Olivier5

Modesty aside, my English is good enough to understand what you are trying to say. And to the degree that my own words are imprecise, if you care for ...

Abderhaman, Martin, David What if the sky was empty? So many processions, so many bowed heads So many hoods, so much wished fear So many demagogues fr...

No, I'm French.

It's not complicated to abandon an hypothesis, especially when it makes no pragmatic difference whatsoever.

I do consider metaphysics, I don't discard them. Every body got some metaphysics or another. Mine is that the universe is open, evolutive, not predete...

That may well be the case. But people who do not care about truth don't usually succeed very long. Everything is that trivial in the end: it's about p...

You just proved that determinism is a metaphysical theory, because there is no conceivable experiment with a conceivable outcome that could prove it f...

I'll take that as a no.

So... Did you find that magical experiment yet?

You are a bit slow realizing the problem... Omniscience is required to test determinism. One has to know the true laws of nature in order to know if t...

Probabilistic theories are in practice discarded when their odds of being wrong is repeatedly calculated at more than 10%. Some place the bar at 5%. I...

You are not God, are you?

Your criteria are Chinese to me. Give me one example of an experiment that could disprove determinism. The question is very simple.

Certainly it would prove it incorrect in this instance. For example some cheating could well be at play.

And how to falsify them. By experience. Your chances to draw 10 times 'head' in a row are 1/1024. Your chances to draw 100 times 'head' are 1 / 10^30 ...

In practice it does. Because that result is so improbable as to be next to impossible.

It may not be what the members want, but it's what they can get and agree upon right now... What they have been able to agree upon until now. Of cours...

A probabilistic theory still makes predictions, testable with statistics.

The discussion is now on whether determinism is falsifiable in Popper's sense, and hence whether it is a scientific theory. Ken contends it is (but ha...

More precisely, we will never know for sure. Like we will probably never know for sure if gods exist or not.

You mean, if only we knew the true and exact laws of nature, we could tell whether they are determinist or not. Well, that's true, but we will probabl...

Let's see if he can explain.

These criteria seem to come from nowhere and go nowhere. I didn't ask about any of that. I asked you to imagine an experiment that could disprove dete...

If you don't know exactly what the original conditions are, how can you expect your predictions to be exact? Even if you say (as actually done in real...

High precision is different from full precision, and you know it. Or you should know it. Perfect precision of measurement of initial conditions is imp...

Fully known? You have any example of something that can be fully known? Balls have been thrown up and down before, and we do seem to have difficulties...

Who wants another European war? If the EU has any advantage, it's in offering a peaceful way to do some level of integration. It's the value propositi...

That's a good point. We seem to project our need for predictability onto the word.

Indeed, determinism cannot be a scientific theory if it is not falsifiable. It is a matter of belief, and your belief in the matter seems quite strong...

Nothing cuts it. You cannot fathom an experiment that would help conclude one way or another on the philosophical idea of determinism.

The point remains that unpredictable is not an exact synonym of undetermined, and that testing the former is not testing the latter... You cannot fals...

Also, it took Him millions of years to figure it out... He can't be that bright.

But you said it yourself: unpredictable is different from undetermined. Something could be fully determined but unpredictable. For example the three b...

Well then, we agree.

I doubt you have read the book, so I will ignore your uninformed attempts at a critique. There is no such thing. QM are generally interpreted as indet...

Aka polysemia.

I could write about randomness and indeterminism, but you'd be the only reading. The Open Universe by Karl Popper, is a a series of arguments in favor...

Something like that, yes. The scientific concept(s) of "degrees of freedom" is interesting here as it suggests that freedom is something that can be q...

Italians think that Brussels tends to be unfair to them. Or Germany. Or France. That we French look down on them. That the Americans summarize them as...

Likewise; most welcome.

Superior animals look purposefully for data, in an active manner, they don't collect them passively. They are looking. This indicates an awareness of ...

Yeah but somebody keyed it in, or connected to the computer a camera or another sensor, itself designed by some folk at pointed somewhere by another. ...

I am not aware on any scientific theory saying that the fundamental indeterminism of quantum mechanics resolves somehow into determinism at the biolog...

(emphasis added) Survival has it's own sources of randomness, like genetic drift. Mating is generally viewed as random by default, and population gene...

Data means something. It's provided by the senses, and it therefore refers to the world out there, or rather to our perception of it. Logically, it do...

Forced in a top down manner on the people, I mean, recent, not cast in stone. In fact the Scott's voted against Brexit and whether they will stay in t...

No no. Random as in quantic randomness that leads to random mutations that lead to random changes in the environment... Random random.

Evolution is not just a question of adapting to an environment. It's about adapting to and competing in a constantly changing environment. The environ...

Indeed, we can take a great deal of randomness for granted. And without it, evolution would not work. I rest my case.

QM is a little more than "a sketchy and speculative fringe theory", I think. I would rather integrated QM in my world view than consider it a mere det...