Monday, March 4, 2013

Determinism, Dear Augustine

A brief aside on broader concepts.

Reading about Augustine, his seminal philosophy is the idea of predestination, from start to finish what is going to happen to you is already laid out in stone, and well, you're in or you aint. It is a little disturbing a concept to believe that free will doesn't matter for beans in Augustine's world, However there is a physics concept that goes directly hand in hand with this idea, it's known as determinism (it's very related to the idea of causality).

The idea behind determinism is simple, if you know the rules of how things work with absolute certainty, and you know the initial conditions perfectly, it is entirely possible to predict mathematically the whole of the unfolding scenario. Think of it this way, we know the rules for pool balls colliding, so if i set up a pool table (ideal and friction-less of course, because this is physics and it cant be too real) and rolled one of the balls at a group, you could using the rules of how pool balls move and collide to perfectly mathematically predict where all the pools would go and would be at any point in time. Given enough paper, time, and boredom, you could actually plot in advance how this would all work out. However interpreting this further, the whole system is completely determined (hence the name determinism) before hand, there can be no deviations and under these conditions this is the only possible way it can go down, no deviations. In other words the future is set and solid.This is very similar to Augustine's idea's since he feels he know how humans started, and roughly the rules of god, and thinks the future is set and solid, you are either in or you aren't and that's already been done for you.

For the most part determinism is a pretty good model for the universe. If you knew roughly the laws of special relativity, newtons laws, basic mechanics, had a good idea of the velocities and accelerations of the stars and galaxies (and dust and rocks and atoms, whatever), and had a computer the approximate size of Manhattan run on magic fairy dust, you could sit and run the 14 billion years of cosmological history backwards and show us at any point what was going on.

The problem with this kind of view is that it simply doesn't work at small scales. At a small enough scale perfect Newtonian determinism breaks down. We can't tell you with absolute certainty what's going to  be where. Repeated measurements for exactly the same experiment yield a probability curve, not a discrete answer. Plainly speaking, the best i can do to tell you where an electron is going to end up at any second in time, is a really good guess, and a couple of percent-chances. In case that sounds like crap and totally counter-intuitive (welcome to quantum physics by the way), this probability theory of quantum mechanics is maybe the best proven theory of science around (partially because you only have to prove probabilities  not discrete answers).

So what? Well what happens if determinism breaks down? well that means that at some scale we can't predict with absolute certainty what is going to happen to you (as I understand it a favorite grad student problem is to predict the probability based on quantum theory that you find that you wake up on mars one day, and the probability exists its just so ludicrously tiny in scope that  its hard to express just how laughable it is). Furthermore, suddenly Augustine takes a scientific dive, at some scale, predestination works on the idea of determinism, Augustine knew the rules and the starting conditions of your soul, and he could tell you whether or not you should learn some harp chords, but determinism just isn't a set facet of reality, it only works at certain scales, with certain things as a nice approximation.

So on philosophical-scientific grounds, Augustine's dependence on determinism for his ideas of predestination simply is a logical fallacy, and at least scientifically he can't be right.

"light" reading on the concepts of determinism and causality:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality_(physics)
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism#Quantum_mechanics_and_classical_physics

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