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Determinism

Determinism

:This article is about the general notion of determinism in philosophy. For other uses of the word "determinism" see: Deterministic (disambiguation). Determinism is the philosophical proposition that every event, including human cognition and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. No mysterious miracles or wholly random events occur. If there has been even one indeterministic event since the beginning of time, then determinism is false.

Philosophy of determinism

The principal consequence of deterministic philosophy is that free will (except as defined in strict compatibilism) becomes an illusion. It is a popular misconception that determinism necessarily entails that all future events have already been determined (a position known as Fatalism); this is not obviously the case, and the subject is still debated among metaphysicians. Determinism is associated with, and relies upon, the ideas of Materialism and Causality. Some of the philosophers who have dealt with this issue are Omar Khayyám, David Hume, Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, and, more recently, John Searle. ::: With Earth's first Clay They did the Last Man's knead, ::: And then of the Last Harvest sow'd the Seed: ::: Yea, the first Morning of Creation wrote ::: What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read. :::::(Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, LIII, rendered into English verse by Edward FitzGerald)

The nature of determinism

The exact meaning of the term "determinism" has historically been subject to various interpretations. Some view determinism and free will as mutually exclusive, whereas others, labelled "Compatibilists", believe that the two ideas can be coherently reconciled. Most of this disagreement is due to the fact that the definition of "free will," like determinism, varies. Some feel it refers to the metaphysical truth of independent agency, whereas others simply define it as the feeling of agency that humans experience when they act. For example, David Hume argued that while it is possible that one does not freely arrive at one's set of desires and beliefs, the only meaningful interpretation of freedom relates to one's ability to translate those desires and beliefs into voluntary action.

Determinism in Western tradition

The idea that the entire universe is a deterministic system has been articulated in both Western and non-Western religion, philosophy, and literature. The Ancient Greek atomists Leucippus and Democritus were the first to anticipate determinism when they theorized that all processes in the world were due to the mechanical interplay of atoms, but this theory did not gain much support at the time. Determinism in the West is often associated with Newtonian physics, which depicts the physical matter of the universe as operating according to a set of fixed, knowable laws. The "billiard ball" hypothesis, a product of Newtonian physics, argues that once the initial conditions of the universe have been established the rest of the history of the universe follows inevitably. If it were actually possible to have complete knowledge of physical matter and all of the laws governing that matter at any one time, then it would be theoretically possible to compute the time and place of every event that will ever occur (Laplace's demon). In this sense, the basic particles of the universe operate in the same fashion as the rolling balls on a billiard table, moving and striking each other in predictable ways to produce predictable results. Whether or not it is all-encompassing in so doing, Newtonian mechanics deals only with caused events, e.g.: If the original position of an object is x, y, z, and if it is hit dead on by an object moving along some vector V, then it will be pushed straight toward another point x', y', z'. If it goes somewhere else, the Newtonians argue, one must question one's measurements of the original position of the object, the exact direction of the object moving on V, gravitational or other fields that were inadvertently ignored, etc. Then, they maintain, repeated experiments and improvements in accuracy will always bring one's observations closer to the theoretically predicted results. When dealing with situations on an ordinary human scale, Newtonian physics has been so enormously successful that it has no competition. But it fails spectacularly as velocities become some substantial fraction of the speed of light and when interactions at the atomic scale are studied. Prior to the discovery of quantum effects and other challenges to Newtonian physics, "uncertainty" was always a term that applied to the accuracy of human knowledge about causes and effects, and not to the causes and effects themselves.

Determinism in Eastern tradition

In the East, determinism has been expressed in the Buddhist doctrine of Dependent Origination, which states that every phenomenon is conditioned by, and depends on, the phenomena that it is not. A common teaching story, called the Net of Indra, illustrates this point. A vast auditorium is decorated with mirrors and/or prisms hanging on strings of different lengths from an immense number of points on the ceiling. One flash of light is sufficient to light the entire display since light bounces and bends from hanging bauble to hanging bauble. Each bauble lights each and every other bauble. So, too, each of us is "lit" by each and every other entity in the Universe. In Buddhism, this teaching is used to demonstrate that to ascribe special value to any one thing is to ignore the interdependence of all things. Volitions of all sentient creatures determine the seeming reality in which we perceive ourself as living, rather than a mechanical universe determining the volitions which humans imagine themselves to be forming. In the story of the Net of Indra, the light that streams back and forth throughout the display is the analog of karma. The word "karma" does not mean anything like "the result of a past good or bad action." "Karma" refers to an action, or, more specifically, to an intentional action, and the Buddhist theory holds that every karma (every intentional action) will bear karmic fruit (produce an effect somewhere down the line). Karma is the only thing that is fundamentally real. Volitional acts drive the universe. The consequences of this view often confound our ordinary expectations -- much in the way quantum physics has results that are strongly counterintuitive. Fritjiof Capra has written extensively on the parallels and differences among western physics and other systems of thought in his book The Tao of Physics. A shifting flow of probabilities for futures lies at the heart of theories associated with the Yi Jing (or I Ching, the Book of Changes). Probabilities take the center of the stage away from things and people. A kind of "divine" volition sets the fundamental rules for the working out of probabilities in the universe, and human volitions are always a factor in the ways that humans can deal with the real world situations one encounters. If one's situation in life is surfing on a tsunami, one still has some range of choices even in that situation. One person might give up, and another person might choose to struggle and perhaps to survive. The Yi Jing mentality is much closer to the mentality of quantum physics than to that of classical physics, and also finds parallelism in voluntarist or Existentialist ideas of taking one's life as one's project. The followers of the philosopher Mo Zi (or "Mo Tzu" if you prefer the earlier Wade-Giles Romanization) made some early discoveries in optics and other areas of physics, ideas that were consonant with deterministic ideas, but the vine that produced this early fruit quickly withered and died.

Arguments against determinism

Argument from morality

Some critics of determinism argue that if people are assumed incapable of independent choice (free will) there can then be no rational basis for morality, and therefore some aspects of criminal and civil jurisprudence and legislation appear irrational and unjust. How, they ask, can one be punished for an involuntary action? In order to maintain the integrity of social institutions that rely in part upon holding people responsible for their actions, it becomes necessary in their eyes to deny determinism, at least as far as it applies to what we ordinarily call voluntary actions. Determinists have responded to this critique by distinguishing between normative and positive claims, arguing that statements of fact can and should be made independently of their consequences. Thus, even if determinism is inconsistent with the idea of a moral universe, that does not necessarily invalidate its conclusions. The presumed social utility of ideas of crime and justice should not be permitted, they argue, to override questions of truth. Contemporary U.S. philosopher Donald Davidson, among others, has argued that if people behaved in an uncaused way then one would describe their actions as insane, not as free. His view is consonant with the philosophical position advocated by Mencius that maintains that one's innate characteristics are the result of deterministic causation, that among these innate characteristics there exists a set of drives (analogous to other drives such as the sex drive) that are axiological or moral in nature, and that factors external to these moral drives can act to inhibit their operation. Inhibiting their action is tantamount to a loss of freedom, which is something one instinctively seeks to avoid. In Western terms, Mencius would say that human beings are born with a conscience, that they are acting in accord with their own natures and inclinations when they guide their actions by their consciences (along with their other drives such as hunger), and that we all experience a loss of freedom when we realize that we are being controlled either directly or indirectly by outside forces -- whether those forces are the lingering effects of conditioning or the imminent threat of death posed by a pistol held to one's head. In short, self-determination is freedom and other-determination is loss of freedom. Morality depends on the exercise of what one's nature has determined one to be and on being de facto responsible for all the consequences of what one decides to do. If one is free of external control one is an entelechy; to the extent that one becomes determined by external factors, one loses one's individual identity and becomes merely the extension of another entity.

