but that last bit, that "A this time instead of B", just seems to pop out of nothing.
So some things have explanations. Seems so weak, it's irrelevant.
Where I wanted to go with this, is to narrow down the sorts of things that have explanations.
I think, even if we do live in a world with quantum randomness, when it comes to the kinds of events we're interested in at our macroscopic scale of existence MOST things have explanations. It doesn't necessarily hurt all that much if some tiny things don't.
But they might undermine the PSR in different ways.
Like maybe you could say "The PSR is true except for these small amount of axioms with no explanation". And that's just a little bit of non-PSR in the world.
Or you could say "The PSR is true except for literally every single quantum event", and then suddenly you have a lot of non-PSR in the world.
The things that lack explanations, are brute facts. So we should always seek explanations, but accept that there are instances where we will hit a brute fact.
Example: assume metaphysical foundationalism is true (i.e. there's a "bottom layer" of reality"). That layer is not explainable in any deeper terms.
But then this wouldn't be a brute fact if we are following along with the PSR -- perhaps it's a regulative fact, though there's some further reason why our explanation ends with causation -- like we cannot comprehend events outside of the structure of causation, for instance. That doesn't mean there are no such events, only that we wouldn't be able to comprehend them, and this is why explanation must terminate in cause -- see how this satisfies the notion that everything has a reason, even if that reason is not a cause?
It's a Be-cause, but not a metaphysical cause.
No not really. It still seems like there are things that don't have reasons in that case to me. Maybe I'm just being stubborn or something, but I don't see it.
If qm dictates that you see A 50% of the time and B 50% of the time, then the question "why did I see A instead of B this time?" still seems reasonless to me.
I don't understand what you're saying. Reified? That entails a fallacy. Do you mean actualized?
Under QM, a pure state quantum system evolves deterministically- per the wave function, describable by a Schroedinger equation.
I agree, but what does the equation describe? It describes some aspect of reality (if it's true).
Personally, I lean toward law realism: there exist laws of nature, which are causal relations between the properties of things. You had said:
Quoting tim wood
Under the paradigm of law realism, the causative power within a quantum system is intrinsic to the quantum system: it's evolution is both necessary and deterministic.
Like maybe that IS just the truth, but if it is the truth then the PSR isn't true there.
Fair enough - it's presupposition, but it is POSSIBLY true. By contrast, we agree that mere description (equations) is not causitive - that's not even possible.
I'll differ here - it's what I do. And lead the thread off on an aside.
F=ma is a definition, not a description. There were no forces sitting around, waiting for Newton to describe them. Rather he defined force as the product of mass and acceleration, as the change in an objects motion.
And treating it this way actually makes your point contra stronger. The force is defined as the change in velocity times mass, which is quite different from the reification of saying that force causes the change in velocity times mass.
A can of worms.
Well, not quite. A force just is the product of mass and change in velocity - in mechanics, at least. So it's more that F=ma defines the physical relationship between mass and change in velocity.
Yes, it is predictive.
Yes, but there is a physical relationship present that exists irrespective of us putting it into intelligible terms.
's response is spot on. What is a "physical relationship"? We sometimes say the force caused the body to accelerate, but that force just is the change in velocity. There's an odd circularity in attributing causation to forces.
Glad you don't mean to do away with language, but this "casual usage" is pertinent to a very practical (and seemingly successful) means of interacting with the world. Granted, it's a paradigm- but one that is fleshed out pretty thoroughly.
There’s a lot I agree with in this OP, but I think the framing assumes a sharper 'either-or' than the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) really requires.
It’s easy to assume that PSR, if true, must entail strict determinism—that every event is fixed in advance by prior conditions in a fully specifying, Laplacean sense. But I think that’s based on a misunderstanding, both of what “sufficient reason” means, and of how complex systems actually behave.
