I think about this kind of stuff a lot (too much according to some people, probably). One of the problems it that people draw a false dichotomy between determinism and indeterminism; it seems like a lot of people think that either the past strictly determines the present (that is, given the state of the universe at a particular moment in time, there is one and only one possible state of the universe at the next moment) or that there is no causal connection between them at all. Such is not the case, since there is a third way, probablistic determinism, that is neither hard determinism nor indeterminism; for a state of the universe at a given moment in time, there exists a non-empty set of possible future states, each of which has a certain probability. It isn't hard determinism, because there's more than one possible future given the present, but it isn't indeterminism because there is a causal connection between the past, present, and future.
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Woot! Philosophy!
Date: 2005-08-04 03:11 pm (UTC)