9k:RD/ lambda-calculus determinism (Q22,28)
Main entry
- lambda-calculus determinism / lambda calculus style determinism / mathematical function determinism / necessity (process of individual things being determined by laws of behavior and surrounding conditions) ->
for some weird reason people always assume that determinism equals Calvinism, where there is one set of conditions that lead to a single ending, rather than determinism itself being the path from a million initial conditions to a million associated endings. this is the intuitive definition of determinism if you've studied enough Newtonian mechanics: if a ball and a ramp start in one particular position they end up in one particular place but it always depends on what position they started in which is not necessarily controllable by an experimenter in the context of daily life. if you start with this definition of determinism you see it is no existential threat to a bunch of individuals floating around making decisions and having some set of processes they struggle to describe and label as Free Will; if determinism is discovered and people become "robots" then no aspect of human experience has been lost.
said another way: determinism is when there is an uncontrollable variable "x", similar to a person, or an unknown quantity of water, or a tennis ball of unknown mass, but you know what the "x" object is going to do even if you don't know exactly how. x goes into the lambda-calculus style function, and it pops out some wide array of possibilities based on the wide array of possibilities that go in — a graph of stuff looking like a curve or a filled shape or a volume, not a single point, describing the outcome. the presence of two objects "x" and "y" doesn't change this, it just creates a 3d graph z = f(x,y) containing a bounded cube of possibilities rather than a bounded square. the top thing to ask people who want to deny "cube determinism" is, do you want people to be able to infinitely deny that there is a possibility they will have to stop being racist, or would you be okay with the possibility of a world where them choosing to stop being racist is inevitable? if that possibility or the possibility of finding it inside the bounded cube sounds good to you, certainly that doesn't make "cube determinism" a known fact about reality, but it does mean you should investigate it. - necessity (mathematics) / 必然論 (数学) [1] -> so apparently in the Japanese language it's more common to use the word "necessity" for this than "determinism". do I pick my words weirdly? I know for sure I do, but I also know that across English language texts people will use like five totally different words from different academic departments to say the same thing. I don't think you can ever get around the difficulty of differentiating underlying concepts with words by picking "more correct words".
必然論 (数学) + special relativity / 特殊相対論 = relativistic determinism (still no idea how to translate that. it'll be "相対" something I guess)
Determinism and "indeterminism"
- Determinism can form out of non-deterministic elements
- Determinism can include non-deterministic elements / Determinism can form out of non-deterministic elements -> we already know this is possible, at least in a mathematical sense concerning material things that really appear unpredictable versus material things that really appear predictable. the most widely-accepted example right now is quantum mechanics. nobody really knows much about the individual particles, yet as things scale up all the particles form into predictable patterns. this is the key to building models of society and historical materialism.
- Determinism already acknowledges hidden variables / A deterministic statement is not a statement that something will occur inevitably under all sets of conditions, but a statement that something will occur at some particular probability under a particular set of conditions, or more specifically that beginning from a particular unknown probability that the real set of conditions will line up with the predicted set of conditions in a particular fraction of real situations, the model claims to be able to closely approximate the real outcome that particular fraction of the time; all deterministic models already contain and account for the concept of unknown information (indeterminism; probability; hidden variables; wave functions) in that determinism itself is the prediction that unknown information will produce unexpected outcomes and confound calculations some particular fraction of the time which is ideally a small one
Determinism and nation-states
- Nations are artificial and un-designed / Nation-states are neither natural nor intentionally constructed -> the claim that, excluding all Marxist states, the process of people forming into nation-states is both artificial and largely not at all designed. many people make the mistake of turning undesigned-ness into a simple binary where if something is not designed it must be fully natural in the sense of either ecological or human, and if something is not fully ecological it must be as deliberately designed as a computer chip; you see this fallacy in both anarchism and Western Marxism. this is not the case. something can be totally undesigned and also harmful, just as something like indigenous agriculture could be designed and be ecological. some things which are ecological are undesigned, yet The Subject itself is arguably designed by its actions toward its own needs while being a biological animal
- The process of people forming into nation-states is both artificial in that it is created by humans, and not created through any intentional human design (not natural; artificial; not intelligently designed; un-designed; existential materialism)
Related
- Idealist economics / Yaroshenkoism (generic) / (9k)
- We have chosen poverty / All human individuals or all citizens each-separately-in-parallel-all-at-the-same-time have the power to spontaneously end poverty just because they can point their fingers at it / (9k)
Ideology codes
- MX / meta-Marxism
- STM / mathematics
- STM / relativistic determinism (violet swatch)
- determinism (physics) / Dec. 26 - rant on Ontology page, re-read later