1&2) Hydroden and Oxygen don't reliably react to create water. They reach a kind of balance of forwards and backwards reactions with a ratio in line with the probability.
Every chemical equation is really a ratio
2h2 + 02 => 2 H20
I'm failing to look up the actual ratio because the internet insists on telling me the ration of hydrogen to oxygen instead, but natural water is maybe 99.99996% h20, and 0.00002% Oxygen and 0.00002% Hydrogen, and that's stable. Water is decomposing into Hydrogen and Oxygen at the same rate as Hydrogen and Oxygen are reacting to form water. Furthermore, the exact ratios are changing from moment to moment - maybe this second, it's 0.0000199996% Hydrogen, and next moment it's 0.00002000007% Hydrogen.
Determinism emerges from many probabalistic molecule reactions, but the results match the probabilities very much more closely than the randomness with which the individual molecules react. Hydrogen and Oxygen very much make water, at least if it is hot enough.
For that matter, at a much lower ration, Hydrogen and Oxygen really do make Carbon dioxide, as multiple hydrogen atoms fuse to make carbon. That ratio is probably so small it's never happened on earth (kind of a guess, I'm not doing that much maths for a forum post, I don't even know if I could), but the probability of a carbon dioxide atom being emitted by Hydrogen and Oxygen is not zero.
This is an example of at least two things:
1) An understanding being "good enough". It's useful, it may not be the whole story, but it does tell you roughly what will happen. The whole story is usually much wider and more interesting, and sometimes feels unreasonable.
2) Lots of probability events "summing up" to something very deterministic. If you run 1,000,000 fair coin tosses, the result will be very close to 50% of them are heads. But it's unlikely to be exactly 50%, it's more likely to be off by a few. The wider story does have some bearing on the truth.
3) Does deterministic free will meet the test of simplicity?
Free will as an idea has concrete ideas associated with it.
Was it my fault that I crashed my car? Could I have chosen otherwise? Perhaps it was just inexperience?
Do I reach my decisions myself? Perhaps the media environment plays a significant role? I tend to think we're usually trying to please someone with our actions, often not ourselves as such, but to get an advantage in a relationship. We aren't selfish but we are, very selfish. We want to please someone else because that benefits us. Which might explain our discussions about free will - we're constantly doing everything for someone else, no wonder we don't feel free.
Thanks for all that background! I was looking up last night the ratio of carbon to oxygen. And the fact that it’s not an identical ratio does fall in line with the quantum description Carlo Rovelli gave.
He said, "The apparent determinism of the macroscopic world is due only to the fact that the microscopic randomness cancels out on average, leaving only fluctuations too minute for us to perceive in everyday."
But really here, my purpose was to take the notion of deterministic free will and put it into a logical worldview in order to see if its really holds water. Essentially, the idea of determinism is a concept borrowed from physics. So let’s see how it would play out in actual physics.
My underlying premise - how we can use the chance of behaviors on the quantum level to abstract a truth about “free will" is leading to Part 2 and Part 3. (Which I wrote all together into one 10,000 word essay. But for the purposes of readability I split them into 2,000 word parts.)
While I know what you’re trying to get at with the water analogy, I feel like it’s a faulty analogy.
The reason two hydrogens and one oxygen don’t form sulphuric acid or carbon dioxide, is because there is no sulphur or carbon in the reactants. The element is determined by the number of protons in the nucleus. One element cannot change into another element unless it is undergoing nuclear decay or nuclear fusion.
The scenario of two hydrogens and one oxygen forming carbon dioxide would break the laws of physics.
Saying atoms are deterministic because they can’t randomly become another element, is like saying free will is deterministic because we can’t jump to Jupiter.
It is undeniable that we are ultimately limited by the laws of nature. I could decide tomorrow that I’ll be the world’s first trillionaire, but we all know that’s not going to happen.
The universe appears to be both deterministic and non-deterministic at the same time. It depends on what you’re measuring.
The *reason* for each causal relationship isn't the point. Yes, each causal relationship has distinction. That's what makes it causal.
But my example was given for the purposes of discussing that each human decision if it was truly causal, would also have its own distinction.
So if each movement we took was a causal effect of something else, then we would have to find a unique cause for the trillions of unique effects in our daily existence.
1&2) Hydroden and Oxygen don't reliably react to create water. They reach a kind of balance of forwards and backwards reactions with a ratio in line with the probability.
