[extropy-chat] Note on "Random (effects without a cause)" comment

[Jeff Medina]

On 11/25/05, John K Clark <jonkc at att.net> wrote:
> "Jeff Medina" <analyticphilosophy at gmail.com>
>
> > please note that no "random mutation" in
> > evolution is acausal or "an effect without a cause."
>
> Nonsense. [...]

Did you stop reading at this bit? Because your example does nothing to
contradict the last paragraph of my email, which distinctly specifies
the possibility of some low-level physical phenomena being
nondeterministic. You also continue to presume, wrongly, that just
because our mathematical model for C-14 decay is probabilistic, the
underlying physical process must be acausal.

A lack of knowledge of a deterministic model of a physical system does
not entail a lack of the existence of a deterministic process
underlying that system.

Asserting acausality in this case simply due to lack of a completely
satisfactory deterministic explanatory hypothesis is just as wrong as
creationists asserting divine intervention simply due to evolutionary
theory's lack of ability to explain a particular evolved trait (as
was, but is no longer, the case with flagella, for example).

> In addition this event will
> also produce a high speed electron moving in a random direction probably
> causing yet another mutation.

As I said earlier, " The possibility of determinism at the quantum
level without requiring
hidden variables or any of that is argued by ['t Hooft], for example."
Your science hobbyism doesn't qualify you to ignore the opinions of
Nobel Laureate theoretical physicists without rather good
justification, John. The electron, for which quantum physics is
relevant, will move in a direction we can't predict, not a
random/uncaused/nondeterministic one, if 't Hooft and others are
correct.

--
Jeff Medina
http://www.painfullyclear.com/

Community Director
Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
http://www.singinst.org/

Relationships & Community Fellow
Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies
http://www.ieet.org/

School of Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of London
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/phil/