jackles wrote:there is only free will in terms of doing good or evil in other words free will is orientated meaning.you have free will in meaning to do good or evil.the rest is ant mechanics
Well if determinism is true that is of course correct, one could question if the universe operates deterministically at any level though: a scientist would say, no not at any level, a philosopher would say yes it is fundamentally deterministic. Reality it seems at least in experiment is a complex mix of random and causal.
This only muddies the question though, see Leplaces demon and entropy/thermodynamics and quantum mechanics:
Good overview here:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/
It's inaccurate only in assuming interpretational issues can or will result necessarily in deterministic physics (a bias I have noticed in philosophy that in itself is at best misguided and ignorant and at worse hopelessly easy to criticise (if you do not know then you can not judge the veracity of one interpretation over another at all or likelihood it is correct) in the case of Many Worlds interpretation and Many Minds and the other best hope Bohmian mechanics does not distinguish itself in any experimental way and is fringe anyway), they need to get a physicist to explain them, because the deterministic theories of quantum mechanics are completely unprovable and probably always will be. That said they could be right it's just premature to say QM will ultimately be deterministic because as yet no one knows if this is true, I can assure you there are a lot of scientists that hope it is true, but I don't think the universe gives a damn about hope or human hubris. hence for better or worse Copenhagen is mainstream only by virtue of being first, and the rest are indistinguishable from it. Even the term promising is a lie, promising in what way? Sadly pop science magazines don't help by proclaiming Stephen hawking thinks Many Worlds is the best explanation or x or y.
"What is your favourite interpretation of physics?"
"Shut up and calculate, (a version or allusion to Copenhagen or a more modern version there of)"
Attributed to Richard P. Feynman and others but probably others.
You can't even trust university peer reviewed encyclopaedias.
There has recently been proposed a limit on the computational power of the universe, i.e. the ability of Laplace's Demon to process an infinite amount of information. The limit is based on the maximum entropy of the universe, the speed of light, and the minimum amount of time taken to move information across the Planck length, and the figure was shown to be about 10120 bits.[9] Accordingly, anything that requires more than this amount of data cannot be computed in the amount of time that has elapsed so far in the universe.
Another theory suggests that if Laplace's demon were to occupy a parallel universe or alternate dimension from which it could determine the implied data and do the necessary calculations on an alternate and greater time line the aforementioned time limitation would not apply. This position is for instance explained in David Deutsch's The Fabric of Reality, who says that realizing a 300-qubit quantum computer would prove the existence of parallel universes carrying the computation.
It must be admitted that the openness of the future would be hard to defend in the rigidly deterministic universe that Laplace regarded as the inexorable consequence of taking Newtonian ideas seriously. We have seen that in that world, full knowledge of the present, together with unlimited calculating power, implies total knowledge of a rigorously entailed past and future. Nothing really novel ever happened; history was a reiterated tautology. However, the iron grip of Laplace's calculating demon has been relaxed by the twentieth century discovery of widespread intrinsic unpredictabilities present in nature, both at the microscopic level of quantum events and also at the macroscopic level of the behavior of exquisitely sensitive chaotic systems. We have noted already that the question of whether these epistemological deficiencies are to be interpreted as signs of an ontological openness is a metaphysical issue, not to be settled by the natural sciences alone. In the case of chaotic systems, we have seen that it is possible to develop an interpretation that leads to the existence of extra causal principles with the form of the 'active information', and that these might well be capable of accommodating the action of both human and divine agency. Such a program would then achieve Pannenberg's desired defense of the openness of history, as theology wishes to understand it, not by appeal to field theory but to the ideas of the top-down effects of active information. There is much that is necessarily speculative here, but I believe that these ideas afford a better model than field for the presence and activity of the Spirit.[10]
—John Polkinghorne, Faith, Science and Understanding
4.4 Quantum mechanics
As indicated above, QM is widely thought to be a strongly non-deterministic theory. Popular belief (even among most physicists) holds that phenomena such as radioactive decay, photon emission and absorption, and many others are such that only a probabilistic description of them can be given. The theory does not say what happens in a given case, but only says what the probabilities of various results are. So, for example, according to QM the fullest description possible of a radium atom (or a chunk of radium, for that matter), does not suffice to determine when a given atom will decay, nor how many atoms in the chunk will have decayed at any given time. The theory gives only the probabilities for a decay (or a number of decays) to happen within a given span of time. Einstein and others perhaps thought that this was a defect of the theory that should eventually be removed, by a supplemental hidden variable theory[6] that restores determinism; but subsequent work showed that no such hidden variables account could exist. At the microscopic level the world is ultimately mysterious and chancy.
