(10-28-2013, 06:56 PM)kandrathe Wrote: First, I believe we have thousands of years of understanding of linear systems, and linear equations. Only a slim number of mathematicians work in non-linear systems. It's really hard. Real work in non-linear mathematics only started in the past hundred years or so, namely work by Euler, Lagrange, and Poincaré. Then only recently with work on chaos, by people like Lorenz.
True, except for the bit about only a slim number of mathematicians working on non-linear systems. But lots of fields of mathematics are new. Their determinism and their novelty are not, as far as I know, related.
Quote:If all the variables are deterministic, the topology is predictable. Life, being comprised of self organized nonlinear dynamical systems, is non-deterministic due to the inherent chaos of the universe.
If that's the way you're looking at it, then the point about nonlinear dynamics is just a red herring, no? If you think the universe is *inherently* non-deterministic, then it shouldn't matter what math you use.
But being mathematically complex/chaotic is not enough by itself to be non-deterministic. Inputs lead outputs in a mechanical way.
Quote:Like the butterfly effect (which is negligible), but I think of the asteroid event 55 million years ago, or the comet explosion over Canada 12,900 years ago. We've survived and adapted to deal with this unpredictability, and in so doing we've become unpredictable ourselves. I'd like to think that because life is short, and dangerous, we've evolved to rise to a level at least where we can comprehend the bigger challenges for life, like rogue asteroids, dying suns, colliding galaxies and super novas.
Human prediction power and philosophical determinism are not the same thing. Just because a system's outcome is not predictable to us with our information, doesn't mean its outcome is malleable to anything we control at a fundamental level.
-Jester
(10-28-2013, 09:15 PM)FireIceTalon Wrote: Individual free will is largely an illusion - it exists only in a trivial sense (for instance, one can choose to eat chocolate ice cream instead of vanilla - but one cannot just opt out of living under capitalism). All people in the world, even those with great power or social status, are constrained by the material forces and processes that the world dictates upon them.
We, alone in the universe, can escape the cosmic clockwork and *choose* our ice cream, but our social constraints bind harder than the physical world? This seems ... unlikely.
-Jester