Indeterminism
I do my best to keep abreast of what’s happening in the world of Science. I guess it is part of that undying need somewhere within my psyche to understand everything that’s going on around me. Hence my studies in philosophy.
Thinking about things lately I’m finding that I still have a big hole in my understanding of modern physics: indeterminism. It isn’t that I don’t have any actual grasp on what it is all about. The easiest example given is that of radioactive decay, and honestly it makes a lot of sense. That out of any mass of decaying material about half of it will decay in a given period of time known as its half life is easy enough for me to understand. What I’m having issues with is thinking of one particular atom in an unstable state that is going to decay. I want to know of something in particular that actually causes the decay to happen. I know that it isn’t really there, but I still don’t quite grok how that is the case.
I know why people have a difficulty with it in general. We see ourselves as agents of determinism: we perform actions that are the causes to effects we see all of the time. If something happens that isn’t expected we understand that we simply have to come upon a better understanding of the cause and effect relationship involved. Even if we understand the probabilistic nature of things underneath the hood of the Universe, our regular interaction with the world is deterministic. We do things, we expect results. Cause and effect.
So all said I understand that it is a hole in my thinking, but it drives me crazy knowing that it is there and not being particularly able to do anything about it. I know there’s a solution there, but I haven’t found the trigger in my head to put it all together. Hopefully my good friend John, the physicist, stops by town before too long to lend me a hand with that one. His recommendation to me to read the book on Quantum Electrodynamics (or was that Thermodynamics?) really helped me in understanding the experimental evidence behind quantum mechanics. I’ll have to check my shelf when I get home to get a good link for the book for anyone interested in it. 
armchairguy said,
May 1st, 2007 at 11:08 am
Nihil:
I think you may have stumbled on what I think is a flaw in commonly accepted definitions of determinism. Determinism is usually made up to be a product of causality. But I think that, in truth, causality (as we usually understand it) is meaningless in a deterministic universe. Causes and effects do not exist except in our minds. This has two aspects to it.
First, the so-called laws of physics are simply concise descriptions of how the universe works; they do not “cause” anything to happen. They are just commonly observed, concisely describable patterns. Newton’s laws do not produce any acceleration; they simply help us insignificant humans understand how acceleration results when a force is applied.
Second, and more to the point, nothing causes anything else in a deterministic universe. If the state of the entire universe is pre-determined at every point of time, what is the meaning of cause? When you say “A is a cause of B”, you usually mean “If A hadn’t occurred, all other things being the same, then B would not have occurred”. But in a deterministic universe, “If A hadn’t occurred” is meaningless. A did occur, and by determinism, nothing else could have happened. Speaking of A not having occurred is meaningless. Thus we can’t make causal statements of the sort we are accustomed to.
Rather, we need to adjust our thinking about causality. When we say “A is a cause of B”, what we should be thinking is “It is fairly easy for us humans to find a sequence of laws (concise descriptions of frequently occurring phenomena) connecting A to B”.
Thus, the atom in an unstable state and may decay, but not be*cause* of anything. We are searching for a common pattern (a law) into which the unstable atom, and its decay, fall. The fact that we are unable to locate such a pattern is what is bothering you. The reason for our inability to locate such a pattern is that there are as many patterns in which such an atom decays as those in which it does not decay.