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Sunday, 6 May 2012

Determinism, superfluously.

Not being able to move around within the dimension of change - known otherwise as "time" - makes us perplexed about what it really us. We can move in three dimensions of space, create and destroy entities within it, and even measure time from within it. However, these degrees of freedom wouldn't be possible without being able to experience change. If time stood still, there could be no movement, no progress, evolution or degeneracy of any kind: everything would be as it was when it was first conceived. Without time, birth and death would coincide.

Because there's time, we want to "slow down" or "speed up" different events. Because of our inability to look ahead in time, we're just not aware of the outcome of our actions, and that gives us both pertinent and illusory freedoms. There's no way to know if the outcome of every action has already been planned out or if we exercise the capacity to make decisions that give rise to alternate universes every time they're made. We hope then that by being deterministic ourselves—by modeling our behaviour on orderliness—we stand a chance of some aspects of future-events being ordered themselves. In other words, we expect the nature of the future to inherit the nature of the present.

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Of course, there are no guarantees. Chaos is not ordered, and if it is to exist in the future of an ordered present, it must have been introduced randomly, in an unpredictable and irreversible way. That means we have no means of knowing when and how it will be introduced while we languish in the present. Moreover, there's no way to discount the interference of ordered uncertainties, either: planning for a game tomorrow and an unanticipated shower leaving it abandoned is a very real sequence of events. Therefore, beyond the construction of determinism by behaving in an orderly manner, we also hope that nothing gets in the way of our plans.


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Apart from the "quality" of time, there's also the quantity—rather, the quantification. Time is understood to be linear. There is no moving sideways in time, just forward or backward. And because moving backward in time is impossible for various reasons, time could be imagined to be a two-dimensional vector in some higher-order complex space, a subset of which is our space. To put it simply, time is a degree-of-freedom that is associated not with individual objects in 3D space but 3D space itself. If time chooses not to lend its support to the behaviour of 3D-space, then omnipotent stagnation would be the official party line.

Within such a quantification of time, imagine the existence of alternate realities: because of time, A's 3D-space could be constructed differently than B's 3D-space. A can be deterministic to the point of hoping the future will inherit his present to a greater extent than it will inherit B's present.

At the same time, A's actions would be different according to whether or not he's aware of B's existence. If A didn't know B existed and was constructing an alternate reality, A's actions will not contain any elements of deterrence, for instance. Accounting thus for the billions of self-aware people on this planet, it's so close to impossible to actually be impossible to assume that individual actions are deterministic in any measure on an individual scale.

Simultaneously, even if we assume that determinism takes shape only within a democratic framework, it must be impossible to make individual decisions. The only reasonable conclusion is that each future of a particular present must be constructed differently. Otherwise, if they were coincidental, the two thinkers would occupy the same quantum state, per se.

Wouldn't they?

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In an infinite universe—one that has unlimited time and space to exist (but not necessarily with the same laws of existence)—there will come a time when determinism will break down. Even if the aspired philosophical scope tends toward absolutism, the idea itself has been created within the context of the extant laws of physics. Someday, these laws will break down. The universe will have expanded, cooled, stars will have died, nebulae will have run out of gas, and the last light will be fading from all space. Only Boltzmann brains will think.

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