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.

#

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.

#

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?

#

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.

The relevance of racial realism

There are three people in a room: A, B and C.

They each possess the following skills in varying levels of excellence:

1. Zeroth Skill (ZS)


2. First Skill (FS)


3. Second Skill (SS)

ZS: A > B = C

FS: A > B > C

SS: A < B = C

If A, B and C belong to three different races, and if the observations made above applied to all individuals of the same race as A, B and C, respectively, then isn't it fair to identify the strength of each trait in a race with the race itself? Deliberately obfuscating such a persistent pattern in light of the social and cultural damage that racism has wreaked may be right when moderated by humanitarian ethics. Then, however, the scientifically provable biological realism of the association (between skill and race) will be lost out (I haven't mentioned any such traits, and the notions of the racially associated skills in the comparison above is only hypothetical).

"If anything, I’m a race realist, and that simply means to recognize and understand the fact that there are racial differences and that these differences have an impact on society, education, crime, and many other aspects of life. It is not being a racist. It’s simply being a realist and a person who’s in search of solutions, rather than simply allowing these problems to continue to escalate."

Carol M. Swain

A century of heady and steady technological progress has, more than anything else, taught us that statistical determinism still largely remains a son of chance. That means we must be as economical as we can with the data we have in order to utilize our human resources best. The real problem of racism lies in the threat posed by its misunderstanding and misuse. As a consequence of racially driven wars and sociopolitical movements, so much as recognizing a race has proved deplorable, condemning racial realism along with it. I'm not a racial realist. I only postulate that if the biological realism backing racism (as in the factitude of race and not the discrimination along the lines of race) stands proven, then we mustn't back away from that conclusion because the history of one scientific fact was blighted by the idiocy of humankind.

Moreover, continuing from the example, discrimination-by-race can occur only when a community forms that encourages, say, an eminence of the First Skill and so lets a community form solely on the basis of an inequality: A > B or B > C or A > C. In that case, a skill's association with the race is not to be blamed just as much as letting that association lend itself to the creation of a community is condemnable. In other words, the claim that "A can do this better than B can" can reek of racial realism as much as it wants to, but it can't acquire by itself a socially judgmental connotation if not for the society that tags it so.

And now, I'll start reading The Bell Curve (1994).

The relevance of racial realism

There are three people in a room: A, B and C.

They each possess the following skills in varying levels of excellence:

1. Zeroth Skill (ZS)


2. First Skill (FS)


3. Second Skill (SS)

ZS: A > B = C

FS: A > B > C

SS: A < B = C

If A, B and C belong to three different races, and if the observations made above applied to all individuals of the same race as A, B and C, respectively, then isn't it fair to identify the strength of each trait in a race with the race itself? Deliberately obfuscating such a persistent pattern in light of the social and cultural damage that racism has wreaked may be right when moderated by humanitarian ethics. Then, however, the scientifically provable biological realism of the association (between skill and race) will be lost out (I haven't mentioned any such traits, and the notions of the racially associated skills in the comparison above is only hypothetical).

"If anything, I’m a race realist, and that simply means to recognize and understand the fact that there are racial differences and that these differences have an impact on society, education, crime, and many other aspects of life. It is not being a racist. It’s simply being a realist and a person who’s in search of solutions, rather than simply allowing these problems to continue to escalate."

Carol M. Swain

A century of heady and steady technological progress has, more than anything else, taught us that statistical determinism still largely remains a son of chance. That means we must be as economical as we can with the data we have in order to utilize our human resources best. The real problem of racism lies in the threat posed by its misunderstanding and misuse. As a consequence of racially driven wars and sociopolitical movements, so much as recognizing a race has proved deplorable, condemning racial realism along with it. I'm not a racial realist. I only postulate that if the biological realism backing racism (as in the factitude of race and not the discrimination along the lines of race) stands proven, then we mustn't back away from that conclusion because the history of one scientific fact was blighted by the idiocy of humankind.

Moreover, continuing from the example, discrimination-by-race can occur only when a community forms that encourages, say, an eminence of the First Skill and so lets a community form solely on the basis of an inequality: A > B or B > C or A > C. In that case, a skill's association with the race is not to be blamed just as much as letting that association lend itself to the creation of a community is condemnable. In other words, the claim that "A can do this better than B can" can reek of racial realism as much as it wants to, but it can't acquire by itself a socially judgmental connotation if not for the society that tags it so.

And now, I'll start reading The Bell Curve (1994).

Entropy And Determinism

 

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="180" caption="Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers"][/caption]

 

Philosophy has often been characterized as the recourse for thinkers, even as consideration for the value it seeks to add is discarded in favor of a more methodical approach toward understanding each of its myriad contributions. While there persists an affectation ofexistential subjectivism, one of objectivism would perhaps beseem the content as well as aid in better contextualizing the lessons of the work at hand in our lives. Before I close this digression, I would like to add that the role philosophy plays, whilst observing from an ontological vantage point, is much greater and demands a compulsion, if not an interest, to discover and establish annealing affinities between any number of entities that we do contemplate to be in the possession of logical similarities.

Whilst a philosophical expediency is predominantly empirical, the opportunity of science reaffirms that character and proceeds to favor establishmentanarianism as an assimilation of conclusions drawn from empirical observations; that our pronouncements on the macrocosm we occupy would be so primordially limited in scope and faith is abundant proof toward the corroboration of determinism. If not for entropy, the deterministic quality of our surroundings would be fait accompli simply because, in our attempts toward the evaluation of this universe, the premise and the calibration have both been quantitatively estimable; there is absolutely no sustainable argument that our conclusions can not be so.