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Takehisa Abe (Tokyo):
In the West we see arguments on freedom of one's will and actions, related to the so-called theological and philosophical determinism and indeterminism. In the East we do not find corresponding metaphysical arguments. However, I have two instances of concrete determinism. One is the Yi-King as a philosophy based on the Yin-Yang theory, and the other is Buddhism as a religion. First, they are introduced and explained to be kinds of determinism in a very general sense. Subsequently, they are characterized from modern scientific points of view. Finally, I want to discuss the present state of both.
Victoria Alexander (New
York): I will be exploring how various theories of causality have affected
narrative structures. Causality is particularly important to the
aesthetics of narrative today because of the way the concept of
intentionality has been challenged by deconstruction and
post-structuralism. The most enlightened writer, according to many
institutions that now support the arts, does not pursue a "teleological"
final product, but instead "stresses the process" of creation. It is
assumed telos is an artificial, subjective, or external principle imposed
upon the work. The preferred style of writing these days is "nonlinear,"
intentionally non-functional, and irrational. Such aesthetic proscriptions
ignore the fact that telos is a concept with a complicated history. A
number of distinct species have evolved since Aristotle explicated his
notion of final cause.
Harald Atmanspacher
(Freiburg/Garching): Traditional philosophical discourse draws a distinction between
ontology and epistemology and generally enforces this distinction by
keeping the two subject areas separated and unrelated. In addition, the
relationship between the two areas is of central importance to physics and
philosophy of physics. For instance, all kinds of measurement-related
problems force us to consider both our knowledge of the states and
observables of a system (epistemic perspective) and its states and
observables independent of such knowledge (ontic perspective). This
applies to quantum systems in particular.
Joseph Berkovitz (Baltimore): Many believe that correlation and causation are intimately related. The exact relation between them is a complicated and controversial matter. The so-called 'the principle of the common cause' (PCC) is one of the most celebrated and disputed principles relating causation to correlation. PCC states that for any non-accidental correlation between two distinct events, which are not causally connected to each other, there exists a common cause that screens off their correlation. Many objections have been raised against PCC. Accordingly, many believe that this principle is false or unwarranted. My aim in this paper is not so much to defend PCC, but rather to point out that it is not really a principle but a schema of principles that calls for interpretation. The terms 'correlation', 'causation' and 'distinct events' are vague and require specification; and different specifications yield a family of principles with different metaphysical, epistemological and empirical status. In my considerations, I will mainly focus on deterministic models.
Robert Bishop
(Freiburg): In the practice of physics, we are able to give a very general and precise description of a deterministic process in terms of group or semigroup operators (e.g. Nickel, this workshop). Three properties play a crucial role in a deterministic description (Stone 1989; Kellert 1993): (DD) Differential Dynamics: an algorithm relates a state of a system at any given time to a state at any other time and the algorithm is not probabilistic. (UE) Unique Evolution: a given state is always followed (preceded) by the same history of state transitions. (VD) Value Determinateness: any state of the system can be described with arbitrarily small (nonzero) error. In contrast quantum mechanics offers some models for indeterministic processes, but an analogous general description of indeterministic physical processes does not exist. It is clear that one of the elements of an indeterministic description is that it should be expressed in terms of semigroup operators since indeterministic processes are time irreversible. What other elements are necessary and sufficient to qualify a description as indeterministic remain unclarified, however. One of the goals of this presentation is to examine some of the possibilities for developing such a general yet precise indeterministic description and its properties. In the practice of human sciences such as psychology, on the other hand, general forms of deterministic or indeterministic descriptions are not well developed. The likelihood that mathematics is the appropriate language for such descriptions is quite low (several presentations at this workshop will indicate why), but that does not rule out the possibility of developing general forms of deterministic and indeterministic descriptions that may prove useful in the human sciences. Therefore a second goal of this presentation is to assess some of the possibilities for developing general yet precise deterministic and indeterministic descriptions focusing specifically on psychology. Kellert, S. H. (1993), In the Wake of Chaos. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Arno Bohm (Austin): After a review of the arrows of time, we describe the possibilities of
time-asymmetry in quantum physics, which was ruled out by the mathematics
of Hilbert space quantum mechanics. Guided by Dirac's bra-ket formalism,
one can create a new mathematical structure, in which the time evolution
is given by a semigroup. This leads to irreversibility on the
microphysical level as exemplified by decaying states or resonances. It is
a manifestation of a fundamental quantum mechanical distinction between
the past and the future.