Determinism, quantum mechanics and classical physics

Since the beginning of the 20th Century, quantum mechanics has revealed previously concealed aspects of events. Newtonian physics, taken in isolation rather than as an approximation to quantum mechanics, depicts a universe in which objects move in perfectly determinative ways. At human scale levels of interaction, Newtonian mechanics gives predictions that in all respects check out as completely perfectible, if not perfect in practice. The dependability of predictions turns out to be reliably improved by refinement in our knowledge of initial conditions. Poorly designed and fabricated guns and ammunition scatter their shots rather widely around the center of a target, and better guns produce tighter patterns. Absolute knowledge of the forces accelerating a bullet should produce absolutely reliable predictions of its path, or so we thought. Contrary to what Newtonian mechanics would predict, at atomic scales the Newtonian paths of objects can only be predicted in a probabilistic way. In double-slit experiments, electrons fired singly through a double-slit apparatus at a distant screen do not arrive at a single point, nor do they arrive in a scattered pattern analogous to bullets fired by a fixed gun at a distant target. Instead, they arrive in varying concentrations at widely separated points, and the distribution of their hits can be calculated reliably. In that sense the behavior of the electrons in this apparatus is deterministic, but there is no way to predict where in the resulting interference pattern an individual electron will make its contribution. On the macro scale it can matter very much whether a bullet arrives at a certain point at a certain time, as snipers and their victims are well aware; there are analogous quantum events that have macro- as well as quantum-level consequences. It is easy to contrive situations in which the arrival of an electron at a screen at a certain point and time would trigger one event and its arrival at another point would trigger an entirely different event. Whether such events are significant in nature may be open to question and empirical investigation. What is clear, however, is that proof of the occurrence of such random events would not address the broader claim determinists make regarding moral responsibility. If the difference in human choices is not due to predetermined occurrences, as determinists argue, but rather to the random movements of an electron, as some free will advocates argue, this would not seem to address the question of individual moral responsibility. Rather than an internally determined force leading the criminal to his crime, an entirely random, almost external, force determines his course. This would be akin to a stranger's hand moving one's hand to perform an action, or injecting one with a truth serum to provide accurate testimony. In neither case would traditional morality find the acted upon individual to be responsible for his actions. If probabilistically determined events do have an impact on the macro events such as whether a person who could be historically important dies in youth of a cancer caused by a random mutation, then the course of history is not determined from the dawn of time. But some authorities argue against the reality of such probabilistically determined events and/or argue that events on the atomic scale cannot influence the course of events on the macro scale. Some people have argued that in addition to the conditions humans can observe and the rules they can deduce there are hidden factors or hidden variables that determine absolutely in which order electrons reach the screen. They argue that the course of the universe is absolutely determined, but that humans are screened from knowledge of the determinative factors. So, they say, it only appears that things proceed in a merely probabilistically determinative way. Actually, they proceed in an absolutely determinative way. Although matters are still subject to some measure of dispute, quantum mechanics makes statistical predictions that would be violated if some underlying reason unknown to us existed. There have been a number of experiments to verify those predictions, and so far they do not appear to be violated although many physicists believe better experiments are needed to conclusively settle the question. See Bell test experiments. The well known experimental physicist Dr. Herbert P. Broida [http://texts.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=hb4q2nb2nd&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div00007&toc.depth=1&toc.id=] (1920-1978) taught his statistical mechanics class at The University of California at Santa Barbara that the probabilities arise in the transition from quantum to classical descriptions, rather than within quantum mechanics, as sometimes supposed. The time dependent Schrödinger equation gives the first time derivative of the quantum mechanical state. That is, it explicitly and uniquely predicts the development of the wave function with time. :Image:Schrödinger time dependent.jpg So quantum mechanics is deterministic, provided that one accepts the wave function itself as reality (rather than as probability of classical coordinates). This is true also in more advanced cases. Since we have no practical way of knowing the exact magnitudes, and especially the phases, in a full quantum mechanical description of the causes of an observable event, this turns out to be philosophically similar to the "hidden variable" doctrine. According to some, quantum mechanics is more strongly ordered than Classical Mechanics, because while Classical Mechanics is chaotic, quantum mechanics is not. For example, the classical problem of three bodies under a force such as gravity is not integrable, while the quantum mechanical three body problem is tractable and integrable, using the Faddeev Equations. That is the quantum mechanical problem can always be solved to a given accuracy with a computer of predetermined precision, while the classical problem may require arbitrarily high precision, depending on the details of the motion. This does not mean that quantum mechanics describes the world as more deterministic, unless one already considers the wave function to be the true reality. Even so, this does not get rid of the probabilities, because we can't do anything without using classical descriptions, but it assigns the probabilities to the classical approximation, rather than to the quantum reality.

First cause

Intrinsic to the debate concerning determinism is the issue of first cause. Deism, a philosophy articulated in the seventeenth century, holds that the universe has been deterministic since creation, but ascribes the creation to a metaphysical God or first cause outside of the chain of determinism. God may have begun the process, Deism argues, but God has not influenced its evolution. This perspective illustrates a puzzle underlying any conception of determinism: Assume: All events have causes, and their causes are all prior events. The picture this gives us is that Event A_N is preceded by A_N-1, which is preceded by A_N-2, and so forth. Under that assumption, two possibilities seem clear, and both of them question the validity of the original assumption: :(1) There is an event A₀ prior to which there was no other event that could serve as its cause. :(2) There is no event A₀ prior to which there was no other event, which means that we are presented with an infinite series of causally related events, which is itself an event, and yet there is no cause for this infinite series of events. Under this analysis the original assumption must have something wrong with it. It can be fixed by admitting one exception, a creation event (either the creation of the original event or events, or the creation of the infinite series of events) that is itself not a caused event in the sense of the word "caused" used in the formulation of the original assumption. Some agency, which many systems of thought call God, creates space, time, and the entities found in the universe by means of some process that is analogous to causation but is not causation as we know it. This solution to the original difficulty has led people to question whether there is any reason for there only being one divine quasi-causal act, whether there have not been a number of events that have occurred outside the ordinary sequence of events, events that may be called miracles. The extreme philosophical position in this line of development was held by Leibniz, who held in his monistic philosophy that all seemingly causal interactions between two (or more) entities, A <-> B, are actually interactions mediated by God, A<->God<->B. Immanuel Kant carried forth this idea of Leibniz in his idea of transcendental relations, and as a result had a profound effect on later philosophical attempts to sort these issues out. His most influential immediate successor, a strong critic whose ideas were yet strongly influenced by Kant, was Edmund Husserl, the developer of the school of philosophy called phenomenology. But the central concern of that school was to elucidate not physics but the grounding of information that physicists and others regard as empirical. In an indirect way, this train of investigation appears to have contributed much to the philosophy of science called logical positivism and particularly to the thought of members of the Vienna Circle, all of which have had much to say, at least indirectly, about ideas of determinism.

A multi-deterministic position

One approach to determinism is to argue that materialism does not present a correct understanding of the universe, not because it is wrong in its general picture of the determinate interactions that occur among material things, but because it ignores the souls of human beings. The soul is understood to be an autonomous agent of choice that has the power to control the body but not to be controlled by the body. Therefore it stands to the activities of the individual human body as does the creator of the universe to the universe. The creator of the universe put in motion a deterministic system of material entities that would, if left to themselves, carry out the chain of events determined by ordinary causation. But the creator also provided for souls that could exert a causal force analogous to the primordial causal force and alter outcomes in the physical universe via the acts of their bodies. No events in the physical universe are uncaused. Some are caused entirely by the original creative act and the way it plays itself out through time, and some are caused by the acts of created souls. But those created souls were not created by means of physical processes involving ordinary causation. They are another order of being entirely, gifted with the power to modify the original creation. The question of how these immaterial entities can act upon material entities is deeply involved in what is generally known as the mind-body problem. It is a problem which has as yet received no answer within the universe of discourse related to the physical universe.

Modern perspectives on determinism

Scientific determinism and first cause

Since the early twentieth century when astronomer Edwin Hubble first hypothesized that red shift shows the universe is expanding, prevailing scientific opinion has been that the universe started with a Big Bang, and therefore has a finite age. Different astrophysicists hold different views about precisely how the universe originated (Cosmogony), but a consistent viewpoint is that scientific determinism has held at the macroscopic level since the universe came into being.

Determinism and generative processes

In emergentist or generative philosophy of cognitive sciences and evolutionary psychology, free will is the generation of infinite behaviour from the interaction of finite-deterministic set of rules and parameters. Thus the unpredictability of the emerging behaviour from deterministic processes leads to a perception of free will, though free will as an ontological entity does not exist. As an illustration, the strategy board-games chess and Go have rigorous rules in which no information (such as cards' face-values) is hidden from either player and no random events (such as dice-rolling) happen within the game. Yet, chess and especially Go with its extremely simple deterministic rules, can still have an extremely large number of unpredictable moves. By analogy, emergentists or generativists suggest that the experience of free will emerges from the interaction of finite rules and deterministic parameters that generate infinite and unpredictable behaviour. Yet, if all these events were accounted for, and there were a known way to evaluate these events, the seemingly unpredictable behaviour would become predictable. Dynamical-evolutionary psychology, cellular automata and the generative sciences, model emergent processes of social behaviour on this philosophy, showing the experience of free will as essentially a gift of ignorance or as a product of incomplete information.

