Sunday, December 10, 2006

Mechanistic determinism [1]

Its was 6th Dec. Mathematics-III compre the next day. I started in the evening. Mathematics-III, all about differential equations, laplace transformations, fourier series and stuff. I started the new chapter, System of first order equations. They gave an example of how a system of differential equations can help us predict how a system will behave. It was like... a large number of point masses in the space, interacting with each other with gravitational forces only. The differential equations, along with the initial conditions help us to find of the equation of motion of the particles.
After the discussion, there was this line..

"This conclusion underlies the once popular philosophy of mechanistic determinism, according to which the universe is nothing more than a gigantic machine whose future is inexorably fixed by its state at any given moment."

I have a lot to discuss about this deterministic and stuff...
I already have two posts somewhat related to the above mentioned subject : My unified theory of so-called living and non-living and Future prediction possible : what do you "think"??
I don't think I would like to type everything in one go, neither you are gonna appreciate that. So, lemme take it in small modules /* what??? am I taking lectures in some course or what??? */ Whatever... today, I am going to write about randomness.

I guess the only thing which can differentiate living beings from non-living beings is randomness, if it is at all there. I have written a bit about it in the latter post of the two mentioned above. Fine, if we consider only non-living things, the things which are popularly called non-living. I don't think there is any thing random in there. The way they react are pretty well defined by the laws. Maybe a few more laws need to be discovered. Maybe these are suffice. Things seem to be random, but they actually are not. If we are not able to predict the behaviour of a system, its behaviour is random for us. Such systems behave in arbitrary way from our point of view. But they actually follow some laws and behave in some particular way only. Hence, if we get to know how things behave, we can predict and bingo...they are no more random.
Like there is some function in C programming language, it is called random().It is used to get some random number. But obviously, it is based on some algorithm. It does not has a free will to give an absolutely random number. It mainly do some calculations on number of clock ticks and bits stored somewhere in RAM /*not sure about this though*/. So, the number it returns depends on the RAM status, CPU clock ticks completed and stuff. So, even if we know the algorithm, which is not much difficult, its not so simple to keep track of number of CPU clock ticks, memory and all. Hence it is virtually impossible to get to know about the number the function is going to return. But it is possible, I guess you must also agree.
This was just an illustration, I guess poorly explained, but I hope you got the idea what I actually want to say. Non-living things are not random. Their behaviour is deterministic. If the universe is made up of non-living stuff only, it is deterministic.
Now we do find behaviour of living beings random. I guess if a system behaves in two different ways given exactly same conditions, then it is random. I would really be happy to find such a system. Even if we consider some living being, in a thought experiment, if we take a being and put it exactly same conditions twice, it will behave essentially in the same way. I am not able to support the view that the two results will be different. I don't think they will be different. But this makes me non-living, I am not happy... :(. I don't think its of any use to be living if you don't have randomness.. or we can refer to it as freewill. If you don't have a freewill, what's the fun in being living???
Fine, at this moment, I am pretty sure about... behaviour of non-living things is not random. They don't have any freewill. Though I am not yet sure whether we have free will or not, but I am sure that, we are nothing better than a non-living thing if we don't have a freewill.
I have a few more thought experiment lined up, more discussion regarding the topic I will continue, this much is enough for today. And for such discussion posts, I'll have conclusion of the day's discussion as find of the day.

Find of the day : Non-living things are not random. The only thing which living beings can possess which can give them some edge over non-living is... randomness....or freewill.

7 comments:

Siddharth Chaudhari said...

hey rishi, call/im me whenever you are free...

dove_dd said...

hmm... do you really think humans respond to the same situation differently? the difference in response might be because they have learnt frm the past experience. or their track of thinking is different. i cant come to terms that non-living things are not random. what do you say about the universe? it is all random. according to the convention.. mud.. universe(yeah?) are non-living.. but think about how random they are. ofcourse, in the first place i dont agree that they are non-living. ofcourse... different responses.. means more criterion.. more complexity in processing info.. so more randomness in living ? may be.. but u know it's all complicated.

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Rishi Mathur said...

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Check out once again

Rishi

Anonymous said...

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