jp, don't feel silly or anything!!! The actual significance of the physics experiment is WAY over my head!! I just remember enough from the rousing debate at Ask John Galt last year to know is it somehow VERY IMPORTANT, and I want to understand better.
You weren't at SI then, but basically there are two camps of people who like to talk about this little bit of philosophy--this synopsis of mine is quite a bit dumber and more basic even than Cliff Notes, incidentally, please forgive me--advocates of FREE WILL, and those who believe in DETERMINISM.
If we are starting at the very beginning, people who believe in free will believe that basically, the choices an individual makes have a pretty big impact on the direction of his/her life. The way I say this is that the person creates his/her own reality, but I am one of those EST graduates from the early seventies.
(Sidebar: did anyone else here take the EST training? I'd love to talk about the sequelae twenty or more years later.)
The people who believe in determinism believe that even though we may think we have choices in life, we actually have little control over our fate.
This was all debated at length at Ask John Galt, and as I recall, the behavior of molecules was significant in the argument. Since we now have proof (I think) of a particular theory, I just wanted to revisit the subject and update it, in a way. This is something I am very interested in thinking about, although I am dumber than a bag of rocks, basically, about physics. It's the argument about free will and determinism that actually excites me.
In fact, an argument in favor of determinism would be what happened to the woman you loved. That changed your life forever. You could argue from that example that fate or random chance, not your own decisions, governs to a large extent what happens to you.
Okay, I'm pretty sure that's awfully simple, like I am about this subject, but not particularly clear!!! |