The essay Karma and Chaos (which I've linked here because it’s well worth reading) offers a useful perspective. It shows how chaos theory and complexity science describe systems that are lawful but not rigidly deterministic. These systems operate according to real constraints—there are rules, boundaries, and patterns—but they do not unfold in a strictly predictable way.
A familiar example is the so-called butterfly effect in meteorology. Weather systems follow physical laws, but small changes in initial conditions can lead to dramatically different outcomes. The system is lawful, but not fully predictable in practice. It doesn’t mean “anything can happen”—the system tends to evolve within certain zones or attractors, but the path it takes can vary widely.
So, if PSR says that every event happens for a reason, that reason might be something like the boundary conditions of a system, or the lawful structure that constrains the range of outcomes—not necessarily a single, fully specified event that had to happen and no other.
In other words, the reason why something happens might be that the system is lawful but open-ended, rather than strictly deterministic. There is sufficient reason why some outcomes are possible and others are not, but that doesn't mean every outcome is rigidly predetermined.
This is close to the Buddhist doctrine of kamma (karma) - the context in which the essay was presented, in fact. Kamma doesn’t mean that every detail of life is predetermined. It does mean that actions have consequences, shaped by past conditions and tendencies, but these are still open to choice and change (which is why, incidentally, the interpretation of karma as fatalism is mistaken). Hence it's a model of lawful but open causality—a dynamic interplay of conditioning and freedom, order and variability. Chaos theory provides a contemporary scientific parallel to this view, describing how systems can be shaped by lawful structures while still allowing for spontaneous shifts and new outcomes. (Interestingly, C. S. Peirce argued for something similar, calling it 'tychism'—the idea that real spontaneity or chance plays a causal role in the universe, but in a way that doesn't undermine its lawful structure, and in fact may be essential for its ongoing development..)
So I’d say that PSR doesn’t necessarily imply determinism. It implies that there are real reasons and structures underlying what happens, but those reasons might allow for a range of lawful possibilities, not a single predetermined outcome.
In short, PSR may invite us to ask why this rather than that, but the answer might be: because the system allows for variation within lawful constraints. That’s not determinism in the classical sense, but it isn’t randomness either. It’s something more dynamic—a lawful openness.
Suppose I need to choose between two doors. I would have sufficient reason to choose one door over the other. But, if I were to have free-will, and if I were to have chosen the other door, I would have sufficient reason as well.
PSR is similar to there being a sufficient reason for, say, our choices. Those choices can be either from a free-will or a deterministic system.
Quoting W. Norris Clarke
I guess it'd depend upon what you want out of your sufficiency.
I'm inclined to say that if the probability distribution of an event is consistent between tokens of said event then there's still a "singular nature of the end result" -- it's just that it's a probability distribution which is neither 1 or 0.
I also think that while we like to know a relationship such that A necessitates B, this is only because we like to control nature and such relationships enable us to do so. But nature need not conform to our desires, and we have to be open to that possibility.
But I can imagine a consistent way to believe the PSR while accepting that possibility -- namely since we are already allowing causes into our ontology we need only say there are at least two kinds of causes, and note the logical relationships which differentiate the kinds (necessity between A->B, or a necessary probability between A->B/C)
I guess I can't get over the idea that it seems fundamentally reasonable to ask "but why this result in particular?"
Electron can be spin up or spin down. We measure it down. Why was it down? "Because it could be up or down". That's cool, but why was it down?
It's okay if there's no particular reason why it was specifically down - sure, maybe that's reality, maybe there is no particular reason why it was specifically down - but if that's the case, then there's a fact without an explanation. We can explain why it was
And that's what PSR means to me - maybe I'm misinterpreting it, but PSR I would paraphrase as "everything has an explanation". If so, then the fact that it was down and not up should also have an explanation, and "it can be down or up" just isn't the end of the explanation. To my mind, there's still that unanswered question.
The PSR , like I've said before, isn't necessarily true. Maybe we don't live in a world where everything has an explanation. That's okay too.
