[MD] Food for Thought

[Case]

[Ham]
I am trying to justify your side of the argument with dmb, but you are
making it very difficult.  To begin with, "history" usually refers to the
cumulative works of mankind, not molecular activity or genetic mutations.  I
don't see that the physicist's notion of "uncertainty" or "predictability"
in microcosmic phenomena is relevant to a philosophy based on an
experiential reality.  It seems to me that the "evolution of mankind" that
we call history has taken a course determined by human decisions.  Since it
has not been significantly affected by the random events of matter, past
history is a 'fait accompli.' -- no matter how many times you "play it
back."

[Case]
Uncertainty is far more obvious in the every day world than at the quantum
level. As I have mentioned many times the significance of uncertainty in
math and physics is that it occurs EVEN there. It is of greater consequence
in the experiential world where if I had had one few cup of coffee last
night I might have gotten up 1 min earlier this morning and not be sitting
in traffic behind that Thug with the boomer in his trunk which made me just
irritated enough to honk my horn and piss him off so he gets out and
blackens my eyes and I am late to work. Pick you own chain of causality and
look at the fragility of the links. Physics just illustrates that this
uncertainty exhibits self similarity across scale.

The point is your view that the past is over, done with and set in stone and
the future soon will be is misguided. From an omniscient perspective there
is not telling what one would see or that one would ever see the same
patterns repeat. Causality is not mechanistic it is organic.

[Ham]
Yes, certainly the outcomes are "unknown".  We cannot predict the future.
Determinism and predictability are an intellectual concept of physicists who
are dealing with events whose causal parameters are limited and whose
effects are by and large predictable.  Human events, on the contrary, cannot
be predicted on a cause-and-effect basis.  The possible behavior of a single
individual has far too many "self-determined" variables to make this
feasible.

[Case]
It is simply not true and human behavior is not caused. We walk because we
have feet. Where we walk is determined by paths, side walks and streets. Why
we walk here or there is determined by our internal states of hunger,
horniess or sense of security. The complexity of causal factors makes human
behavior hard to predict but it does not make behavior immune to them. 

[Ham]
You make a distinction between determinism and predictability.  I
distinguish between determinism and inevitability.  From the evolutionary
perspective of human experience, it is inevitable that history will play out
its course from the Big Bang to entropy.  It will then have been completed.
But because I see the individual as free and autonomous, I reject the idea
that man -- individually or collectively -- is pre-determined or predestined
by nature, cosmic law, or the essential source.  Your continuing emphasis on
probability and predictability suggests to me that you disagree.

[Case]
I suppose the distinction between predictability and inevitability would be
that inevitability means something is fated; that some course must be
followed. And I would say no. To say that outcomes are determined means that
causal factors are at work but cause is more of a web than a chain of events
and it can not be determined in advance how those factors will ultimately
work themselves out. If you mean that man is immune from determinism I
simply can't imagine what in your experience would lead you to that view.