Chapter XIV: Determinism | The Philosophy Of Science by Steven Gussman [1st Edition]

        “An intelligence that, at a given instance, could comprehend all the forces by which nature is 

        animated and the respective situation of the beings that make it up, if moreover it were vast 

        enough to submit these data to analysis, would encompass in the same formula the movements of 

        the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atoms.  For such an intelligence

        nothing would be uncertain, and the future, like the past, would be open to its eyes.”

        – Pierre-Simon de Laplace^I


        “God does not play dice.”

        – Albert Einstein^II

        Determinism is a facet of mechanical philosophy all too often neglected, today.^III  Determinism is the basic fact that effects have causes, always.  Determinism is the claim that (in-principle) one can always predict the future (or the past) as long as one is in possession of perfectly accurate (and precise) initial conditions and the fundamental physical laws to apply to them.^IV  Even many emergent laws of physics are still deterministic!  A great example is Newtonian physics: the kinematic equations can tell you where a thrown baseball will land and after how long, as long as you know the initial height of the ball, speed of the ball, and the acceleration due to gravity at Earth's surface (g = -9.814 m/s²).^V

        As french physicist Piere-Simon Laplace especially noticed, determinism implies that all states of the world are pre-determined in-principle.^VI  Today, a determinist would argue that all states of the world are in-principle predictable from the initial conditions of the cosmos at the big bang, by the application of the fundamental laws of physics (which we are not yet in full possession of).^VII  While astonishing, this simply must be the case.^VIII  Indeed, most scientists take determinism for granted without realizing it: the whole point of the scientific method is to hypothesize explanations for empirical data, then figure out how that framework makes novel predictions, and finally, perform an empirical observation of experiment to check if the prediction is true (graduating the hypothesis to a theory), or if the disagreeable result otherwise falsifies the hypothesis.^IX  Granted, sometimes one doesn't make deterministic predictions, but stochastic ones: one's explanatory framework may only predict that an observation will be 70% likely to turn out one way, and 30% likely to turn out in some other way.  For most of the history of science, we understood any such randomness as arising from our partial ignorance (either of initial conditions or of laws).^X  Since it is better to have a partial theory than it is to have no theory, we celebrate and use even our stochastic understandings of the world—but we used to interpret these as incomplete understandings of the phenomena they describe.  In even emergent sciences, from chemistry to biology, psychology, and sociology, effects are expected to have causes whether we have full information about these processes or not.^XI  It was only very recently, with the advent of quantum physics, that many physicists have been (wrongfully) persuaded into thinking that reality is somehow partially fundamentally random, at base.  It is said that there is no explanation for why our current best theory of particle physics cannot predict exactly where an electron will be in an atom, or how fast it will be moving (and especially not both at the same time!).  A minority (most prominently the father of modern physics, Einstein) have pushed back against this from the start, and attempted to propose deterministic explanations for quantum phenomena (or at least make the argument from philosophy of physics that such a mechanism must exist).  Such scientists understood that the idea of randomness is incoherent; it's not even clear what it means for a process to be truly random—it amounts to the claim that some effects truly have no causes.  That is the antithesis of scientific explanation.

        In the best case, competing hypotheses are competing deterministic explanations for an effect!  Yet, as hinted at earlier, there are a number reasons why a phenomenon may appear to have a random component.  More often, at the lower levels of abstraction, it is because while the mechanism is deterministic in-principle, it is effectively noisy in-practice due to our partial ignorance of initial conditions (as in chaos theory) or in mechanics (as when we are only in possession of an approximate natural law).^XII  More often in higher levels of abstraction, it is because many such effects have multiple causes (as in complex systems) and we are often only in possession of (or otherwise only take into account) few or one such causal force.^XIII  (Some of these causes could also interact creating differential feedback loops and other, more complicated, contributions than mere mutual exclusive causation).  Imagine you are looking at a phenomenon, or, an effect, and it has ten mutually exclusive causes (which might be relatively few and simple compared to the real-world complexity at higher levels of abstraction).  This means that a tenth approximation would actually cease to be an approximation: it would be the deterministic, analytical model of all of the ten causes involved in producing the effect.^XIV  If you were only in possession of the first, most dominant cause, you would have a first approximation: perhaps taking cause #1 into account predicts 80% of the effect.  Not bad!  But it means that your explanation's ability to make predictions will be limited—it will either be inaccurate 20% of the time, or otherwise be accurate within a 20% margin of error.  But as we know, it would be foolish to assume that this 20% indeterminacy were a fundamental facet of nature rather than of one's own ignorance of the other causes at play!  Indeed, it is only the people who realize this who will even attempt to discover a second approximation (that perhaps brings the total predictive power up to 90%) and thereby contribute to knowledge.  The real definition of a "scientist", it has been forgotten, is a gadfly who dares to discover something new, not someone who remembers only what is already known.  Both of these people will fancy themselves "scientists", but only one will win The Nobel Prize while the other will get a gift certificate at an Applebee's trivia night.^XV
        Ironically, this short chapter is likely to be the most controversial argument I make in this book, even though it would have effectively been the default position just a century ago.  If quantum physics is to overturn this most basic, logical facet of philosophy of science, its proponents are going to have to actually grapple with how to understand that, philosophically.  Effects have causes, and the mechanism that connects them may be understood in the cosmos.

Footnotes:

0. The Philosophy Of Science table of contents can be found, here (footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2022/04/table-of-contents-philosophy-of-science.html).

