Nice thread guys. A couple of comments that I welcome responses to. First, John Galt mentioned objectivism. I respect Rand's guts in advocating drug legalization, pornography, perverted sex, etc. when the despicable establishment was against this. Of course, I'm for all this stuff also, but unlike Rand, I think it's all neat and fun and perversion is really cool and ought to be encouraged. However, I think Rand's philosophical arguments are badly flawed and embarrassingly weak. I'm an anarcho-capitalist libertarian and think that from the "virtue of selfishness" a defense can be constructed. (Note that this was NOT Rand's position: she held the nonsensical idea that no values were necessary to derive ethics-i.e. she thought she could derive an ought from an is). Since I think it is more important to act ethically than how you derived your ethics, I still really appreciate objectivists stubborn opposition to the present status quo anyway.
About causality and randomness. I have a controversial little essay on the subject, written a few years ago. But it can be easily summarized as follows (minus all the mathematics, of course). Consider the game of pool or billiards. What will happen when the cue ball strikes another ball? According to quantum mechanics, or according to classical mechanics using the Hamiltonian or Lagrangian approach, the answer can NOT be predicted in advance, because conservation of energy and momentum does not suffice to predict the outcome. (Picture the collision in the frame in which both balls (same mass) have the same speeds and opposite directions. Then clearly they can rebound in any direction and still conserve energy/momentum). Newtonian physics a la freshman physics does give a definite answer however. So the mysteries of quantum mechanics can perhaps be reduced to the mysteries of the game of billiards. In fairness, I should point out that quantum mechanicists would say that billiard balls are predictable because they are so large (and not true point particles) but that this experiment with electrons, say, would give a nondeterministic answer.
It seems conceivable to me that QM is wrong and that billiard balls (and electrons) are in fact deterministic. I have worked out a mathematics of how this might go (Essentially this is freshman physics, now with the Newton-Kauderer law of motion). What do experiments say? They clearly say that nature is unpredictable, but there may be a way around this in that perhaps not all relevant variables have been held constant. Rolling dice in the same apparent manner apparently leads to different outcomes but here no-one would say it is because the dice are random. So too may be the case with colliding particles. This is the purest heresy to the scientific establishment. I really enjoy heresy also, along with good old perversion. |
