Determinism is the
philosophical belief that every event or action is the inevitable result of
preceding events and actions. Therefore, in principle at least, every event or
action can be completely predicted in advance, or in retrospect. Fundamentally, Mankind’s innate actions are
rooted in a deterministic model. Man
desires to eat, reproduce, and avoid death.
During his short existence, he creates an environment aimed towards the
fulfillment of his deterministic desires. However, both the physical and mental
environment he lives within is chaotic.
Given that experience is rooted in a chaotic system it seems to place a
limit on Man’s capability to apply basic deterministic principles towards
achieving everyday desires with any degree of certainty. Nonetheless, he continues to hold faith in
his decisions as if his life was ruled by a deterministic system. Over time, this security has been
strengthened by science. Yet, even now,
as new scientific discoveries question the order of the universe Man has not
changed altered his faith determinism.
According to the
deterministic model of science, the universe unfolds in time like the workings
of a perfect machine, without a shred of randomness or deviation from the
predetermined laws. However, physicists have come to discover that chaotic
behavior is much more widespread then previously accepted deterministic
models. If one where able to observe
that the system in which they live in is not based on a deterministic model and
actualize this idea in their conscious continuum it might allow the possibility
for an individual to transcend the limitations of their deterministic
experience and cultivate a more encompassing naturalistic perception that is
rooted in the randomness of universe.
As a philosophical
belief about the material world, determinism can be traced back several
thousand years to Ancient Greece.
Determinism became incorporated into modern science around the year 1500
A.D. with the establishment of the idea that cause-and-effect rules completely
govern all motion and structure on the material level.
Isaac Newton
discovered a concise set of principles, expressible in only a few sentences,
which he showed could predict the motion in a wide variety of systems to a high
degree of accuracy. Newton demonstrated that his three laws of motion, combined
through the process of logic, could accurately predict the orbits in time of
the planets around the sun, the shapes of the paths of projectiles on earth,
and the schedule of the ocean tides throughout the month and year. Newton's
laws are completely deterministic because they imply that anything that happens
at any future time is completed determined by what happens now and moreover
that everything now was completely determined by what happened at any time in
the past.
Currently one of the
fundamental principles of modern experimental science is that no real
measurement is infinitely precise, but instead must necessarily include a
degree of uncertainty in the value. The uncertainty that is present in any real
measurement arises from the fact that any imaginable measuring device--even if
designed and used perfectly---can record its measurement only with a finite
precision. One way to understand this is to recognize that in order to record a
measurement with infinite precision, the instrument would require an output
capable of displaying an infinite number of digits. Conceptually this same principal holds true for social actions. Not matter how simple Man can never know
what effect his action while have in the future and what event his action was
based upon in the past.
The
present thought is that the universe is operating within a sort of dynamical
instability. Dynamical instability refers to a special kind of behavior in time
found in physical systems. The assumption was that if you could shrink the
uncertainty in the initial conditions---by using finer measuring
instruments---then any imprecision in the prediction would shrink in the same
way. In other words, by more precise information, you got more precise output
for any later or earlier time. Thus, it was assumed that it was theoretically
possible to obtain nearly-perfect predictions for the behavior of any physical
system. Although certain simple systems do obey the "shrink-shrink"
rule for initial conditions and final predictions, most systems do not.
Systems
that did not obey the rule consisted of three or more variables with
interaction between all three. For these types of systems a very tiny
imprecision in the initial conditions grow in time at an enormous rate. That
is, for these systems, even if you could specify the initial measurements to a
hundred times or a million times the precision, etc., the uncertainty for later
or earlier times would not shrink, but remain huge. Therefore for more
complicated systems, such as the choices individuals make with in society, any
imprecision at all, no matter how small, would result after a short period of
time in an uncertainty in the deterministic prediction which was hardly any
smaller than if the prediction had been made by random chance. This extreme
"sensitivity to initial conditions" has come to be called chaos.
Because long-term predictions made for chaotic systems are no more accurate
that random chance, only short-term simple predictions can be made with a
relative degree of accuracy.
Modern physicists
have come to discover that chaotic behavior is much more widespread then
previously accepted deterministic models.
The discovery of chaos seems to imply that randomness lurks at the core
of any deterministic model of the universe. It is this randomness that gives
life its "arrow of time," the irreversible flow from the past to the
future. Society needs to be aware that the results of their actions can not be
predicted to any degree of certainty because decisions are made within a
dynamic environment. Life is random and
experience irreversible. It is not
important to be able observe how experience is rooted in the past or where it
is heading in the future, but to have a strong perception of now.
Written by Tobin Butcher