External links

- [http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/dhi.cgi?id=dv2-02 Dictionary of the history of Ideas:] Determinism in History
- [http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwIntroIndex.htm Philosopher Ted Honderich's Determinism web resource]
- [http://www.galilean-library.org/int13.html An Introduction to Free Will and Determinism] by Paul Newall, aimed at beginners.
- [http://www.determinism.com/essay.shtml Determinism] An Essay by Peter Gill
- [http://www.determinism.com/05042002.shtml Where's The Free Will?] An Exploration of This Elusive Concept by Gordon M. Orloff
- [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Causal Determinism]

References

- Albert Messiah, Quantum Mechanics, English translation by G. M. Temmer of Mécanique Quantique, 1966, John Wiley and Sons, vol. I, chapter IV, section III.
- A lecture to his statistical mechanics class at the University of California at Santa Barbara by Dr. Herbert P. Broida [http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/uchistory/archives_exhibits/in_memoriam/catalog/broida_herbert.html] (1920-1978) (a well known experimental physicist)
- "Physics and the Real World" by George F. R. Ellis, Physics Today, July, 2005 — This article seems to make the common error of thinking quantum probability goes on in nature; but its explanation, in terms of homeostasis, of why life is understandable in terms so different from those of microscopic physics is relevant to the distinction between physical and moral determinism. Category:Philosophy of science Category:Metaphysics Category:Randomness

Deterministic (disambiguation)

The term deterministic may refer to:
- a type of algorithm as discussed in computer science, see deterministic algorithm
- deterministic automaton
- deterministic computation
- deterministic finite state machine
- deterministic law
- deterministic system in mathematics
- deterministic system in philosophy
- the more general notion of determinism from philosophy, see determinism
- biological determinism
- causal determinism
- climatic determinism
- economic determinism
- environmental determinism
- genetic determinism
- hard determinism
- historical determinism
- linguistic determinism
- logical determinism
- scientific determinism
- social determinism
- soft determinism
- theological determinism
- determinism in the context of free will

Proposition

:This article documents the term proposition as it is used in logic. For other usages see proposition (disambiguation). Proposition is a term used in logic to describe the content of assertions. An assertion is content which may be taken as being true or false. Assertions are non-linguistic abstractions from the linguistic sentences that constitute an assertion. The nature of propositions is highly controversial amongst philosophers, many of whom are skeptical about the existence of propositions. Many logicians prefer to avoid use of the term proposition in favour of using sentences. Different sentences may thus express the same proposition when they both have the same meaning. For example, Snow is white (in English) and Schnee ist weiss (in German) are different sentences, but both say the same thing, namely, that snow is white. Hence they express the same proposition. Two different sentences in the same language may also express the same proposition. For example, Tiny crystals of frozen water precipitation are white is in English, but is said to be the same proposition by virtue of the definition of "snow". The usual convention for naming propositions is to create a noun phrase by prefixing the word that to any sentence which expresses the proposition in question. Thus, that Jones is a bachelor is the proposition expressed by the sentence "Jones is a bachelor". Two other logical uses bear note: In Aristotelian logic a proposition is a particular kind of sentence: one which affirms or denies a predicate of a subject. Aristotelian propositions take forms like All men are mortal and Socrates is a man. Propositional logic is so named because its atomic elements the expressions of complete propositions; they are often simply called propositions. The sentence A and B expresses both proposition A and proposition B. Both of these uses treat a proposition simply as a sentence (albeit of a certain kind). This usage is increasingly non-standard, and will not be used in the rest of this article. Often propositions are related to closed sentences, to distinguish them from what is expressed by an open sentence, or predicate. In this sense, propositions are statements that are either true or false. This conception of a proposition was supported by the philosophical school of logical positivism. Some philosophers, such as John Searle, hold that other kinds of speech or actions also assert propositions. Yes-no questions are an inquiry into a proposition's truth value. Traffic signs express propositions without using speech or written language. It is also possible to use a declarative sentence to express a proposition without asserting it, as when a teacher asks a student to comment on a quote; the quote is a proposition (that is, it has a meaning) but the teacher is not asserting it. The second paragraph of this article expressed the proposition that snow is white without asserting it (i.e. claiming snow is white). Propositions are usually spoken of as the content of beliefs and similar representative thoughts. They can also be the object of other attitudes like desire, preference, intention, inquiry, as "I desire that I have a new car," or "I wonder whether it will snow" (or, whether it is the case that it will snow). Desire, belief, and so on, are thus called propositional attitudes when they take this sort of content.

Treatment in logic

In Aristotelian logic a proposition is a particular kind of sentence, one which affirms or denies a predicate of a subject. Aristotelian propositions take forms like All men are mortal and Socrates is a man. Propositions are the elements in the domain of propositional logic. The sentence A and B expresses both proposition A and proposition B. Propositions are what is expressed by predicate logic. (x)Fx is said to express a proposition. However, neither F nor x is a proposition itself. One early goal of predicate logic was to try and capture the structure of propositions independently of the sentences that express them; both the German and English sentences may be translated as Ws. By virtue of the definition of the object s (snow) this may be transformed into the more precise formulation of the proposition given above. Whether this translation can really be done is a matter of philosophical debate. Modal operators like possibility or necessity have propositions as their subject (propositions are said to be in their scope). Modal logic has been similarly used in examining propositional attitudes like belief and desire, because the subjects of beliefs and desires are said to be propositions as well.

Objections to propositions

Many philosophers and linguists claim that the notion of a proposition is too vague or not useful. For them, this is just a misleading concept that should be removed from philosophy and semantics. W.V.O. Quine maintained that the indeterminacy of translation prevented any meaningful discussion of propositions, and that they should be discarded in favor of sentences.

External links

- Stanford Encyclopedia Philosophy
- [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/propositions-singular/ Singular Propositions]
- [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/propositions-structured/ Structured Propositions] Category: Law Category:Semantics Category: Logic Category: Philosophy of language ja:命題

