Knowing About Determinism

Knowing (2009) tells the story of a scientist who finds a page full of numbers containing the dates, locations, and death tolls of a long series of major disasters. The kicker is that this page is found buried in a time capsule where it had been placed by a young girl fifty years ago. Unsurprsingly, the film plays around with the familiar issues of determinism, freedom, meaning, and so on.

Early in the film, our science professor (Nicholas Cage) is giving a lecture about "the subject of randomness versus determinism in the universe."

Student: Determinism says that occurrences in nature are causally decided by preceding events or natural laws, that everything leading up to this point has happened for a reason.

Professor: That’s right. That’s what determinism says. [He goes on to discuss with them the fact that the earth is located just the right distance from the sun for life to be possible.] That’s a nice thought, right? Everything has a purpose, an order to it, is determined. But then there’s the other side of the argument. The theory of randomness, which says it’s all simply coincidence. The very fact we exist is nothing but the result of a complex yet inevitable string of chemical accidents and biological mutations. There is no grand meaning. There’s no purpose.

The student's opening description of causal determinism is on the money -- until she includes the ambiguous bit about everything happening for a reason. This could be understood in a deflationary way, so that she's simply reiterating that events are causally determined by previous events. But the professor's response makes clear his assumption that to be a causal determinist is to believe that we live in a purpose driven universe.

This is a strange assumption. Why should the view that the universe is causally determined involve the idea that there's some secret purpose behind what happens? Take the tragic death of the professor's wife in a hotel fire. The causal determinist thinks that awful event was causally determined by prior events, and those events in turn were causally determined by still prior events, and so on. The indeterminist (the champion of "randomness") denies this, believing that if it were somehow possible to replay the events, things might not turn out the same way again. But neither of them need believe that there's any purpose in or for her death.

In short, the professor seems to confuse causal determinism with fatalism or with a robust teleological or theological view of the universe. It's not an uncommon confusion.

We might also wonder whether randomness gets a bad rap here.

Time Travel 1

Time travel is one of science fiction's earliest and most enduring themes. Mark Twain gives us what is perhaps the earliest example of a person who is displaced in time in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), while H.G. Wells invents the fiction of a time machine in the aptly titled The Time Machine (1895).

Is time travel possible? In what sense? We may want to know whether time travel is physically possible, given what we now know about the nature of the universe. People have lots of interesting things to say about this. Not me, though.

Philosophers are more likely to wonder whether time travel is logically possible. And this question is intimately connected to the fascinating question of whether an sf story about time travel can be coherent. I'll be assembling several posts on these matters in the near future.

For now, see what some sf writers have to say about the use of time travel in sf at the excellent blog SF Signal.

Looking Ahead to 2088

Here's a video that's been making the rounds. It's called Mobility 2088, and in it Honda asks various people what they think transportation will look like in 80 years.



I caught at least two sf writers among the talking head futurists: Ben Bova and Orson Scott Card. What's your guess about what the world will be like in 80 years?

Are you a Sim?

After watching The Matrix, a lot of us enjoy flirting with the idea that we might be in some kind of simulation. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom suggests that this shouldn't be a mere flirtation. He argues that the odds that you are right now living in a computer simulation are pretty good. There's a website dedicated to the presentation and discussion of "the simulation argument." A short version of it can be found here.

Essentially, Bostrom argues that one of the following three claims must be true:

1. Almost all civilisations at our level of development become extinct before becoming technologically mature.

2. The fraction of technologically mature civilisations that are interested in creating ancestor simulations is almost zero.

3. You are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

To the extent that you're inclined to think that 1 and 2 are false, then, you'd be justified in thinking that 3 is true.

Or, to put it another way, if a civilization advances to the point where they're capable of providing simulated environments, and if that civilization is interested in running simulations of the past (ancestor simulations), then there will be many people living in such simulations. And if the set of persons contains a significant number of people in simulations, there's at least some significant probability that you are such a person!

It's not an easy argument to assess. What do you think?

The Real World?

The Matrix offers us a virtual world full of people who don't realize the nature of their environment. According to at least some physicists, our actual world may be more like the Matrix world in certain respects! See this article in New Scientist. Hat tip to io9. Some of the essays on the Philosophy section of The Matrix website also explore the similarities and differences between the world of the Matrix and "the real world."

What's Coming?

Over at Edge, each year they ask a whole lot of leading thinkers a question about the role of science in our thought and culture. This year's question is: "WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING? 'What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?'" Follow the link and scroll down to see what people have to say...

Isn't this the very question that a lot of sf tries to answer? It might be interesting to compare what scientists and sf writers are saying...