Every chemical equation is really a ratio
2h2 + 02 => 2 H20
I'm failing to look up the actual ratio because the internet insists on telling me the ration of hydrogen to oxygen instead, but natural water is maybe 99.99996% h20, and 0.00002% Oxygen and 0.00002% Hydrogen, and that's stable. Water is decomposing into Hydrogen and Oxygen at the same rate as Hydrogen and Oxygen are reacting to form water. Furthermore, the exact ratios are changing from moment to moment - maybe this second, it's 0.0000199996% Hydrogen, and next moment it's 0.00002000007% Hydrogen.
Determinism emerges from many probabalistic molecule reactions, but the results match the probabilities very much more closely than the randomness with which the individual molecules react. Hydrogen and Oxygen very much make water, at least if it is hot enough.
For that matter, at a much lower ration, Hydrogen and Oxygen really do make Carbon dioxide, as multiple hydrogen atoms fuse to make carbon. That ratio is probably so small it's never happened on earth (kind of a guess, I'm not doing that much maths for a forum post, I don't even know if I could), but the probability of a carbon dioxide atom being emitted by Hydrogen and Oxygen is not zero.
This is an example of at least two things:
1) An understanding being "good enough". It's useful, it may not be the whole story, but it does tell you roughly what will happen. The whole story is usually much wider and more interesting, and sometimes feels unreasonable.
2) Lots of probability events "summing up" to something very deterministic. If you run 1,000,000 fair coin tosses, the result will be very close to 50% of them are heads. But it's unlikely to be exactly 50%, it's more likely to be off by a few. The wider story does have some bearing on the truth.
3) Does deterministic free will meet the test of simplicity?
Free will as an idea has concrete ideas associated with it.
Was it my fault that I crashed my car? Could I have chosen otherwise? Perhaps it was just inexperience?
Do I reach my decisions myself? Perhaps the media environment plays a significant role? I tend to think we're usually trying to please someone with our actions, often not ourselves as such, but to get an advantage in a relationship. We aren't selfish but we are, very selfish. We want to please someone else because that benefits us. Which might explain our discussions about free will - we're constantly doing everything for someone else, no wonder we don't feel free.
Thanks for all that background! I was looking up last night the ratio of carbon to oxygen. And the fact that it’s not an identical ratio does fall in line with the quantum description Carlo Rovelli gave.
He said, "The apparent determinism of the macroscopic world is due only to the fact that the microscopic randomness cancels out on average, leaving only fluctuations too minute for us to perceive in everyday."
But really here, my purpose was to take the notion of deterministic free will and put it into a logical worldview in order to see if its really holds water. Essentially, the idea of determinism is a concept borrowed from physics. So let’s see how it would play out in actual physics.
My underlying premise - how we can use the chance of behaviors on the quantum level to abstract a truth about “free will" is leading to Part 2 and Part 3. (Which I wrote all together into one 10,000 word essay. But for the purposes of readability I split them into 2,000 word parts.)
While I know what you’re trying to get at with the water analogy, I feel like it’s a faulty analogy.
The reason two hydrogens and one oxygen don’t form sulphuric acid or carbon dioxide, is because there is no sulphur or carbon in the reactants. The element is determined by the number of protons in the nucleus. One element cannot change into another element unless it is undergoing nuclear decay or nuclear fusion.
The scenario of two hydrogens and one oxygen forming carbon dioxide would break the laws of physics.
Saying atoms are deterministic because they can’t randomly become another element, is like saying free will is deterministic because we can’t jump to Jupiter.
It is undeniable that we are ultimately limited by the laws of nature. I could decide tomorrow that I’ll be the world’s first trillionaire, but we all know that’s not going to happen.
The universe appears to be both deterministic and non-deterministic at the same time. It depends on what you’re measuring.
I don't quite understand what you're saying.
The *reason* for each causal relationship isn't the point. Yes, each causal relationship has distinction. That's what makes it causal.
But my example was given for the purposes of discussing that each human decision if it was truly causal, would also have its own distinction.
So if each movement we took was a causal effect of something else, then we would have to find a unique cause for the trillions of unique effects in our daily existence.
I got distracted by the fact that you described a phenomenon that’s physically impossible.
It doesn’t matter if atoms are deterministic or not. The chances of hydrogen and oxygen atoms forming carbon dioxide is 0%.
So even if certain phenomena weren’t deterministic, we can still rule out the impossible.