Theodor Christidis
(Volos): In this paper I examine some of Heraclitus' ideas comprised in several
fragments from his unpreserved book 'On Nature', which seem to be very
close to ideas expressed by Ilya Prigogine in the last 50 years and
summarized in his book `The End of Certainty'. It is a fact that Nature
does not completely disclose herself, but rather likes to hide herself.
The epistemological problem, thus, can only be solved on the basis of
those hidden elements of which Nature gives us some indications. And, as
all things (and processes) are steered through all, the only possibility
of solving the epistemological problem is to describe natural systems by
operators acting on the evolution of probability with time (Prigogine's
answer) rather than by deterministic equations. We also touch on the
cosmological considerations of Heraclitus as well as on his thesis on the
problem of time, with a brief reference to Prigogine's ideas.
James P. Crutchfield (Santa
Fe): I will review a relatively new approach to structural complexity that
defines a process's causal states and gives a procedure for finding them.
It turns out that the causal-state representation---an
$\epsilon$-machine---is the minimal one consistent with accurate
prediction. The claim that this representation captures all of a process's
structure derives from $\epsilon$-machine optimality and uniqueness and on
how $\epsilon$-machines compare to alternative representations. For
example, one can directly relate measures of randomness and structural
complexity obtained from $\epsilon$-machines to more familiar ones from
ergodic and information theories.
Dennis Dieks (Utrecht): Physical determinism is often associated with the doctrine that "nothing new ever arises in the universe". By contrast, indeterminism is frequently considered to be a source of "creativity" or "originality". Several arguments for the existence of this alleged difference in status can be found in the literature. One important argument is that according to deterministic theories all information about the state of the universe, at any instant, is already contained in the initial condition and that therefore no new information is created during the temporal evolution of the universe. The point is often reinforced by considerations relating to time-symmetry. Fundamental deterministic physical theories do not make a distinction between the future and the past: what can happen in one time-direction can also occur in the opposite direction. Moreover, there is the Poincaré recurrence theorem, which states that a closed system will return infinitesimally close to its initial state. On the other hand, indeterministic evolution seems to be intrinsically bound up with time-asymmetry. The information about what will happen is not contained in the initial state, and there is a perpetual transition from the possible to the actual that seems intimately connected with the transition from future to past. Future events still belong to the realm of possibilities; the future is open. By contrast, the past is fixed. Probability theory seems to apply in only one time direction. I will argue, however, that the significance of the difference between physical determinism and indeterminism is greatly overrated, at least in the respects mentioned above. Especially in quantum theory, in which the probability distributions themselves obey deterministic evolution equations, many of the characteristics of determinism also apply to the description of indeterministic processes. As I will show, this holds in particular for time-symmetry and Poincaré recurrence. I will critically assess a number of arguments occurring in the literature that say that quantum mechanical probabilities are in an essential way time-asymmetric.
Mauro Dorato (Rome): The four main different positions that are usually debated within the determinism/free-will issue - compatibilism, hard determinism, libertarianism and "dissolutionism"- are shown to depend on different conceptions of freedom. Since the participants to the debate alternatively regard freedom as the capacity of doing what we want, as the capacity to do otherwise in the same situation, or as the capacity to originate a new causal chain, discussions on the consequences of determinism for our free-will and moral responsibility resemble a dialogue among deaf people, and often end in a stale-mate. After diagnosing such a situation, the four positions above are evaluated by considering (i) which capacities homo sapiens can be reasonably ascribed in the actual world and (ii) what we know about such a world from the natural sciences. Finally, differences in the conception of freedom are shown to depend on fundamental commitments to different values and temperaments.
Phil Dowe (Hobart): What is Determinism? In this paper I articulate and defend a causal theory of determinism, where 'determinism' is that which worries people in relation to freewill. I argue first that non-causal or 'scientific' theories, and theories which appeal to chance both fail to explicate the relation of determinism to time, and second that various extant theories of causation fail to explicate the relation between indeterministic and deterministic causation. I offer a causal theory which overcomes both these problems.
