Again, the idea isn't that we're talking about equiprobable randomness. "Every time you run the model, you are likely to get different results"--no, that's not at all necessarily the case. If either B or C can follow A, but there's a 99.9% chance of C occurring rather than B, then if you run an experiment thousands of times, you might wind up with B a handful of times instead of C.henry quirk wrote: ↑Thu Jun 17, 2021 4:54 pmokay...Terrapin Station wrote: ↑Thu Jun 17, 2021 2:39 pmIt's more specific than just cause and effect talk.
If either B or C can occur after A, where B has a 10% chance of occurring and C has a 90% chance of occurring, but they ONLY occur after A, then we could say that A caused the effect B or C--because B or C wouldn't have occurred without A obtaining, but that's a different idea than determinism. So it's important to understand the difference.
Understanding the above difference, that's not what I'm saying. But it's a standard view in the sciences that some phenomena are probabilistic, and not just because of epistemic limitations. The view is that they're inherently (or ontologically in philosophy-talk) probabilistic. For example, this is an upshot of Bell's Theorem, which is considered proved. (Which is not to say that I agree with that, but it's the standard view.)**I agree. What I don't agree with is your assertion science folks deny cause and effect,
Yes, it is necessary. There's groundwork that needs to be done, which is obvious in that I have to keep repeating the same stuff over and over. If we don't understand the prerequisites, we can't understand the material built upon them. So first we have to understand what determinism even is, and then we have to sort out whether the sciences currently forward a deterministic view or not.Are we ever gonna get to your notion of free will? While I appreciate all the schoolin' (I understand you're just bein' thorough), it's not necessary.
A deterministic model does not include elements of randomness. ... A probabilistic model includes elements of randomness. Every time you run the model, you are likely to get different results, even with the same initial conditions. (swiped from some site)
...I concede the point
Free will?
Just in case you're not familiar with this, but you don't want to ask, equiprobable randomness is this:
If there are two possibilities, then there's a 50% chance of one occurring and a 50% chance of the other.
If there are three possibilities, then there's a 33.3...% chance of each occurring.
If there are four possibilities, then there's a 25% chance of each occurring.
And so on.
In situations where randomness is NOT equiprobable, then if there are two possibilities, there might be a 99.9% chance of one option occurring and only a 0.01% chance of the other. Or it may be 90%/10%, or whatever--anything other than 50-50.
And so on.
So, the next step is that if we're talking about occurrences that are not determined in the sense of there being only one possible outcome (but we're also not talking about equiprobable occurences either), then something--whether a brute fact or something else, is biasing one possibility over the other.
The third step is that it could be the case that those non-equiprobable percentages can change.
Are you following that so far? (We're still just doing preliminary conceptual work. None of this is specifically about free will yet.)