Miracle

:For other uses, see Miracle (disambiguation). According to many religions, a miracle, derived from the old Latin word miraculum meaning 'something wonderful', is a striking interposition of divine intervention by God in the universe by which the operations of the ordinary course of Nature are overruled, suspended, or modified. One must keep in mind that in Judaism, Christianity, Islam and in other faiths people have substantially different definitions of the word miracle. Even within a specific religion there is often more than one usage of the term. Sometimes the term miracle may refer to the action of a supernatural being that is not a god. Then the term divine intervention refers specifically to the direct involvement of a deity.
Miracles as supernatural acts
supernatural since the 5th century.]] In this view, a miracle can be defined as a violation of laws of nature by God or some other supernatural being. To wit: # There are events that seem to be miracles. # The best explanation for these events is that they were performed by a supernatural being. # Therefore, there is probably a supernatural being (i.e., God) that performs what appear to be miracles. Many adherents of monotheistic religions assert that miracles, if established, are logical proof of the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and all-benevolent God. A number of criticisms of this point of view exist: #While the existence of miracles may imply the existence of a supernatural miracle worker, that supernatural miracle worker need not be an omnipotent, omniscient, and all-benevolent God; it could be any supernatural being. That is, it only proves that gods might exist, not that there is a monotheistic God. #Some argue that miracles, if established, are evidence that a perfect God does not exist, as such a being would not want to, or need to, violate His own laws of nature. Roman Catholic theologians do not accept this reasoning; they conclude that the miracles are from an omnipotent God, because they believe to have previously logically proven (through concepts like the prime mover) that there must be a single omnipotent, omniscient, God. #Laws of nature are inferred from empirical evidence. Thus if an accepted law of nature ever appeared to have been violated, it could simply be that the accepted law was an erroneous inference from an insufficient set of empirical observations, rather than a supernatural disruption of the true course of nature. #All claims of miracles are premature until such time as complete knowledge of all natural laws is held by all making and examining the claim and the miracle is demonstrated to be not natural. As all claims of natural laws are falsifiable and therefore complete knowledge is impossible, it is not now nor has it been nor ever will it be time to claim that an event has broken a natural law.
Miracles as described by the Bible
The description of most miracles in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and in the Christian New Testament are generally the same as the modern-day definition of the word: God intervenes in the laws of nature. A literal reading of the Biblical accounts shows that there are a number of ways this can occur: God may suspend or speed up the laws of nature to produce a supernatural occurrence; God can create matter out of nothing; God can breathe life into inanimate matter. The Bible does not explain details of how these miracles happen. The Bible also attributes many natural occurrences to God, such as the sun rising and setting, and rain falling. Today many Orthodox Jews, most Christians, and most Muslims adhere to this view of miracles. This view is generally rejected by non-Orthodox Jews, liberal Christians and Unitarian Universalists. Some events commonly understood to be miraculous may not be instances of the impossible. For instance, consider the parting of the Red Sea. This incident occurred when Moses and Israelites fled from bondage in Egypt, to begin their exodus to the promised land. The book of Exodus never says that the Reed Sea split in an immediate fashion, and the "waters [as] a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left" could be figurative. The text might rather be interpreted to say that God caused a strong wind to slowly drive the shallow waters to land overnight. In this scheme there is no claim that God pushed apart the sea as it is shown in many films; rather, the miracle would be that Israel crossed this precise place, at exactly the right time, when Moses lifted his staff, and that the pursuing Egyptian army then drowned when the wind stopped and the piled waters rushed back in. Most events later described as miracles are not labeled as such by the Bible; rather the text simply describes what happened. Often these narratives will attribute the cause of these events to God.
Miracles as events pre-planned by God
In rabbinic Judaism, most rabbis of the Talmud held that the laws of nature were inviolable. The idea of miracles that contravened the laws of nature were hard to accept; however, at the same time they affirmed the truth of the accounts in the Tanakh. Therefore some explained that miracles were in fact natural events that had been set up by God at the beginning of time. As summarised by Maimonides: :"...Our Sages... said.. as regards miracles:... that the miracles are to some extent also natural: for they say, when God created the Universe with its present physical properties, He made it part of these properties, that they should produce certain miracles at certain times, and the sign of a prophet consisted in the fact that God told him to declare when a certain thing will take place, but the thing itself was effected according to the fixed laws of Nature." (Guide for the Perplexed 2:29; but see below.) In this view, when the walls of Jericho fell, it was not because God directly brought them down. Rather, God planned that there would be an earthquake at that place and time, so that the city would fall to the Israelites. Instances where rabbinic writings say that God made miracles a part of creation include Midrash Genesis Rabbah 5:45; Midrash Exodus Rabbah 21:6; Midrash Koheleth; and Pirkei Avot 5:6.
Aristotelian and Neo-Aristotelian views of miracles
Aristotle rejected the idea that God could or would intervene in the order of the natural world. Jewish neo-Aristotelian philosophers, who are still influential today, include Maimonides, Samuel ben Judah ibn Tibbon, and Gersonides. Directly or indirectly, their views are still prevalent in much of the religious Jewish community.
Non-literal reinterpretations of miracles
These are held by both classical and modern thinkers. In Numbers 22 is the story of Balaam and the talking donkey. Many hold that for miracles such as this, one must either assert the literal truth of this story, or one must then reject the story as false. However, some Jewish commentators (e.g. Saadiah Gaon and Maimonides) hold that stories such as these were never meant to be taken literally in the first place. Rather, these stories should be understood as accounts of a prophetic experience, which are dreams or visions. Joseph H. Hertz, a 20th century Jewish biblical commentator, writes that these verses "depict the continuance on the subconscious plane of the mental and moral conflict in Balaam's soul; and the dream apparition and the speaking donkey is but a further warning to Balaam against being misled through avarice to violate God's command."
Miracles as a product of creative art and social acceptance
In this view, miracles do not really occur. Rather, they are the product of creative story tellers. They use them to embellish a hero or incident with a theological flavor. Using miracles in a story allow characters and situations to become bigger than life, and to stir the emotions of the listener more than the mundane and ordinary. In the ancient world miracles were taken for granted. To suggest that they did not occur would be admitting you were irrational.
Miracles as commonplace events
Littlewood's law states that individuals can expect miracles to happen to them, at the rate of about one per month. By its definition, seemingly miraculous events are actually commonplace.
Christian views of miracles
Early Christian writers of the first few centuries appear to take the biblical stories of miracles at face value. In addition, they report additional miracles that happened in later centuries. The purposes of miracles vary, but recurring themes are miracles done for the benefit of a person, such as physical healing, or raising from the dead; miracles done to prevent or discourage some evil from happening, such as Herod Agrippa being consumed with worms upon inviting people to worship him, or various martyrs being found unusually difficult to kill, such as not being touched by flames (Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego; or Polycarp of Smyrna); and oftentimes to increase the faith of those who witnessed or later heard of the miracles, whether the faith of current believers or unbelievers moved to convert to Christianity after witnessing a miracle. Miracles are central to most forms of Christian Theology, (especially Roman Catholic Theology); they are often the pillar upon which the reasonableness or truth of a religion is set to stand. Although most Catholic and certain Protestant theologians believe that the existence and certain limited properties of God can be proven philosophically and/or scientifically, these theologians explain that other elements of their beliefs have come from statements made by God either directly or through a person who proved that the statement was coming from God by performing a bona-fide miracle. (This assumes God wouldn't lie, something which is believe true by a philosophical argument.) This is seen by many theologians as the primary reason for Jesus to perform miracles, to prove that he was God so that humans would follow him. The miracles of Jesus were preformed in front of many people, not in private. He did them wherever he went, at all times. They were done for all types of people, not just Jews. The miracles benefited the people Jesus was with, not Jesus himself other than serving as proof as to who he was. C.S. Lewis, Norman Geisler, William Lane Craig, and Christians who engage in jurisprudence Christian apologetics have argued that miracles are reasonable and plausible. [http://www.comereason.org/phil_qstn/phi060.asp] [http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-t011.html] [http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/miracles.html][http://www.tektonics.org/gk/hume01.html][http://www.ses.edu/journal/articles/2.1Hoffman.pdf].
Types of Miracles
Often skeptics try to explain away miracles by natural processes. For example the crossing of the Red Sea can be explained by natural processes. However, what cannot be explained is the timing and placement. It happened at the right moment at the right place when and where the Israelites needed it to happen. This timing and placement is not achievable by chance and is what makes these events miracles. These unusual or natural events that occur at precise times and places are called nontranscendent miracles. Another type of miracles are ones that seem to defy physics all together. Modern physics, specifically dimensional physics, help to explain how events that seemingly defy reality can occur. These transcendent miracles include events such as the virgin conception of Christ and his bodily resurrection.
Catholic view of miracles
There have been a large number of Catholic Christians, philosophers, and clergy who have discussed a wide variety of ideas concerning the nature of miracles. These ideas vary from strict literal acceptance of the Biblical text, to neo-Aristotelian rationalist interpretations of miracles. In some Catholic views, a miracle is an unnatural occurrence that is brought about by divine intervention. In other Catholic views, anyone can perform a miracle if he or she adheres to certain conditions. The person must be clear of any sin, and long before that, one should be well aware of what a sin really is. One should live entirely by the dictates of Jesus, whom Christians view as part of the Godhead, and as the Messiah. Fasting, penance, atonement and prayer are considered to be crucial to the success of the miracle. Some Catholics hold that a Satan-assisted miracle is a temporary miracle that disguises itself as a genuine miracle. The miracle is more based on hysteria than on anything genuinely happening in the supernatural. The miracle does not last long and the situation is back to its previous state in a short time. In this case, the goal of the miracle is to attest false prophets and soothsayers. The Vatican records some 12,756+ events that it regards as miracles. Saints like St. Francis of Assisi and St. Anthony have been credited with hundreds of miracles during their lifetime and thousands after their death. Many Catholics believe that dead saints are still performing miracles, by interceding on behalf of the sinner before God.
Contemporary miracles
Contemporary persons who perform many acts that they claim are miracles include the Indian gurus Sathya Sai Baba and Swami Premananda. However some of the miracles range from sleight of hand to elaborate magic tricks. Various Christian groups also claim ongoing occurrence of miraculous events. While some miracles have been proven to be fraudulent (see Peter Popoff for an example) others (as the Paschal Fire in Jerusalem) have not proven susceptible to analysis. Some Christian groups are far more cautious about proclaiming apparent miracles genuine than others, although official sanction, or the lack thereof, rarely has much effect on popular belief.
See also