Edwin E. Gantt (Provo): Recent decades have witnessed an astounding increase in the amount of research and theorizing in the discipline of psychology that is conducted from within a primarily biological framework of explanation. Although biologically based forms of explanation have been present in the discipline from its very inception, recent advances in the fields of biotechnology (e.g., Magnetic Resonance Imaging, etc.) and psychopharmacology have lent increased weight to biological explanations of human psychological phenomena. Because most biological explanations of human actions and experiences are fundamentally reductive in nature and, thus, committed to one or another form of necessary determinism or efficient causality, the discipline of psychology is increasingly coming to conceive of human behavior as devoid of genuine agency or freedom. Likewise, insofar as human acts are taken to be the necessary products of fundamentally impersonal and mechanical biological causes, human behavior is also thought to lack any genuine ethical or morally meaningful content. In response, this paper seeks to articulate a philosophically defensible alternative to biologically reductive explanations of human action which is nonetheless sensitive to the fundamentally embodied nature of human life. In addition, this paper will attempt to situate its account of human embodiment within an understanding of human existence that recognizes the inescapably social and moral nature of that existence. To these ends, this paper will examine the thinking of the French phenomenologists, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas.
Charles Guignon (Burlington): Joseph Rychlak (1979) shows how modern determinism results from the
distinctive way of understanding the world and humans that emerged with
the rise of the modern science in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. On this new conception of reality, which was so successful in
astronomy and physics, we make phenomena intelligible by treating things
as material objects subject to efficient causes. Given this outlook, other
sorts of causal factors and bases of intelligibility, such as Aristotelian
final and formal causes, are rejected as vestiges of outdated ways of
thinking with no place in the modern world. Opposing the dominance of this
scientific image, Martin Heidegger (1927/1962), Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962)
and Charles Taylor (forthcoming) try to recover a more "primordial"
experience of our being-in-the-world, a way of being that is prior to, and
a condition of the possibility for, the objectifying and mechanistic world
picture we find in science. Seen from the standpoint of this
phenomenological and hermeneutic outlook, although the scientific picture
may be adequate to explain paticular sorts of natural phenomena,
specifically human phenomena can be made intelligible only in terms of the
richer conception of self and world provided by the notion of
being-in-the-world. I want to show that determinism in the philosophical
sense, the view that because all events in the physical universe occur
with law-governed necessity free will is impossible, presupposes the
correctness of the scientific image of the world. If we can come to see
this scientific image as only a specialized way of looking at paticular
sorts of things for particular purposes, and so as having no privileged
status or global application, then the traditional philosophical problem
of accounting for the possibility of free will is dissolved. My claim is
that the conception of being-in-the-world formulated by Heideggerian
philosophers undercuts the assumptions that make determinism possible.
Coming from the standpoint of this alternative way of conceiving our
situation in the world, we are able to make better sense of our actual
lived experience of freedom. Moreover, we can see that this way of
understanding agency is not just an optional "stance" or point of view
(comparable to what Dennett (1989) calls "the intentional stance"), but is
a fundamental and inescapable way of understanding our actual lives as
agents in the world.
Karl Gustafson (Boulder): First, at the request of the Workshop organizers, I will review and interpret our recent resuls which enable the embedding of stochastic processes into a larger deterministic dynamics. Second, I will argue that one must know not only the past but also the future in order to describe the present. Third, I will question the notion of time as a cartesian independent variable,especially within stochastic contexts.
Robert Kane (Austin): The question of whether the physical world is deterministic, or whether all human choices and actions are the determined products of our biological, psychological and social histories, is thought to be of great relevance to the question of whether we have free will and are responsible or accountable for our actions in an ultimate sense. Yet there have been influential trends in the twentieth century suggesting that what the natural and human sciences have to tell us about whether all events in the physical universe are determined has no bearing on ordinary judgments about whether persons are free and responsible or accountable for their behavior, or whether and when they are deserving of praise or blame, punishment or reward. Some believe this because they believe that free will and responsibility are compatible with determinism, so that it does not matter to our ordinary beliefs about freedom, responsibility, and blame whether determinism is true or not. Others believe it for a different reason--because they believe that free will and responsibility are not compatible with indeterminism. Human choices or actions that were undetermined (occurring, for example, as the result of undetermined quantum events in the brain) would happen spontaneously and not under the control of agents, and so would not be free and responsible choices or actions at all. Indeterminism in the brain or behavior would be more likely to undermine freedom and responsibility than enhance them. Despite the enormous influence of both of these lines of thought in the twentieth century, I think both are misguided, and will argue as much in this paper. A case can be made for saying that whether the universe is deterministic or not does matter for everyday concerns about the human condition concerning free will, though new arguments must be deployed--better than the prevailing and familiar ones--if this case is to be made. A case can also be made for saying that free will and responsibility can be reconciled with a universe containing indeterminism and chance; though here again new arguments must be deployed--better than the prevailing and familiar ones--if this is to be shown. The purpose of the paper is to explore new avenues of argument on both these matters concerning the relation of free will to determinism, on the one hand, and to indeterminism, on the other. One implication of these arguments is that it does matter what the the natural and human sciences have to tell us about whether all events in the physical universe, including human actions, are determined or undetermined. The topics of this conference have a definite bearing on deep philosophical questions about freedom, responsibility and the human condition.
