As I understand it (please do correct me if I'm wrong) at

File: determinism.jpg (104KB, 600x849px) Image search: [Google]

104KB, 600x849px

It's all a long deterministic chain reaction that started (presumably) with the big bang. Everything after that is a result of action-reaction transfer of energy, which is based on completely physical, deterministic laws dictated by mathematical rules. That's all there is.

>>7781450
I assume you're talking about vacuum fluctuation.
This isn't actually a time-dependant fluctuation - the ground state does not change over time.
Vacuum fluctuation means that if you were to measure the magnetic field, say, of the vacuum, you'd find that the result is not zero, but oscillates around zero. This is essentially the same as Heisenberg uncertainty, but in field theory,

>>7781459
No, no, I'm talking about within a moment in time and not time temporally. If the fundamental elements of nature moved how did it move and why in that way in that moment?

I don't believe this is about the Big Bang.

>>7781471
You can't really separate a moment in time without including what happened prior to it. Things move because other things gave them the energy to do it. Technically there can be no entity that operates without the initial push which means everything is deterministic.

>>7781481
Of course we can. It's called sustaining causation. We have within a moment a chain of things making other things be as they are. When we work that chain back I'm curious how we understand the fundamental parts of nature in relation to it. The only way I can make sense of it is something self-caused but that leads into a lot of weird questions and I'm not sure if I'm understanding the situation well enough to continue with the situation.

>>7781469
>This isn't actually a time-dependant fluctuation - the ground state does not change over time.

By "not time dependent" do you mean instantaneous like I was speaking about in this post?

>oscillates around zero
Thank you for explaining but that seems to lead into my original questions:


However are these fluctuations deterministic? Why do certain actions with that ground state happen when they do? Is that something we're still trying to understand or am I just completely misrepresenting the issue?


Thank you for taking the time to explain thus far.

>>7781510
Explain how you can examine the behaviour of a subject without examining the things that caused it to be. Explain how you can ask the question of "how it happened" while ignoring the things that made it happen.

>>7781517
>Explain how you can examine the behaviour of a subject without examining the things that caused it to be.

We won't be able to explain the full behavior of a subject from simply a moment's chain of causation but we can understand the nature of what truly causes the subject to be in their current state and what they rely on to be in that state along with what precisely makes them be in that immediate state by examining that sustaining causation (or vertical causation if you wish to use that term instead).

>Explain how you can ask the question of "how it happened" while ignoring the things that made it happen.

By not framing causation so simplistically. For the situation of a rock going through a window it is more accurate to say that the rock pushing the glass and the glass giving way caused the break than saying me throwing the rock, even though both claims are true.

Anyone?

please

Not sure what you're asking, OP, but you found confused.

>>7781559
>We won't be able to explain the full behavior of a subject from simply a moment's chain of causation but we can understand the nature of what truly causes the subject to be in their current state and what they rely on to be in that state along with what precisely makes them be in that immediate state by examining that sustaining causation

If you wanted to get technical, an attempt at this could create an infinite chain of finding sustaining causations, accounting for an exponentially increasing and also possibly infinite number of variables and fluctuations. There is no point at which sustaining causation is not a factor.

>For the situation of a rock going through a window it is more accurate to say that the rock pushing the glass and the glass giving way caused the break than saying me throwing the rock, even though both claims are true.

Both are true, but you throwing the rock is the sustaining causation behind the rock pushing the glass. Each moment and fluctuation is the sum of all previous moments and fluctuations. And while you throwing the rock was not the only possible causation for it breaking the glass, in that moment it would be more true to say the rock pushing the glass and the glass giving way was the result of you throwing the rock.

Think of time as an infinite snake sparkler- the ashy snake part is the past, the flash point is the present, and the ignition source is the future

Is it not still the sheer inertia from each moment of the universes previous state that projects it into the 'now'

Determinism means that we can predict my thoughts? everything is predefined?