- A Course In Miracles says that a miracle is a "shift in perception".
- Miracles of Jesus
- Divine Providence In Jewish thought
- Jack Kerouac on miracles said, "Walking on water wasn't built in a day."
References

- Colin J. Humphreys, Miracles of Exodus. HarperSanFrancisco, 2003.
- Krista Bontrager, [http://www.reasons.org/resources/apologetics/its_a_miracle.shtml?main#_edn8 It’s a Miracle! Or, is it?]
- Eisen, Robert (1995). Gersonides on Providence, Covenant, and the Chosen People. State University of New York Press.
- Goodman, Lenn E. (1985). Rambam: Readings in the Philosophy of Moses Maimonides. Gee Bee Tee.
- Kellner, Menachem (1986). Dogma in Medieval Jewish Thought. Oxford University Press.
- Woodward, Kenneth L. (2000). The Book of Miracles. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-82393-4.
- Andrew Dickson White (1896 first edition. A classic work constantly reprinted) A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, See chapter 13, part 2, Growth of Legends of Healing: the life of Saint Francis Xavier as a typical example.
External links

- [http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/philosophy/staff/luck/index.html The Academic Study of Miracles]
- [http://www.backtoislam.com/?cat=68 God's Miracles, Islamic perspective]
- [http://skepdic.com/miracles.html Skeptics Dictionary on miracles]
- [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/miracles/ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry]
- [http://www.mukto-mona.com/Articles/yuktibaadi.htm An Indian Skeptic's explanation of miracles : By Yuktibaadi] compiled by Basava Premanand
- [http://www.mesora.org/RabbiFox/miracles-fox.html Torah Perspectives on Miracles]
- [http://www.daat.ac.il/daat/kitveyet/sde_chem/klien-1.htm The problem of miracles in Jewish Thought] (Hebrew)
- [http://uberkuh.com/node/322 Castles in the Air]
- [http://www.chabad.org/article.asp?AID=248167 Why Don't Miracles Happen Today? - A Jewish view on miracles nowdays] chabad.org Category:Ethics Category:Religious philosophy and doctrine Category:Charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity ja:奇跡 simple:Miracle

Randomness

:For other meanings, see Random (disambiguation). ---- The word random is used to express apparent lack of purpose, cause, or order. The term randomness is often used synonymously with a number of measurable statistical properties, such as lack of bias or correlation. Randomness has an important place in science and philosophy.

History

Mankind has been concerned with randomness since prehistoric times, mostly through divination (reading messages in random patterns) and gambling. The opposition between free will and determinism has been a divisive issue in philosophy and theology. Despite the prevalence of gambling in all times and cultures, for a long time there was little western inquiry into the subject, possibly due to the Church's disapproval of gambling and divination. Though Gerolamo Cardano and Galileo have written about games of chance, it was work by Blaise Pascal, Pierre de Fermat and Christiaan Huygens that led to what is today known as probability theory. Mathematicians focused at first on statistical randomness and considered block frequencies (that is, not only the frequencies of occurrences of individual elements, but also those of blocks of arbitrary length) as the measure of randomness, an approach that extended into the use of information entropy in information theory. In the early 1960s Gregory Chaitin, Andrey Kolmogorov and Ray Solomonoff introduced the notion of algorithmic randomness, in which the randomness of a sequence represents whether it is easy to compress.

Randomness versus unpredictability

Randomness should not be confused with practical unpredictability, which is a related idea in ordinary usage. Some mathematical systems, for example, could be seen as random; however these are considered unpredictable. This is due to sensitive dependence on initial conditions (see chaos theory). Many random phenomena may exhibit organized features at some levels. For example, while the average rate of increase in the human population is quite predictable, in the short term, the actual timing of individual births and deaths cannot be predicted. This small-scale randomness is found in almost all real-world systems. Ohm's law and the kinetic theory of gases are statistically reliable descriptions of the 'sum' (ie, the net result or integration) of vast numbers of individual micro events, each of which are random, and none of which are individually predictable. (Theoretically the micro-events of gases, for example, could be predicted if the exact position, velocity, atomic composition, angular momentum, and so on of each particle were known.) All we directly perceive is circuit noise and some bulk gas behaviors. It is important to note that chaotic systems are only unpredictable in practice due to their extreme dependence on initial conditions. Whether or not they are unpredictable in terms of computability theory, i.e.,given initial conditions exactly can the result be predicted, seems to be a subject of current research. At least in some disciplines computability theory the notion of randomness turns out to be identified with computational unpredictability. Unpredictability is required in some applications, such as the many uses of random numbers in cryptography. In other applications (e.g. modeling or simulation) statistical randomness is essential, but predictability is also required (for instance, when repeatedly running simulations or acceptance tests, it can be useful to be able to rerun the model with the exact same random input several times). Sensibly dealing with randomness is a hard problem in modern science, mathematics, psychology and philosophy. Merely defining it adequately, for the purposes of one discipline has proven quite difficult. Distinguishing between apparent randomness and actual randomness has been no easier. In addition, assuring unpredictability, especially against a well-motivated party (in cryptographic parlance, the "adversary"), has been harder still. Some philosophers have argued that there is no randomness in the universe, only unpredictability. Others find the distinction meaningless (see determinism for more information).

Misconceptions/logical fallacies

Popular perceptions of randomness are frequently wrong, based on logical fallacies. Following is an attempt to identify the source of such fallacies and correct the logical errors. For a more detailed discussion, see Gambler's Fallacy.

A number is "due"

This argument says that "since all numbers will eventually come up in a random selection, those that have not come up yet are 'due' and thus more likely to come up soon". This logic is only correct if applied to a system where numbers that come up are removed from the system, like if cards are drawn and then removed from the deck. It's true that once a jack is removed from the deck, the next draw is less likely to be a jack and more likely to be some other card. However, if the card drawn is returned to the deck, and the deck is reshuffled, there should be an equal chance of drawing a jack or any other card the next time. The same truth applies to any other case where nothing is removed from the system after each event.

A number is "cursed"

This argument is almost the reverse of the above, and says that numbers which have come up less often in the past will continue to come up less often in the future. A similar "number is 'blessed'" argument might be made saying that numbers which have come up more often in the past are likely to do so in the future. This logic is only valid if the roll is somehow biased and results don't have equal probabilities - for example, with a weighted die. If we know for certain that the roll is fair, then previous events have no influence over future events. Note that in nature, unexpected or uncertain events rarely occur with perfectly equal frequencies, so learning which events are likely to have higher probability by observing outcomes makes sense. What is fallacious is to apply this logic to systems which are specially designed so that all outcomes are equally likely - such as dice, roulette wheels, and so on.

Study of randomness

Many scientific fields are concerned with randomness :
- Algorithmic probability
- Chaos theory
- Game theory
- Information theory
- Pattern recognition
- Probability theory
- Quantum mechanics
- Statistics
- Statistical mechanics

In philosophy

Note that the bias that "everything has a purpose or cause" is actually implicit in the expression "apparent lack of purpose or cause". Humans are always looking for patterns in their experience, and the most basic pattern seems to be cause/effect. This appears to be deeply embedded in the human brain, and perhaps in other animals as well. For example, dogs and cats often have been reported to have apparently made a cause and effect connection that strikes us as amusing or peculiar. (See classical conditioning.) For instance there is a report of a dog who, after a visit to a vet whose clinic had tile floors of a particular kind, refused thereafter to go near such a tiled floor, whether or not it was at a vet's. It is because of this bias that the absence of a cause seems problematic. See causality. To solve this 'problem', random events are sometimes said to be caused by chance. Rather than solving the problem of randomness, this opens the gaping hole of defining chance. It is hard to avoid circularity by defining chance in terms of randomness. Randomness is also quite relevant in discussions of free will, and of a first cause.