Olimpia Lombardi (Buenos
Aires): There has been a longstanding debate within philosophy between those who hold a metaphysical realist view and those holding a relativist view. Metaphysical realists typically argue that there is one "objective" ontology (way the world is) while relativists argue to the contrary. Internalism has been proposed as a middle way between these opposing views. According to the internalist philosopher, ontology is framework dependent, so "objective" does not mean independent of the subject, but, rather, resulting from applying our frameworks to the reality lying behind the world of our experience. In this paper we will argue that internalism also allows us to face controversial questions related to the objectivity of scientific descriptions. In particular, the problem of the compatibility between deterministic and indeterministic descriptions in highly unstable systems can be solved from the internalist perspective, since both descriptions are objective because each one of them cuts out its own entities from the same underlying reality. We suggest that this approach can be applied to other traditional problems in the philosophy of science such as debates about irreversibility and locality in physics in both cases there is no contradiction in predicating incompatible objective properties to the same underlying reality when such properties are predicated to different ontologies. It is possible to speculate that this line of thought can be extended to the classical mind-body problem in the context of the philosophy of mind. For example emergence and supervenience have new philosophical content from the internalist point of view because there is no one absolute ontology. Therefore reality may be structured in different ontological strata meaning mental entities acquire the same objective status as physical entities, even if complete reduction would be possible. Finally we will argue that, despite the wide applicability of the internalist perspective, some remaining problems regarding the notion of "underlying reality" and the question of reduction must be solved.
Günter Mahler (Stuttgart): The second law is arguably one of the most fundamental and far reaching laws of physics; nevertheless its origin remains puzzling. In particular, the reconciliation of the postulated irreversibility with the the notorious reversibility of all fundamental physical laws has been a serious challenge of statistical physics over decades. The Boltzmann- as well as the Gibbs ensemble-approach claim to account for that problem but have to acknowledge some additional assumptions which do not follow from the underlying microscopic laws. Therefore, researchers like L.D. Landau, E. Schroedinger, J. von Neumann, W.Pauli and G. Lindblad, to name but a few, suggested quantum mechanics as a possible remedy. However, no concrete results have been obtained so far; here we want to fill this gap. Focusing on a gas in a container, both treated quantum mechanically, we exploit the fact that these two subsystems have to interact and that, in general, any interaction leads to entanglement. Generically this entanglement is such that the reduced entropy takes on its maximum value under microcanonical constraints and in the thermodynamic limit. Contrary to the classical case even the microstate of the gas appears to be mixed at any time! A rather simple and intuitive picture is thus emerging: While the total system dynamics is described by a pure state undergoing a deterministic unitary evolution, the dynamics of the gas appears irreversible and approaches a state of maximum control loss. Entanglement physics, which has received much attention recently because of its possible impact on information processing, is thus helping us to solve an old problem in statistical physics, a somewhat unexpected "spin-off" indeed.
Jack Martin and Jeff Sugarman
(Burnaby): Broadly speaking, agency is the freedom of individual human beings to make choices and to act on these choices in ways that make a difference in their lives. Agency is assumed in most psychological practices that purport to help people solve problems, cope, make decisions, change, "make a difference," and "take control." Ironically, agency is mostly denied or ignored in psychological science which often seeks to explain human experience and action by reducing agency to behavioral contingencies, statistical regularities, neurophysiological states and processes, computational functions and models, or evolutionary biology. In this workshop presentation, a compatibilist (soft determinist) argument for agency understood as self-determination is presented, and a developmental theory of situated, deliberative agency is sketched. In particular, it is argued that traditional libertarian and hard determinist approaches to agency tend to ignore the historical, sociocultural constitution of agency. In the case of libertarianism, this tendency manifests in question-begging assertions of radical freedom emanating from a metaphysically isolated agent somehow disconnected to the physical, biological, and sociocultural world. In the case of hard determinism, this tendency manifests in implausible attempts to reduce agency to nothing more than physical kinds and causes. By "bringing agency into the world" we hope that the arguments and theory we advance might help to reconcile some existing tensions between psychological science and practice.
