Life of Pi

[sapphi_snake]

Bong Lover said:

I am more than willing to concede that it is possible, perhaps even most likely that the universe is nothing more than matter. I also know that there is no way of know this for sure though. To believe in something more or not is the basic concept of faith. To reject it is also a form of faith as I have pointed out, in the end it is a choice that everybody have to make for themselves, hopefully after giving the matter some serious thought.

This concludes my ramblings around the Life of Pi. And it would be a great place to end this thread if I didn't owe you and explanation of why a mechanical universe is deterministic.

If everything in the universe is describable with strict rules of physics then there is no room for randomness anymore. When a feeling is just a certain pattern of chemicals in your brain, and a decission is just an eletric pulse then all these things breaks down to interaction between molecules, their state is again determined by the configuration of their atoms, which again are determined by the presise position of the electrons, netrons and positrons at a given moment in time. Their state is determined by their quarks and probably etc. etc.

This means that at any instant in time, if we had the technology to do it, you can determine the exact position of every single particle in the universe, and from the laws of physics you can determine how they will interact and thus infer their state in the following instant of time. There is no randomness anymore, just particles doing what particles does.

Some might try to conter this by introducing chaos theory and how the behavior of particles can not be predicted. Of course, a chaos system is deterministic, it's just that we are too stupid to be able to predict them. Even seemingly random events are predetermined in a purely physical universe. That means not just how the earth moves around the sun, but how you act, any thing you feel is just a direct result of the previous state of the universe. In fact, you reading this post (or deciding not to) was already implied at the begining of the universe.

Of course, to reject the deterministic universe there has to be some force in the universe that is not governed by strict physical laws, a force that has the power to chose which way a quark will turn or whatever. If you allow for such a force we are back to square one, as this would be an instance of something 'supernatural'. Again, by supernatural I mean things that are outside of the physical universe and is not ruled by the laws of physics.

Aren't you going by the assumption that we know everything there is to know about the "physical" universe, and how it allegedly works?