In biology

The characteristics of an organism are traditionally said to be due to genetics and environment, but there are also random elements. For example, consider the characteristic of freckles on a person's skin. Their genetic inheritance controls their potential for developing freckles, with this gene linked to the gene for red hair, in this case. Their environment, such as solar exposure, determines how many of these potential freckles are actually present. The location of each individual freckle, however, can neither be predicted by genetics or solar exposure, so is caused by a random element. Whether this is truly random, or just follows a pattern too complex for us to understand, is not known. Note that this effect isn't limited to physical characteristics. Sexual orientation also appears to have a random element, for example. In identical twin studies, such twins are more likely to have the same sexual orientation than two randomly chosen individuals in any given population. This correlation is due solely to genetics, if they are adopted and raised in separate environments, and could be either genetics or environment if they are raised in the same environment. However, those identical twins raised in the same environment still do not have a 100% correlation in sexual orientation. In cases where there is a difference in sexual orientation between the two, this must be attributed to a random element. Again, we don't know if this is truly random, or just follows a pattern too complex for us to understand.

In the natural sciences

Traditionally, randomness takes on an operational meaning in natural science: something is apparently random if its cause cannot be determined or controlled. When an experiment is performed and all the control variables are fixed, the remaining variation is ascribed to uncontrolled (ie, 'random') influences. The assumption, again, is that if it were somehow possible to perfectly control all influences, the result of the experiment would be always the same. Therefore, for most of the history of science, randomness has been interpreted in one way or another as ignorance on the part of the observer. With the advent of quantum mechanics, however, it appears that the world might be irreducibly random. According to the standard interpretations of the theory, it is possible to set up an experiment with total control of all relevant parameters, which will still have a perfectly random outcome. Minority resistance to this idea takes the form of hidden variable theories in which the outcome of the experiment is determined by certain unobservable characteristics (hence the name "hidden variables"). The debate is over whether truly random events exist, or whether events perceived as random are simply following patterns too complex for our cognition ability. Many physical processes resulting from quantum-mechanical effects are, therefore, believed to be irreducibly random. The best-known example is the timing of radioactive decay events in radioactive substances. Deviations from randomness are often regarded by parapsychologists as evidence for the theories of parapsychology.

Source of randomness

In his book A New Kind of Science, Stephen Wolfram describes three mechanisms responsible of (apparently) random behaviour in systems : # Randomness coming from the environment (for example, brownian motion, but also hardware random number generators) # Randomness coming from the initial conditions. This aspect is studied by chaos theory, and is observed in systems whose behaviour is very sensitive to small variations in initial conditions (such as pachinko machines, dice ...). # Randomness intrinsically generated by the system. This is also called pseudorandomness, and is the kind used in pseudo-random number generators. There are many algorithms (based on arithmetics or cellular automaton) to generate pseudorandom numbers. The behaviour of the system can be determined by knowing the seed state and the algorithm used. This method is quicker than getting "true" randomness from the environment. In practice, these sources of randomness often act together.

In mathematics

The mathematical theory of probability arose from attempts to formulate mathematical descriptions of chance events, originally in the context of gambling but soon in connection with situations of interest in physics. Statistics is used to infer the underlying probability distribution of a collection of empirical observations. For the purposes of simulation it is necessary to have a large supply of random numbers, or means to generate them on demand. Algorithmic information theory studies, among other topics, what constitutes a random sequence. The central idea is that a string of bits is random if and only if it is shorter than any computer program that can produce that string (Chaitin-Kolmogorov randomness) - this basically means that random strings are those that cannot be compressed. Pioneers of this field include Andrey Kolmogorov, Ray Solomonoff, Gregory Chaitin, Anders Martin-Löf, and others.

In communication theory

Successful communication in the real world depends, at the limit, on understanding and successfully minimizing the deleterious effects of assorted interference sources, many of which are apparently random. Such noise imposes performance limits on any communications channel and it was the study of those limits which led Shannon to develop information theory, make fundamental contributions to communication theory, and establish a theoretical grounding for cryptography.

In finance

The Random walk hypothesis considers that asset prices in an organized market evolve at random.

Applications and use of randomness

"Unpredictable" random numbers were first investigated in the context of gambling, and many randomizing devices such as dice, shuffling playing cards, and roulette wheels, were first developed for use in gambling. Fairly produced random numbers are vital to electronic gambling and ways of creating them are sometimes regulated by governmental gaming commissions. "Random" numbers are also used for non-gambling purposes, both where their use is mathematically important, such as sampling for opinion polls, and in situations where "fairness" is approximated by randomization, such as selecting jurors and military draft lotteries. Computational solutions for some types of problems use random numbers, such as in the Monte Carlo method and in genetic algorithms.

Generating randomness

The many applications of randomness have led to many different methods for generating random data. These methods may vary as to how unpredictable or statistically random they are, and how quickly they can generate random numbers. Before the advent of computational random number generators, generating large amount of sufficiently random numbers (important in statistics) required a lot of work. Results would sometimes be collected and distributed as random number tables. :See also: Randomization

Quotations

- "God doesn't play dice with the universe." —Albert Einstein
- "Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random." —Donald E. Knuth
- "The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance." —Robert R. Coveyou, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 1969
- "That which is static and repetitive is boring. That which is dynamic and random is confusing. In between lies art." —John A. Locke
- "Perhaps our thinking exemplifies a selective system. First lots of random scattered ideas compete for survival. Then comes the selection for what works best —one idea dominates, and this is followed by its amplification. Perhaps the moral [...] is that you never learn anything unless you are willing to take a risk and tolerate a little randomness in your life." —Heinz Pagels, The dreams of reason, 1988

Books

- Randomness by Deborah J. Bennett. Harvard University Press, 1998. ISBN 0674107454
- The Art of Computer Programming. Vol. 2: Seminumerical Algorithms, 3rd ed. by Donald E. Knuth, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997. ISBN 0-201-89684-2
- Fooled by Randomness, 2nd Ed. by [http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/ Nassim Nicholas Taleb]. Thomson Texere, 2004. ISBN 158799190X

External links

- [http://wetzel.psych.rhodes.edu/random/intro.html Can you behave randomly?]
- [http://www.random.org Random.org]
- [http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/CDMTCS/chaitin/sciamer.html Chaitin: Randomness and Mathematical Proof]
- [http://www.fourmilab.ch/random/ A Pseudorandom Number Sequence Test Program (Public Domain)]
- [http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/dhi.cgi?id=dv1-46 Dictionary of the History of Ideas:] Chance
- [http://www.spaceandmotion.com/Philosophy-Free-Will-Determinism.htm Philosophy: Free Will vs. Determinism]
- [http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/page-1067b-text History of randomness definitions], in Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science. Category:Cryptography Category:Probability and statistics
- ja:ランダム

Indeterminism

Indeterminism is the philosophical belief that free will and determinism are incompatible, and that there are events which do not correspond with determinism. There are generally three types of indeterminists. One version holds that some events are uncaused, another holds that there are nondeterministically caused events, and the third holds that there are agent-caused events. Indeterminism is also the name of an industrial rock band from Cleveland, Ohio.

External links

- http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-theories/

Event

An event is something that takes place; an occurrence and arbitrary point in time. A significant occurrence or happening. A social gathering or activity. Individuals define an event's significance subjectively; people actively and retroactively compartmentalize their lives and history in terms of epochs delimited by events considered to be significant. Sciences:
- In physics (and in some kinds of philosophy), an event occurs at a point in time which can be distinguished because the state of the world changed. Something was different before and after the event. Physics also speaks of event horizons and simultaneity. In Physics and in Science in general, an event may be contrasted with a process, which occurs across intervals, not just at a point on a timeline. An action or relationship may be misunderstood when viewed as an event or single point of focus. Instead, it may help to view it as part of an integrated process.
- In special relativity (and general relativity), an event is a point in the spacetime continuum, i.e. it has a position in space and time.
- In experimental particle physics, an event refers to a set of elementary particle interactions recorded in a brief span of time.
- In probability a possible outcome of an experiment is called an elementary event, while a set of those (a subset of all) is called simply an event (see event (probability theory)).
- In biology one speaks of extinction events.
- In philosophy, one might want to distinguish facts from events, and then between physical events, mental events, and brain events. Weinberg's Law of Twins states that most of the time, no matter how much effort one expends, no event of any great significance will result.