PSR -> determinism
But not the other way around necessarily
But neither the PSR nor determinism are necessarily true.
Suppose the many-worlds interpretation -- is "It was down because you're in the down-electron universe, whereas another version of you is in the up-electron universe" a sufficient explanation?
Cool. I don't agree for reasons I already stated, but ultimately that's just a battle of terminology. I can go along with the notion that the PSR implies determinism.
How then, using this terminology, does determinism not imply the PSR? What is the deterministic scenario in which the PSR is false?
Yes
Because ironically, in the many worlds there's a single state of affairs in the end with a complete explanation.
"Single state of affairs? In many worlds?" I hear you ask. Yes. Find out why in the next episode.
The universe we live in happens to evolve deterministically, but there's no particular reason for, say, the physical constants or the starting conditions of the universe. They just are what they are with no underlying reason.
I agree that there's no particular reason for the physical constants or starting conditions of the universe.
I don't know why you'd claim our particular universe evolves deterministically when we have QM as an obvious counter-example to the various examples we'd be tempted to invoke. There is at least one natural phenomena, according to science, which does not behave according to the relationship of necessity between events.
How do you arrive at a belief that the universe we happen to live in is deterministic? Much more how to make it an obvious belief?
Not so fast...
Quoting R. Feynman, Characteristics of Force (from The Feynman Lectures on Physics)
Read on...
I wasn't making a statement about our universe, you asked me for a scenario in which something would be true. It's a hypothetical to answer your question.
But qm is only a counter example depending on interpretation - you brought up many worlds, many worlds is deterministic
Mkay.
Quoting flannel jesus
Wouldn't we be able to ask "Why am I in universe 1 rather than universe 2?"
?
Is there an answer to that question in the many-worlds interpretation?
I'm struggling to see how many-worlds can be interpreted as deterministic, but again it seems like we're coming back to terminology in the first place.
To wrap back around to your OP:
Quoting flannel jesus
Where do you fall on the question?
If I had a computer program where you press a button, and it rolls a dice, and you see a random number between 1 and 6 afterward, that would be indeterministic in a sense, right?
Now what if I had a computer program where you press a button, and it rolls a dice, and then it deletes the original window and spawns 6 new windows, one for each dice side? And then you press the button again and for each of those 6 windows, it spawns another 6 windows, so now there's 36 windows, and in the first window the history is a roll of a 1 and then a 1, and the second window has a history of a 1 and a 2, ... all the way to the 36th window which is a 6 and a 6?
And then you close the program down and run it again and it happens the exact same way every time.
Would you think that program, with a new window for every possible roll, is indeterministic? After all, it does the same thing every time.
More directly: I don't think any of the executions of a program are deterministic, but are manufactured such that they appear, or are mostly, deterministic.
So my skepticism of determinism, more than the PSR, is my motivation here.
Quoting flannel jesus
"does the same thing every time" isn't what I said with respect to different kinds of events.
I have no idea what you're trying to say with this. You asked me how many worlds is deterministic, I tried to give you a visualization to help you see it
Many worlds is analogous to my dice example.
Another way to explain it: In the many worlds view, the Schrödinger equation is king. The Schrödinger equation evolves the wave function deterministically, and - unlike some other interpretations - in many worlds the wave function never collapses, which means it keeps getting evolved by the Schrödinger equation forever.
It can be deterministic and also just not the right interpretation, not matching reality.
You may be able to, but I cannot understand why Many Worlds is deterministic for the reason I said -- why am I in the up-world and not the down-world? What is the deterministic law that makes it such that I experience this world I am in?
We can make up one, but our experience is such that we get a probability distribution -- we might be in the up- or down- world, but we have to perform the experiment to see which we're in.
And if we're in the up-world, what does positing a down-world we're not a part of do? Doesn't that explode our ontology beyond our ability to judge true or false? There may be a left-world, for instance, but we have only observed up- and down- quarks.
