RCSaunders wrote: ↑Fri Jun 18, 2021 9:46 pm
One very bad mistake being made in this entire discussion is about the nature of, "cause," and what determinism means.
The notion of "cause," was totally corrupted by Hume and the entire intellectual world has since swallowed his misrepresentation of cause, now almost universally described as, "cause and effect," meaning, "the same cause (event) always produces the same effect (event)."
Whatever it's called, in science, "cause," is never identified in those terms because scientific cause is not, "event," causation, but, "entity," causation. The wrong description of cause is, "event A will always result in effect B," or conversely, "effect B is always caused by event A." Three fundamental things are wrong with that view:
1. In the entire history of the word there have never been two identical events as either, "causes," or, "effects."
2. No event in history is isolated and every event is contingent on an infinite number of contributing variables.
3. Every event is the action of entities. What any entity does, how it behaves at any moment is determined by its own nature (the kind of entity it is) and it's immediate context (it's environment or it's relationship to all other entities).
The real meaning of the word, "
cause," in the physical sciences, relative to events, is, "
the explanation for." It is based on the principle that no physical event happens spontaneously, miraculously, by magic or without an explanation that is not itself physical. It does no mean the simple-minded sixth-grade notion of, "cause and effect."
The correct description of physical cause is based on the fact every entity has a specific nature that determines how it will behave relative to all other entities, which may be stated, "the same entity in the same context will always behave in the same way." Obviously, no two events are identical because there is never a single cause A that results in event B. Same cause same event is simply nonsense. For every event there are an infinite number of variables, any of which being different would result in a different event. In actual practice, very similar entities may be in very similar contexts, similar enough to satisfy any engineering requirements, but none will ever be identical.
What that means for determinism is that every physical event can only ever be what it is, because it is determined by what actually is, which is the nature of every entity which is part of that event. For every entity in every event is what it is and will behave as it does in that context and could never behave in any other way in that context. Every physical event is absolutely determined.
Statistics and probability are totally irrelevant to physical causation. There is no such thing as an indeterminate physical state, and every event that actually occurs had a 100% probability of happening.
Any event that actually occurs had a one hundred percent possibility of occurring, but no statistical method could ever have predicted it.