Telecommunications

- In information processing, an event is a change in the properties received by an observer after being transmitted from an object.
- In computer science, an event is a software message that indicates something has happened. See event-driven programming. A number of protocols, such as MIDI, are also event-based. als:Ereignis ja:イベント

Compatibilism

Compatibilism, also known as "soft determinism" and most famously championed by Hume, is a theory which holds that free will and determinism are compatible. According to Hume, free will should not be understood as an absolute ability to have chosen differently under exactly the same inner and outer circumstances. Rather, it is a hypothetical ability to have chosen differently if one had been differently psychologically disposed by some different beliefs or desires. Hume also maintains that free acts are not uncaused (or mysteriously self-caused as Kant would have it) but caused by our choices as determined by our beliefs, desires, and by our characters. While a decision making process exists in Hume's determinism, this process is governed by a causal chain of events. For example, a person may make the decision to support Wikipedia, but that decision is determined by the conditions that existed prior to the decision being made. The opposing view, that free will cannot be consistent with determinism, is sometimes called incompatibilism. The pessimistic version, sometimes known as hard determinism, is that neither determinism nor indeterminism permit free will; Hume also considered free will inconsistent with indeterminism. One incompatibilist position holds that "free will" refers to genuine (e.g. absolute, ultimate) alternate possibilities for beliefs, desires or actions, and that such possibilities are absent from the compatibilist definitions. In the absence of such possibilities, the belief that free will confers responsibility is held to be false. However, one compatibilist counter-argument is that such absolute alternate possibilities could only have random causes, which would actually diminish responsibility. Some views are less easily categorized. The libertarian position is that our experience of free will implies the universe is not deterministic. Some advocates of this view consider it compatible with determinism in the "physical" universe, but believe "mental" events are different. A more concise description can be found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (see link below) :The thesis of determinism says that everything that happens is determined by antecedent conditions together with the laws of nature. Incompatibilism is the philosophical thesis that if determinism is true, then we don't have free will. The denial of incompatibilism is compatibilism; a compatibilist is someone who believes that the truth of determinism does not rule out the existence of free will. William James, the American pragmatist philosopher who coined the term "soft determinist" in an influential essay titled The Dilemma of Determinism, held that the importance of the issue of determinism is not one of personal responsibility, but one of hope. He believed that thorough-going determinism leads either to a bleak pessimism or to a degenerate subjectivism in moral judgment. The way to escape that dilemma is to allow a role of chance. He said that he would not insist upon the name "free will" as a synonym for the role chance plays in human actions, simply because he preferred to debate about things, not words.

Texts

- Daniel Dennett's Freedom Evolves.
- Molinism

External links

- [http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/V014SECT2 Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy On-line]
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
- [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-theories/ Non-deterministic Theories of Free Will]
- [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-arguments/ Arguments for Incompatibilism] Category:Comparisons Category:Philosophical theories

Fatalism

Fatalism is the view that human deliberation and actions are pointless and ineffectual in determining events, because whatever will be will be. One ancient argument, called the idle argument, went like this:
- If it is fated for you to recover from your illness, then you will recover whether you call a doctor or not.
- Likewise, if you are fated not to recover, you will not do so even if you call a doctor.
- So, calling a doctor makes no difference. Arguments like the above are usually rejected even by causal determinists, who may say that it may be determined that only a doctor can cure you. There are other examples that show clearly that human deliberation makes a big difference - a chess player who deliberates should usually be able to defeat one of equal strength who is only allowed one second per move. Determinism should therefore not be mistaken for fatalism. Although determinists would accept that the future is in some sense set, they accept human actions as factors that will cause the future to take the shape that it will - even though those human actions are themselves determined; if they had been different, the future would also be different. Arguments for fatalism, although rarely accepted, do have a bearing on discussions about the nature of truth. The logical argument for fatalism says that, if there will be a sea battle tomorrow, and someone says "there will be a sea battle tomorrow" then that sentence is true, even before the sea battle occurs. But given that the sentence is true, the sea battle could not fail to take place. This argument can be rejected by denying that predictions about the future have to be true or false when they are made - ie, rejecting bivalence for sentences about the future, though this is controversial. Related to fatalism is the debate over whether the alleged omniscience of God is compatible with free will, or whether omniscience implies predestination and therefore fatalism.

External link

- [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fatalism/ Fatalism], from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Category:Social philosophy Category:Metaphysics

Materialism

:For the prioritization of resources, see economic materialism. In philosophy, materialism is that form of physicalism which holds that the only thing that can truly be said to 'exist' is matter; that fundamentally, all things are composed of 'material' and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. Science uses a working assumption, sometimes known as methodological materialism, that observable events in nature are explained only by natural causes without assuming the existence or non-existence of the supernatural.

Overview

The first detailed description of the philosophy occurs in the scientific poem De Rerum Natura by Lucretius in his recounting of the mechanistic philosophy of Democritus. According to this view, all that exists is matter and void, and all phenomena are the result of different motions and conglomerations of base material particles called "atoms." De Rerum Natura provides remarkably insightful, mechanistic explanations for phenomena, like erosion, evaporation, wind, and sound, that would not become accepted for more than 1500 years. Famous principles like "nothing can come from nothing" and "nothing can touch body but body" first appeared in this most famous work of Lucretius. The view is perhaps best understood in its opposition to the doctrines of immaterial substance applied to the mind historically, and most famously by René Descartes. However, by itself materialism says nothing about how material substance should be characterized. In practice it is frequently assimilated to one variety of physicalism or another. Materialism is sometimes allied with the methodological principle of reductionism, according to which the objects or phenomena individuated at one level of description, if they are genuine, must be explicable in terms of the objects or phenomena at some other level of description -- typically, a more general level than the reduced one. Non-reductive materialism explicitly rejects this notion, however, taking the material constitution of all particulars to be consistent with the existence of real objects, properties, or phenomena not explicable in the terms canonically used for the basic material constituents. Jerry Fodor influentially argues this view, according to which empirical laws and explanations in "special sciences" like psychology or geology are invisible from the perspective of, say, basic physics. A vigorous literature has grown up around the relation between these views. "Materialism" has also frequently been understood to designate an entire scientific, "rationalistic" world view, particularly by religious thinkers opposed to it and also by Marxists. This arises from the use by Science of a working assumption, sometimes known as methodological materialism, that observable events in nature are explained only by natural causes without assuming the existence or non-existence of the supernatural. It typically contrasts with dualism, phenomenalism, idealism, and vitalism. For Marxism, materialism is central to the "materialist conception of history", which centers on the empirical world of actual human activity (practice, including labor) and institutions created, reproduced, or destroyed by that activity (see materialist conception of history). The definition of "matter" in modern philosophical materialism extends to all scientifically observable entities such as energy, forces, and the curvature of space. In this view, one might speak of the "material world".

Varieties of materialism

- Christian materialism
- Dialectical materialism (See also Marxist philosophy of nature.)
- Historical materialism (Marxist application of materialism to history)
- Eliminative materialism
- Emergent materialism
- Evolutionary materialism
- French materialism
- Reductive materialism / Reductionism

History of materialism

Ancient Greek philosophers like Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Epicurus, and even Aristotle prefigure later materialists. Later on, Thomas Hobbes and Pierre Gassendi represent the materialist tradition, in opposition to René Descartes' attempts to provide the natural sciences with dualist foundations. Later materialists included Denis Diderot and other French enlightenment thinkers, as well as Ludwig Feuerbach. Schopenhauer wrote that "...materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself." (The World as Will and Representation, II, Ch. 1) "Everything objective, extended, active, and hence everything material, is regarded by materialism as so solid a basis for its explanations that a reduction to this (especially if it should ultimately result in thrust and counter-thrust) can leave nothing to be desired. (But) [a]ll this is something that is given only very indirectly and conditionally, and is therefore only relatively present, for it has passed through the machinery and fabrication of the brain, and hence has entered the forms of time, space, and causality, by virtue of which it is first of all presented as extended in space and operating in time." (ibid., I, §7) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, turning the idealist dialectics of Georg Hegel "upside down", provided materialism with a view on processes of quantitative and qualitative change called dialectical materialism, and with a materialist account of the course of history, known as historical materialism. In recent years, Paul and Patricia Churchland have advocated an extreme form of materialism, eliminativist materialism, which holds that mental phenomena simply do not exist at all -- that talk of the mental reflects a totally spurious "folk psychology" that simply has no basis in fact, something like the way that folk science speaks of demon-caused illness.