That's an indexical problem. The answer to that is not a problem for many worlds, it's a problem for ANY multi-consciouness existence, even if many worlds is not true. Why are you you and not me? If you can answer that question coherently, you can also answer why you're this version of you in MWI and not some other version of you.
And the other version of you is wondering the same thing - why is he that version, instead of the version you are?
Imagine putting a conscious being inside my dice program. By the time you roll the dice twice, there's now a person who has seen a 1 and a 1, and ap erson who has seen a 1 and a 2, etc.. all the way to 6 and a 6.
Now you run the program once and the guy who sees a 1 and a 3 wonders aloud, "why am I this one and not the one that saw a 6/6?" and the guy who sees 6/6 says "Wow! Two sixes in a row! I'm so lucky!"
And every time you run the program from scratch, you see it again: the guy who sees a 1 and a 3 wonders aloud, "why am I this one and not the one that saw a 6/6?" and the guy who sees 6/6 says "Wow! Two sixes in a row! I'm so lucky!"
Now you know there's nothing particularly lucky about the 6/6 guy, right? Not from your perspective. From your perspective, outside the program, that's a natural, inevitable consequence of the program running - every time you roll the dice twice, there will ALWAYS be a guy who saw 6 and then 6, and that guy will ALWAYS say "Wow! Two sixes in a row! I'm so lucky!".
And the first guys question is kinda weird too. There's no reason why he's the one who saw 1 and 3 instead of some other one, that question assumes he COULD HAVE seen something else, in some ontologically strong sense of "could", but the reality is his consciousness was in some sense created the moment that window split into the dice roll of 3. He's the one who saw 1 and 3 because he was invented at that moemnt to be the one that saw 1 and 3. He is almost by definition, the version of that consciousness that sees 1 and 3. If he saw something else, he'd just... be somethig else.
So can you answer why you're you and not me? Can you tell me why I'm me and not you? And can you try to apply that answer to many worlds versions of yourself?
---
I just realized, it might first be worth clarifying, do you understand why MWI is deterministic if we set aside the problem of conscious experience? Like if you have an MWI-flavor world but just without any experience happening in it, can you accept that THAT world is deterministic?
I'm me and not you cuz there was a percentage chance I was you, and a percentage chance I was me -- and I just happened to flip heads.
The universe in which you're you and I'm me is identical to the universe in which I'm you and you're me - so identical in fact that I posit it's most likely correct to say that the very concept that I could be you and you could be me is probably incoherent.
I don't think so -- and obviously the stochastic process is more complex than flipping a quarter -- but I do think that I'm me and not you simply cuz that's how the world evolved, in the same manner that a quarter can be heads or tails before you flip, but after you have a determined token.
Quoting flannel jesus
Why would we believe this? It seems to me that there's a very salient difference between those universes -- namely that I'd be typing what you've been typing, and vice-versa.
And the same thing is true of your many worlds question.
You understand that the Schrödinger equation is deterministic tight? And that many worlds is just the idea that the Schrödinger equation continues to evolve the wave function with no collapse?
I understand that it's not deterministic, but that's probably contributing to our misunderstandings.
Have you googled if it's deterministic? What does a bit of googling tell you?
(Ps my description of the input and output is not exactly correct, but it's close enough to correct for casual conversation, and still completely correct that given the same input it gives the same output)
Heh, no. In school I solved the Schrodinger equation in the one and only case that it's analytic as an exercise -- one proton and one electron.
So rather than googling I'm drawing upon my studies from whenever ago. (and it might sound impressive, but really it's just a partial differential equation -- so if you know them maths you can solve it too)
Quoting flannel jesus
If so then sure it's deterministic, but with a probablistic mathematics which makes it such that you cannot tell what will necessarily happen.
In many worlds you can - what happens is all of it. That's why many worlds is deterministic. It takes the output of a deterministic function and says "that entire thing is real, that entire thing happens"
It says the world evolves according to the Schrödinger equation, it says the entire output of the Schrödinger equation is real in some sense, the Schrödinger equation is deterministic so that makes many worlds deterministic.