I. See The Elegant Universe by Greene (pp. 340-341, 409) which further cites Philosophical Essay On Probabilities by Pierre-Simon Laplace, translated by Andre I. Dale (Springer-Verlag) (1825 / 1995) (though I have not yet read this work).

II. See Parallel Worlds by Kaku (pp. 160); A Brief History Of Time by Hawking (pp. 58); What Is Real by Becker (pp. 44-45); and Our Mathematical Universe by Tegmark (pp. 178, 192).

III. See the “Mechanical Philosophy” chapter.

IV. See The Theoretical Minimum by Susskind and Hrabovsky (pp. 1-10) (which places special emphasis on the fact that deterministic mechanisms are reversible); A Brief History Of Time by Hawking (pp. 55-58, 188-189) and Brief Answers To The Big Questions by Hawking (pp. 29, 90-96, 118-119) (though unlike myself, Hawking seems persuaded by quantum physics that classical determinism is no longer tenable, at times even questioning whether it is tenable in macroscopic black-hole physics); The Elegant Universe by Greene (pp. 340-343) (similar caveats apply); for the philosophical history of the concept of determinism, see The Dream Of Reason by Gottlieb (pp. 314-315, 322) and The Dream Of Enlightenment by Gottlieb (at least pp. 180-183); for the relationship between quantum physics and determinism, see Our Mathematical Universe by Tegmark (pp. 177-183) (though we deeply disagree about the solution to the measurement problem in quantum physics; his appeal to physicist Hugh Everett's many-worlds interpretation does not restore determinism, look forward to the “Physics” chapter in the “Ontology” volume); "Free Will" by Jerry Coyne (Edge / Harper Perennial) (2014 / 2015) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25381) in This Idea Must Die edited by Brockman (pp. 154); "Determinism" by Jerry Coyne (Edge / Harper Perennial) (2017 / 2018) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27067) in This Idea Is Brilliant edited by Brockman (pp. 176-179); "State" by Scott Aaronson (Edge / Harper Perennial) (2017 / 2018) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27127) in This Idea Is Brilliant edited by Brockman (pp. 179-183); Cosmos: Possible Worlds by Ann Druyan (National Geographic) (2020) (pp. 274-275); In “Defense Of Philosophy (Of Science)” by Gussman (https://footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2021/05/in-defense-of-philosophy-of-science.html); and “A Profusion Of Place | Part I: Of Unity And Philosophy” by Gussman (https://footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2020/03/a-profusion-of-place-part-i-of-unity.html#FN42B) (for a discussion of why so-called chaos theory hurts determinism only in-practice, not in-principle).

V. Look forward to the “Physics” chapter in the “Ontology” volume.

VI. See again the quote at the top of this chapter, and footnote I.

VII. See Cosmos: Possible Worlds by Druyan (pp. 274-275). I was under the impression someone on Carroll's Mindscape Podcast once mentioned a belief in deterministic cause-and-effect all the way back to the big bang, but I cannot seem to find it.

VIII. Some today like to call such a principle superdeterminism, but of course, it's just the natural consequence of determinism taken seriously, and so requires no "super" prefix, see Cosmos: Possible Worlds by Druyan (pp. 274-275).

IX. For an independent expression of the centrality of determinism to science, see “State” by Aaronson (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27127) in This Idea Is Brilliant edited by Brockman (pp. 183).

X. See The Demon Haunted World by Sagan (pp. 8, 295) and Cosmos: Possible Worlds by Druyan (pp. 274). By my memory, Sagan himself said that probabilities were generally a sign of relative ignorance on the part of the theoretician, but I cannot seem to find it.

XI. See What Is Real? by Becker (at least pp. 16-20, 45, 47-48, 50-52, 59, 123, 188-189, 235, 256-259); and my June 20^th, 2018 Instagram post: https://www.instagram.com/p/BkQ_DIwhIkF/. In a conversation with Twitter user @_dead_light_ / @drama_zero, he independently mentioned how strange it is that determinism is no longer expected even from a fundamental theory, see our Twitter thread on either side of his February 13^th, 2019 tweet: https://twitter.com/_dead_light_/status/1095732505313980417 (he for some reason argues that someone has already solved the problem of quantum indeterminacy in this thread, which is not true).

XII. See “A Profusion Of Place | Part I: Of Unity And Philosophy” by Gussman (https://footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2020/03/a-profusion-of-place-part-i-of-unity.html#FN35B) and my February 13^th, 2019 tweet from the aforementioned conversation: https://twitter.com/schwinn3/status/1095744054783102976?s=20&t=Xk7Yc5egdWUlCFfVzm0hgQ.

XIII. See the “Elegance And Complexity” chapter.

XIV. See the “Approximation” chapter.

XV. See the “The Scientific Ethic” and “The Sociology Of Scientists” chapters. See also Letters To A Young Scientist by E. O. Wilson (pp. 92-93); "Excellence" by Eric. R. Weinstein (Edge / Harper Perennial) (2013) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23879) in What Should We Be Worried About?: Real Scenarios That Keep Scientists Up at Night edited John Brockman (Harper Perennial) (2013) (pp. 265-269) (though I have not yet read the rest of the essays in this book); and “Bret And Heather 81st DarkHorse Podcast Livestream: Permission to Think” by B. Weinstein and H. Heying (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoaKtBMk53Y) (15:31 – 19:54).