Gregor Nickel (Tübingen): In a first part we present an abstract mathematical framework,
whithin which determinism can be formulated. A deterministic motion on a
state space ${\cal Z}$ is then given by an evolution family
$\Phi_{t, t_0} : {\cal Z} \to {\cal Z}$, or a semigroup $(T_t)$, if
we add the property of autonomy. For these semigroups the following
identities hold: $T_s T_t = T_{t+s}, \quad T_0 = Id.$ The structure of a
one-parameter semigroup is suggested as a mathematical model of
autonomous, deterministic motion.
Hans Primas (Zurich): A physical law is said to be fundamental if it does not dependent on a
particular context. The set of all transformations which do not change the
first principle of physics is a symmetry group, sometimes called the
symmetry group of nature. In present-day physics the fundamental
dynamical law is taken as a time-translation-invariant and
time-inversion-invariant one-parameter group of automorphisms of the
underlying mathematical structure. In this description all of reality is
already pre-existent, and nothing new can come into existence. There is no
past, present or future, hence no distinction between cause and effect.
These principles refer to an ontic description which is to a large
extent context-independent but not directly operationally accessible.
Frank C. Richardson
(Austin), Robert C. Bishop (Freiburg): Most 20th century social science has eagerly adopted the deterministic
picture of the world that once seemed supported if not required by the
stunning successes of the natural sciences in modern times. It is commonly
believed that some kind of thoroughgoing physical, social, or
psychological determinism--often an undifferentiated mix of the
three--must be assumed if we are to explain human behavior, partly because
it is taken for granted that such explanations must consist in
context-free laws or models that identify the efficient causes of events
in the human realm. This seems to involve social science in a troubling,
often noted paradox. On the one hand, we seek to map the deterministic
processes of social reality in order to aid in transforming it in an
effective and beneficial manner, thus presupposing the reality of human
freedom and agency in some form. On the other hand, this approach seems to
many to advance a deterministic picture of human behavior that reduces
"freedom" and ingenuity to just another passive link in the causal chain.
Bishop, R., and Richardson, F. The Free-will Debates in
philosophy and psychology: hidden moral dimensions. Paper presented at the
Annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, Washington D.C.,
August, 2000.
Brent D. Slife (Provo): I contend in this paper that time has played a pivotal, but relatively unacknowledged, role in the issues of determinism, at least in psychology. Several scholars have recognized this contribution in philosophy, most notably Martin Heidegger, Paul Ricoeur, and Henri Bergson, but I would like to discuss the peculiarities of time's role in the social sciences. As I will argue, Newton's popularization of Absolute time led psychologists to adopt a singularly atomistic conception of time. Unfortunately, this temporal atomism has fostered all manner of conceptual problems in psychology that continue to enfeeble and befuddle theoreticians and practitioners alike. Many psychologists assume these problems have been solved by the modern notion of information and the vaunted "information processor." However, I will argue that this "solution" is a sham. I will proffer, instead, a holistic conception of time to address many of these disciplinary problems.
Karl Svozil (Vienna): Consequences of the basic and most evident consistency requirement - that measured events cannot happen and not happen at the same time - are shortly reviewed. Particular emphasis is given to event forecast and event control. As a consequence, particular, very general bounds on the forecast and control of events within the known laws of physics are derived. These bounds are of a global, statistical nature and need not affect singular events or groups of events.
László E. Szabó (Budapest): There is no such property of an event as its "probability." Rather, I argue that probability is a derivative concept, supervening on physical quantities characterizing the state of affairs corresponding to the event in question. The term "probability" can be used only collectively: it means different dimensionless [0,1]-valued physical quantities (measures) in the different particular situations. I also argue that probability is not the limiting value of relative frequency, and not even necessarily related to the notion of frequency. In some cases, the conditions of the sequential repetitions of a particular situation are such, however, that the probability (the corresponding physical quantity) is approximately equal to the relative frequency of the event in question. Sometimes we do not know the value of the physical quantity X, corresponding to the probability of an event A. In this case, if we are convinced about the relationship between X and the relative frequency of A, we can measure X by counting the relative frequency of A. Furthermore, I will argue that probability, as a derivative concept, has nothing to do with (objective) indeterminism and, on the other hand, has nothing to do with "lack of knowledge," even if world is deterministic.
Last revision: 6 March 2001 |