OK, got it.
I thought you were claiming it rather than saying there's a possible interpretation of the equation such that determinism is true.
Well, I for one have a question -- namely that it uses probablity and you have to do the experiment to find out which "world" you happen to be in.
I prefer the Copenhagen interpretation. No infinite worlds, but simply a probability in one world. But probability throws a wrench into the notion that every event is connected by necessity -- which is what I think of when I think of determinism.
The distribution always comes from the Schrödinger equation though, and that's decided deterministically. Even in Copenhagen
I don't think I'd be wise enough to be able to tell if indeterminism comes after determinism, or elsewise.
What I know is that you have to perform the experiment in order to find out the outcome -- much like a quarter.
I'd use Yahtzee and Pachinko interchangeably with that example.
All of them can be interpreted as being in a deterministic world -- where this very coin flip must be heads -- but that interpretation, so I think, is beyond our ability to judge things true or false.
Rather, we have some macroscopic events which behave in accord with probability. And also some microscopic ones that surprised us along the way.
(This especially with respect to the notion that D2O is H2O -- the extra weight of that neutron is what makes it deadly to us)
Quoting flannel jesus
PSR seems to be more of a classical principle, talking more about a sufficient reason why I chose chocolate today despite preferring vanilla, and not so much about sufficient reason for the nucleus to decay just then.
Still, certain wordings of PSR may correspond to certain wording of determinism, and in this way the one can be implied by the other. Other wording might be incompatible.
As for some of the other conversations:
Quoting Moliere
Quoting flannel jesus
Pretty equivalent, yea. Makes no sense in either case. To suggest otherwise would be to say that X is Y when it clearly isn't.
Then again, I'm running under the presumption that there isn't a thing that got to be me (or got to be in this universe) like it was some kind of lottery or something.
Quoting Moliere
We apparently see things quite differently, you taking the 'thing playing a lottery' stance.
Quoting Moliere
Easy. The whole thing says that for a closed system, the system (described by one wave function) evolves according to the Schrodinger equation, which is a fully deterministic equation.
Non-deterministic interpretations involve what Einstein apparently detested: the rolling of dice. A good deal of interpretations involve this.
Quoting Moliere
Under determinism, yes, every time, given multiple systems with fully identical initial state.
So the question is, given determinism, can PSR still not apply? Given non-determinism, can PSR still be valid?
Quoting Moliere
Depends on one's definition of 'I'. Given some definitions, you're in both. I don't like that definition since it seems to violate law of non-contradiction. Determinism is a separate issue from what 'you' are under MWI.
Yes -- but maybe Einstein was wrong.
Is the whole universe rightly described as a closed system?
If the PSR is interpreted to state that every event must have a cause, then it would seem that the PSR does imply determinism. Is that how you are interpreting it?
Indeed, maybe he was wrong.
I think any decent definition of 'universe' would involve it being a closed system. If not, it is at best part of some larger structure, just part of a universe.
Given such a definition, any 'multiverse' would be a collection of fairly disjoint things. Look at the observable universe. There are infinitely many of those, so it is a multiverse of sorts, but they are adjacent to each other and interact to a point. No 'visible universe' is a closed system, so it doesn't qualify as a bunch of separate universes by said 'decent definition' of 'universe'.
Quoting Moliere
A physical coin flip (like Pachinko) should be a reasonably deterministic process. If all state is known to enough precision, the outcome is computable. Still, classical physics is not empirically deterministic, as illustrated by things like Norton's dome. This does not falsify ontic deterministic interpretations, which give cause to all events.
I think that begs the question.
Though to be fair to you -- to say the universe is a closed system is more or less to affirm the conservation laws are true and applicable to all that we can observe and make inferences about.
