Would it? For sure such a model would be NP-hard but I don’t understand how the halting problem would be relevant.
A model which can predict the exact quantum state of every particle in the universe at any given point in time? If it exists in this universe (the one it is simulating), then clearly it would have to simulate itself in the process, right? However, to simulate itself properly, the simulated version would ALSO have to be able to use its model just as accurately. But then the simulated version runs into the same problem. So then the simulated version has to simulate itself simulating itself simulating itself… Clearly such a thing can only exist if it does not interact with the universe that it is simulating (in which case it is useless as we cannot see the results), or if it compromises its accuracy (in which case it is no longer the uncertainty-banishing machine).
Furthermore even if such a machine WERE possible it wouldn’t mean diddly-squat for Praxeology. Praxeology holds in cases where there is no uncertainty just as well as it holds in cases where there is.
Haha, I guess I was envisioning a model that was much less ambitious.
Praxeology is value free thus determinism and praxeology aren’t at odds.
But ethics is.
Ethics requires free will. If there is no free will and every action is a consequence of a prior event as the law of causality suggests, then all the ends that are chosen are actually “determined” very early, maybe at the point of the big bang.
Still there is another side of the coin.
Let’s say we have free will.
To chose ends one must not only have free will but foresee the future. And to do this one still needs the law of causality because to foresee the future one must realize certain causal relations that keep repeating, thus becoming laws.
An apple must always fall down when someone shakes the tree thus one can foresee the apple falling down when he shakes the tree again in the future. If apple behaves randomly no one can choose an end regarding apples.
Perhaps ethics is incompatible with determinism only at face value: after all, ethics are included into one’s perception of things, and might well come to influence his preferences, hence his actions. As long as such an influence is finite and potentially quantifiable, than ethics are nothing but one more weel into the determinist chain of cause-and-effect.
Really nothing is at odds with determinism, besides some very crass statements like: this or that is probabilistic in nature. Nothing is probabilistic in nature, that’s just a simple approximation for us to use. War and Peace nailed this once and for all, I believe.
Ethics has a lot more going against it than just its incompatibility with determinism (if it is indeed incompatible). Not only are normative propositions incapable of being derived from factual statements and thus cannot be verified (if the axioms are brought into doubt), but they aren’t even falsifiable.
“Not only are normative propositions incapable of being derived from factual statements and thus cannot be verified (if the axioms are brought into doubt), but they aren’t even falsifiable.”
If there is free will, “ought” can be derived from “is”.
I don’t know what you mean by falsification in this context.
“Perhaps ethics is incompatible with determinism only at face value: after all, ethics are included into one’s perception of things, and might well come to influence his preferences, hence his actions. As long as such an influence is finite and potentially quantifiable, than ethics are nothing but one more weel into the determinist chain of cause-and-effect.”
Ethics is more than some influence. It presupposes free will. Without free will there is no meaning of “ought”. If determinism is true not only free will an illusion brought about by ignorance but ethics is an illusion as well.
I agree that Ethics, at face-value, does presuppose Free Will, and the lack thereof would seem to invalidate ethics entirely. But I beg to differ. After all, why mustn’t’ we se ethics as just a body of ideas that guides a person in his decisions, altering his preferences? Whatever Ethics is theoretically build upon, on practical terms what it doest is that it changes people’s preferences, and thus their action. I believe that this influence is fully consistent with cause-and-effect, and hence can, theoretically be fully predicted. After all, if ethics was practically based upon free will, we wouldn’t even be able to conceive it as an idea.
Does it even matter whether we have free will or not? If there’s absolutely no way to distinguish between the two, it hardly seems worth fussing over.
I’d also have thought Bayes’s theorem would have put an end to the debates over whether the world is “deterministic” or not, but what can you do…
When logic fails to help, probability is the foul science one resorts to in order to avoid consulting magicians.
“Does it even matter whether we have free will or not? If there’s absolutely no way to distinguish between the two, it hardly seems worth fussing over.”
I actually agree. Whether there is free will or not one must and actually does act as if there is free will.
This is like, not being sure of the fact that what you are experiencing is just a dream or not. We may be the imagination of another being but we must act as if we are not. Because if you are a skeptic, you should be skeptical that you may actually be not a part of a dream. That is why people do whatever they do, try to increase the probability of their survival even in their dreams.
"I agree that Ethics, at face-value, does presuppose Free Will, and the lack thereof would seem to invalidate ethics entirely. But I beg to differ. After all, why mustn’t’ we se ethics as just a body of ideas that guides a person in his decisions, altering his preferences? "
You are changing the meaning of ethics.
I don’t care about the meaning of ethics. I only care about its practical consequences.
if you don’t know the meaning of ethics then it is impossible to know of an ethical consequence or what you call “practical consequence” that has to do with ethics.
You cannot derive a normative statement from a positive statement, free will or no.
Falsification meaning normative propositions such as ‘you should not kill’ can neither be verified or falsified, under any conditions. Morality relies on intuition and revelation, which are on shaky epistemological ground.
It matters to people trying to eliminate muddled reasoning and mysticism from our understanding of the universe.
How is Bayesian probability even relevant to the question of determinism?
I said “don’t care”, not “don’t know”.
Please, allow me to rephrase: notwithstanding what that body of normative knowledge that we consider Ethics presupposes to be, notwithstanding the assumptions it makes, its internal laws, what it exponents hold it to be, notwithstanding this all, Ethics has a palpable result on human action, that is, it affects people’s preferences. Thus, although the concept of Free Will is essential to Formal Ethics, if Free Will didn’t really exist but still people believed that it did, thus stuck to ethics, than this body of knowledge although false prima facie, would still exert its practical influence, we might say that, in such cases when an entity’s practical value can be divorced form its formal existence, that the entity has no formal meaning at all, and is meaningful only in its practical consequences.
On the other hand, the value of math can’t be said to be just practical above such lines, for if 2+2 stopped being equal to 4 (a scenario we can’t even imagine), than mathematics could no longer be used practically, regardless of whether people knew or not that 2+2 no longer equaled 4.
First, it seems you are begging the question, assuming to begin with that normative propositions cannot be factual statements.
Secondly, even if there is a distinction, how can it be proven that the latter cannot be derived from the former? (Also, necessary (logical) truths can be deduced without any premises.)
Thirdly, what about inductive reasoning?
Fourthly, there are, in fact, normative propositions that can (and have been) proven to be false (thus clearly falsifiable): e.g., by pointing out a self-contradiction or showing that it relies on a vacuous concept, or is inconsistent with the nature of things.
P(A|B) * P(B) = P(B|A) * P(A)
There it is. That is what put an end to the debates over determinism?