References

- Churchland, Paul (1981). Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes. The Philosophy of Science. Boyd, Richard; P. Gasper; J. D. Trout. Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press.
- Flanagan, Owen (1991). The Science of the Mind. 2nd edition Cambridge Massachusetts, MIT Press.
- Fodor, J.A. (1974) Special Sciences, Synthese, Vol.28.
- Kim, J. (1994) Multiple Realization and the Metaphysics of Reduction, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 52.
- Lange, Friedrich A.,(1925) The History of Materialism. New York, Harcourt, Brace, & Co.
- Moser, P. K.; J. D. Trout, Ed. (1995) Contemporary Materialism: A Reader. New York, Routledge.
- Schopenhauer, Arthur, (1969) The World as Will and Representation. New York, Dover Publications, Inc.
- Vitzthum, Richard C. (1995) Materialism: An Affirmative History and Definition. Amhert, New York, Prometheus Books.
- Buchner, L. (1920). Force and Matter. New York, Peter Eckler Publishing CO.
- La Mettrie, Man The machine Category:Monism Category:Metaphysics Category:Philosophy of mind Category:Secularism ja:唯物論

Causality

:For the causal in mysticism, see causal realm. The philosophical concept of causality or causation refers to the set of all particular "causal" or "cause-and-effect" relations. A neutral definition is notoriously hard to provide since every aspect of causation has received substantial debate. Most generally, causation is a relationship that holds between events, objects, variables, or states of affairs. It is usually presumed that the cause chronologically precedes the effect. Finally, the existence of a causal relationship generally suggests that - all other things being equal - if the cause occurs the effect will as well (or at least the probability of the effect occurring will increase). Examples describing causal relationships:
- The cue ball colliding with the eight ball causes the eight ball to roll into the pocket.
- The presence of heat causes water to boil.
- The Moon's gravity causes the Earth's tides.
- A good blow to the arm causes a bruise.
- My pushing of the accelerator caused the car to go faster.

Causation in the history of philosophy

Aristotle

Aristotle suggested four types of cause for a thing that exists: Material, Efficient, Final and Formal. Take for example the causality involved in creating a silver chalice used in a religious ceremony (this example is from Martin Heidegger). The four causes of the event of its creation are:
- The material cause would be the silver used to fabricate the chalice; the raw matter required by the event.
- The formal cause would be the chalice design itself—the shape in which to form the silver; the design for the use of the raw matter.
- The efficient cause would be the silversmith who took the silver and formed it into shape of the chalice; the actual agent required in turning the raw matter into the desired form.
- The final cause would be the religious ceremony that required a silver chalice in the first place; the ultimate reason behind the event, what compels the agent to make the raw matter into its form. Note that cause here does not imply a temporal relation between the cause and the effect. See supervenience.

Hume

The philosopher who produced the most striking analysis of causality was David Hume. He asserted that it was impossible to know that certain laws of cause and effect always apply - no matter how many times one observes them occurring. Just because the sun has risen every day since the beginning of the Earth does not mean that it will rise again tomorrow. However, it is impossible to go about one's life without assuming such connections and the best that we can do is to maintain an open mind and never presume that we know any laws of causality for certain. This was used as an argument against metaphysics, ideology and attempts to find theories for everything. A.J. Ayer and Karl Popper both claimed that their respective principles of verification and falsifiability fitted Hume's ideas on causality.

Spinoza

From Samuel Shirley's "Baruch Spinoza; The Ethics: Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and Selected Letters"; ISBN: 0872201309; p. 25—Cause. : "The reader will find that Spinoza's "cause" is not quite what he is used to. It need not imply temporal succession: indeed, for Spinoza a cause is more the logical ground from which a consequent follows, . . . "For example, it "follows" from the nature of a triangle that its three angles are equal to two right angles. Hence, Spinoza occasionally couples the word "cause" with the term "reason" ("ratio"). :By the phrase efficient cause Spinoza means primarily the cause that produces the effect in question and is quite close to the notion of a sufficient condition. His theory of causality excludes the Aristotelian final cause, the goal or purpose of a thing or event. In his Appendix to Part I Spinoza explicitly claims that final causes are human fictions.

Causality, nihilism, and existentialism

Nihilists subscribe to a deterministic world-view in which the universe is nothing but a chain of meaningless events following one after another according to the law of cause and effect. According to this worldview there is no such thing as "free will", and therefore, no such thing as morality. Learning to bear the burden of a meaningless universe, and justify one's own existence, is the first step toward becoming the "Übermensch" (English: "overman") that Nietzsche speaks of extensively in his philosophical writings. Existentialists have suggested that people have the courage to accept that while no meaning has been designed in the universe, we each can provide a meaning for ourselves. In light of the difficulty philosophers have pointed out in establishing the validity of causal relations, it might seem that the clearest plausible example of causation we have left is our own ability to be the cause of events. If this is so, then our concept of causation would not prevent seeing ourselves as moral agents.

Necessary and sufficient causes

:A similar concept occurs in logic, for this see Necessary and sufficient conditions Causes are often distinguished into two types: necessary and sufficient. If x is a necessary cause of y, then y will only occur if preceded by x. In this case the presence of x does not ensure that y will occur, but the presence of y ensures that x must have occurred. On the other hand, sufficient causes guarantee the effect. So if x is a sufficient cause of y, the presence x guarantees y. However, other events may also cause y, and thus ys presence does not ensure the presence of x. J.L. Mackie argues that usual talk of "cause" in fact refers to INUS conditions (insufficient and non-redundant parts of unneccessary but sufficient causes). For example, consider the short circuit as a cause of the house burning down. Consider the collection of events, the short circuit, the presence of oxygen, the flammability of the house, and the absence of firefighters. Altogether these are unnecessary but sufficient to the house's destruction (since many other collection of events certainly could have destroyed the house). Within this collection, the short circuit is an insufficient but non-redundant part (since the short circuit by itself would not cause the fire, but the fire will not happen without it). So the short circuit is an INUS cause of the house burning down.
Causality contrasted with logical implication
Logical conditional statements are not statements of causality. Since logical conditional statements and causal statements are both presented using "If...then..." in English they are commonly confused; they are distinct, however. The standard conditional statement expresses a fact about the actual world, while causal statements imply something more. For example all of the following statements are true (interpreting "If... then..." as the logical conditional):
- If George Bush was president of the United States in 2004, then Germany is in Europe.
- If George Washington was president of the United States in 2004, then Germany is in Europe.
- If George Washington was president of the United States in 2004, then Germany is not in Europe. The first is true since both the antecedent and the consequent are true. The second and third are both true because the antecedent is false. Of course, none of these statements express a causal connection between the antecedent and consequent. Another sort of logical implication, known as counterfactual implication has a stronger connection with causality. However, not even all counterfactual statements count as examples of causality. Consider the following two statements:
- If A is a triangle, then A has three sides.
- If switch S is thrown, then bulb B will light. In the first case it would not be correct to say that A's being a triangle caused it to have three sides, since the relationship between triangularity and three-sidedness is one of definition. Nonetheless, even interpreted counterfactually, the first statement is true. Most sophisticated accounts of causation find some way to deal with this distinction.
Counterfactual theories of causation
The philosopher David Lewis notably suggested that all statements about causality can be understood as counterfactual statements (Lewis 1973, 1979, and 2000). So, for instance, the statement that John's smoking caused his premature death is equivalent to saying that had John not smoked he would not have prematurely died. (In addition, it need also be true that John did smoke and did prematurely die, although this requirement is not unique to Lewis' theory.) One problem Lewis' theory confronts is causal preemption. Suppose that John did smoke and did in fact die as a result of that smoking. However, there was a murderer who was bent on killing John, and would have killed him a second later had he not first died from smoking. Here we still want to say that smoking caused John's death. This presents a problem for Lewis' theory since, had John not smoked, he still would have died prematurely. Lewis himself discusses this example, and it has received substantial discussion. (cf. Bunzl 1980; Ganeri, Noordhof, and Ramachandran 1996; Paul 1998)
Probabilistic causation
Interpreting causation as a deterministic relation means that if A causes B, then A must always be followed by B. In this sense, war does not cause deaths, nor does smoking cause cancer. As a result, many turn to a notion of probabilistic causation. Informally, A probabilistically causes B iff As occurrence increases the probability of B. This is sometimes interpreted to reflect imperfect knowledge of a deterministic system but other times interpreted to mean that the causal system under study has an inherently chancy nature. The establishing of cause and effect, even with this relaxed reading, is notoriously difficult, expressed by the widely accepted statement "