Quoting noAxioms
It doesn't falsify it, but I have to begin to wonder what this ontic determinism is -- if it's not empirically determined it can't be falsified.
So why believe it?
We live in a world of process, where all kinds of processes seem to invariantly give rise to other processes. We actually don't know of exceptions, so why not believe in it?
Though I'd emphasize my viewpoint here: it's not the quantum level as much as there are natural stochastic processes, such as the pachinko machine, or the genes one is born with. At least empirically speaking.
Actually the question in the OP was whether the idea of the PSR is inextricably bound to the idea of determinism . The OP specifically stated that the concern is not with the truth of the PSR and determinism.
What reason?
Quoting Janus
Yeah. I started there with
Quoting Moliere
I'm still thinking that if we accept determinism then the PSR is easy to establish, but cuz of stochastic events the reverse does not hold cuz we can explain events stochastically.
The observed invariance of chemical and electrical processes, which are what constitute everything we observe.
Quoting Moliere
We explain events causally not stochasitically.
I don't think those exclusive. There are necessary causes and stochastic causes, and others harder to define than these mathematical constructs.
Quoting Janus
Maybe it's a professional hazard, but "invariance" is not what I see in chemistry or electrical explanation.
Predictions have improved, but "invariance" seems wrong to me.
It changes, if at a slower rate, but does change.
Quoting Moliere
So chemical elements do not always combine in predictable ways? In the absence of understandable faults and unusual conditions electrical and electronic components don't always function as predicted?
Yup!
Much of the time they do -- but not always always. That's why it's still a science. We get it wrong sometimes, in the details.
Quoting Janus
Theoretically I think of a stochastic cause as, using Hume's notion of a necessary connection between events, a set probability between events.
So if I flip a quarter then 50% Heads 50% Tails.
When they do not behave in the way we have predicted is it not due to unforeseen conditions which when discovered causally explain the anomaly?
Quoting Moliere
Over a very long series of throws we will tend to get a 50/50 distribution of outcomes, but i see that as an observation not a causal explanation. A causal explanation might tell us why we get that 50/50 distribution.
Sometimes. And sometimes it's given "the shrug" -- "Idk, because there are too many possible causes"
Usually that's when you figure out it was a bad experiment after all, or you mess something up.
But every once and again they are discoveries, so unexpected consequences that teach us something.
Right?too many possible causes. Don't anomalies that are not understood invite investigation in terms of causal thinking? I'm finding it hard to think of examples of such anomalies.
Quoting Moliere
That seems right. So we investigate the causes of anomalies, and once they are understood they are no longer anomalies, and we go back to finding predictable results, until the next set of unforeseen unusual conditions comes along.
It seems that, except when it comes to human and some animal behavior, causation is the paradigmatic mode of thought. With animals and humans thinking in terms of causality may be supplanted by thinking in terms of intentionality.
The puzzle there is how intentions which are themselves understood to be the outcome of brain processes, and which are themselves outside of the animal or human ambit of awareness, can really be free of causation.
And if Hume is right, while true that it's paradigmatic, it's also just a habit unjustified by logic.
Quoting Janus
I'm more tempted to inverse this -- How can we believe in universal causation (determinism) when we know we are free and can't predict everything?
Yes, not strictly justified by logic, since there is no logical necessity that events must have causes, or that particular causes or conditions must of logical necessity give rise to particular effects.
So, it's not a matter of pure reason supporting the idea of causation, but of practical reason giving us good reason (it almost always works) to think causally. In fact it seems arguable that there is no other way to understand physical phenomena. The whole of science is based on the idea of energy doing work, and causation is understood not merely as Humean "constant conjunction" but as 'energy exchange'.
Quoting Moliere
Sure you can invert it. I think we believe in universal causation because that seems to be what we observe everywhere, and we also have coherent understandings of why we think we are free (because we cannot be aware of all the forces acting on us, as Spinoza noted) and why we cannot predict everything (because very slight variations in initial conditions amplify to create great differences in outcomes when it comes to the complex systems whose behavior we are not so good at predicting).