So goes the story; but like much popular wisdom, it is partly mistaken and/or misleading. Ironically, quantum mechanics is one of the best prospects for a genuinely deterministic theory in modern times! Even more than in the case of GTR and the hole argument, everything hinges on what interpretational and philosophical decisions one adopts. The fundamental law at the heart of non-relativistic QM is the Schrödinger equation. The evolution of a wavefunction describing a physical system under this equation is normally taken to be perfectly deterministic.[7] If one adopts an interpretation of QM according to which that's it—i.e., nothing ever interrupts Schrödinger evolution, and the wavefunctions governed by the equation tell the complete physical story—then quantum mechanics is a perfectly deterministic theory. There are several interpretations that physicists and philosophers have given of QM which go this way. (See the entry on quantum mechanics.)
More commonly—and this is part of the basis for the popular wisdom—physicists have resolved the quantum measurement problem by postulating that some process of “collapse of the wavefunction” occurs from time to time (particularly during measurements and observations) that interrupts Schrödinger evolution. The collapse process is usually postulated to be indeterministic, with probabilities for various outcomes, via Born's rule, calculable on the basis of a system's wavefunction. The once-standard, Copenhagen interpretation of QM posits such a collapse. It has the virtue of solving certain paradoxes such as the infamous Schrödinger's cat paradox, but few philosophers or physicists can take it very seriously unless they are either idealists or instrumentalists. The reason is simple: the collapse process is not physically well-defined, and feels too ad hoc to be a fundamental part of nature's laws.[8]
In 1952 David Bohm created an alternative interpretation of QM—perhaps better thought of as an alternative theory—that realizes Einstein's dream of a hidden variable theory, restoring determinism and definiteness to micro-reality. In Bohmian quantum mechanics, unlike other interpretations, it is postulated that all particles have, at all times, a definite position and velocity. In addition to the Schrödinger equation, Bohm posited a guidance equation that determines, on the basis of the system's wavefunction and particles' initial positions and velocities, what their future positions and velocities should be. As much as any classical theory of point particles moving under force fields, then, Bohm's theory is deterministic. Amazingly, he was also able to show that, as long as the statistical distribution of initial positions and velocities of particles are chosen so as to meet a “quantum equilibrium” condition, his theory is empirically equivalent to standard Copenhagen QM. In one sense this is a philosopher's nightmare: with genuine empirical equivalence as strong as Bohm obtained, it seems experimental evidence can never tell us which description of reality is correct. (Fortunately, we can safely assume that neither is perfectly correct, and hope that our Final Theory has no such empirically equivalent rivals.) In other senses, the Bohm theory is a philosopher's dream come true, eliminating much (but not all) of the weirdness of standard QM and restoring determinism to the physics of atoms and photons. The interested reader can find out more from the link above, and references therein.
This small survey of determinism's status in some prominent physical theories, as indicated above, does not really tell us anything about whether determinism is true of our world. Instead, it raises a couple of further disturbing possibilities for the time when we do have the Final Theory before us (if such time ever comes): first, we may have difficulty establishing whether the Final Theory is deterministic or not—depending on whether the theory comes loaded with unsolved interpretational or mathematical puzzles. Second, we may have reason to worry that the Final Theory, if indeterministic, has an empirically equivalent yet deterministic rival (as illustrated by Bohmian quantum mechanics.)
Ironically in this case best means more hopeful than better chance. They do however have the decency to say it is unresolved, but they have unfairly loaded a bias onto the issue that is impossible to justify by use of prose IMHO. Logically speaking there is no reason to assume that QM is deterministic given the evidence, and no reason to assume it ever will be given the lack of evidence likely to come from the other interpretations. So we are at a sort of impasse...