To my mind that begins to look like a ghost -- we can explain it, but we can't say it's certainly the case.
For instance -- Spinoza has an explanation for determinism, but another explanation for thinking we are free is we're born free and so know it as well as we know our bodies, and we can't predict everything because some events are connected by chance rather than necessity.
Insofar as we are able to understand them events on the macro-level do not seem to be connected by chance. Events on the micro-level may be or it m ay just be that we cannot grok them in our coarse-grained macro outlook.
To be sure we can't know whether one or the other explanation is certainly the case, but in the final analysis that seems to be the case with most everything in human life.
While I think determinism is impossible to determine empirically, I also don't believe it's true. There are patterns, but if some of those aren't predictable then to call them "determined" looks different from what I thought determinism to be claiming. Something like Dennet's claims about how that one particular event could not be different in the course of things.
I generally take probability as an empirical reality rather than a fudge-factor for our ignorance. Uncertainty figures into scientific thought so much that it seems reasonable to treat it as real as all the rest.
But since the truth or falsity of determinism is epistemically unobtainable I prefer to reserve judgement, while noting that most things in the world of physical processes are very successfully modeled in deterministically causal terms. Which means I lean towards determinism, and tend to view the idea of libertarian freedom as a fantasy.
That said, disagreement is not a negative in my view, and I can understand why you think as you do, without feeling inclined to follow that path of thought myself.
Because it's beautiful (in a mathematical sense). There's something hideous about random spontaneous things with no ontological explanation just popping into existence.
I believe Einstein was hinting at that when he said God doesn't play dice.
I think there's an intuitional gulf between those that think that's a reasonable guiding principle and those that can't see why beauty should have anything to do with how reality operates. I personally can't justify why physics ought to be beautiful, but I feel in my bones that the success of physics ideas influenced by ideas of mathematical beauty are no mistake, no coincidence.
A deterministic world is ordered, logical, "everything in its right place" - indeterminism includes things that happen for no reason, which is inherently disordered and chaotic. It's just not very neat.
But I wouldn't tie those to a universalizing program like causal determinism of a physical world, or something like that. They are ways of judgment.
I'm flummoxed as to why you or anyone would find deteminism beautiful. But then, you just said that physics is 'determined by subjective requirements'.....
You put those words in quotes as if I literally said them, but I didn't say them.
Quoting Wayfarer
Order. In a deterministic system, every event has its place in the system, every event has a clear explanation and follows from the way the system is. In an indeterministic system, there's chaos because "stuff just happens". There's nothing particularly beautiful about "stuff just happening", compared to the beauty of patterns and order. And you don't have to accept that, of course, it's not some kind of scientific fact that that's what beauty is. I'm not telling you you need to believe that, just saying why I do.
As a matter of free choice!
Quoting flannel jesus
That was what I took this to mean:
Quoting flannel jesus
Quoting flannel jesus
But as I’ve said, it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. As I said already, if the PSR says that everything happens for a reason, that reason might be something like the boundary conditions of a system, or the lawful structure that constrains the range of outcomes—not necessarily a single, fully specified event that had to happen and no other. Like, something will fall down, not up, but where it falls might still contain an all-important element of chance.
In other words, the reason why something happens might be that even though a system is lawful, it might still be open-ended, rather than strictly deterministic. There is sufficient reason why some outcomes are possible and others are not, but that doesn't mean every outcome is rigidly predetermined. Otherwise how could novelty ever enter the picture? How could anything happen?
Novelty is relative. As long as you couldn't predict it, it's novel - and you can't predict reality perfectly no matter how deterministic it is. You can predict certain low -complexity events, like the approximate location a bomb will land of you launch it at a particular angle with a particular amount of force, but you can't predict the future of a brain faster than the brain can do something that might surprise you, even if the processes in the brain are effectively macroscopically deterministic.