Is the trajectory here “due to chance”?
87 thoughts on “Chance”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
Is the trajectory here “due to chance”?
You must be logged in to post a comment.
A darwinist should answer yes.
A deterministic should answer no.
A theist can say it is not due to chance but it is neither determined.
This “darwinist” (Gregory, you know what I mean by this term) says: chance is not a cause.
What this “darwinist” says is that the trajectory is determined but unpredictable.
Because it is unpredictable, we can, informally, say it is “due to chance”, meaning that we cannot model it in any way other than giving the entire dataset (i.e. not a “model” but the thing-itself).
But in that case, “chance” ~= “deterministic”
It underscores my point that “chance” refers to what we cannot predict aka uncertainty and is not a property of the phenomenon in question, but a property of our knowledge of it, which can change.
In this case, I can predict what it will do pretty well, by watching it a few times, and remembering the moves.
Does it move from being “chance” to “deterministic” just because I have seen it once before?
Does that even make any sense?
You then are saying that Gould was wrong.
OP:
Any minute now, Dr. phoodoo will come in to tell us that this is an example of chaotic motion.
I do hope so.
Gould was wrong about a number of things (as are all scientists), but which particular thing did you have in mind?
Blas,
Don’t be lazy, Blas. Give us the Gould quote.
A GIF repeats itself. If the physical object represented by the GIF is set in motikn multiple times it will not repeat.
Evolution may or may not repeat, depending on the constraints imposed by chemistry. In highly constrained situations, such as Lensky’s lab, it may repeat.
Although he is writing mainly about determinism and free will, Sean Carroll has a worthwhile introduction to “chance” used in three different senses: unpredictable due to mathematical chaos, unpredictable due to lack of knowledge, and inherently unpredictable due to quantum effects. How can we have determinism and chance? And is chance fundamental due to quantum effects or is it always reducible to lack of knowledge?
His view:
Sean Carroll on Determinism
Turtles all the way down.
I think sometimes that theists are simply envious of science’s ability to build stories that are deeper, more interesting and more useful than those about sky fairies.
That we are her by chance?
If I understand this concern properly, it raises some interesting issues in philosophy of science: what is the role of chance in a scientific explanation? And if we say chance has a role in an explanation, does that mean it is a cause?
I know that many of these questions have been addressed in various ways in previous posts, but I have not seen these questions addressed exactly for statements like this:
A chance asteroid impact wiped out the dinosaurs and so was an important factor in the evolution of mammals.
Is this a valid usage of chance in an evolutionary explanation? I would say yes because it would be outside the local knowledge of the fitness landscape for dinosaurs (local being a key term: it would be impractical to use the state of the whole universe).
Is this still a valid explanation even though it involves chance? That is an easier question to answer when the model has probability distributions that are easy to calculate. But with asteroid impacts we are trying to model very rare events. I think it is this kind of discontinuity that Blas may be referencing in Gould which does not seem to be open to the same kind of stochastic model as coin flips or drug trials.
If we nonetheless accept chance as a valid term in a scientific explanation, does that mean it is a cause? I don’t think so. I think this is an explanation of biology using a mechanism, not deduction from some general causal law, so it still makes sense to use chance as part of that mechanism and consistently say chance is not a cause. But I am getting beyond my philosophical depth on that.
Bruce do not confuse science with metaphisics. The question if chance exists and thenis a “cause” is a metaphisical one. The answer on that question will lead you to an epistemology and this will condition your scientific answers.
Usually darwinists don´t see the differences and claim to have the cake after eat it.
Sean Caroll, who I referenced above, agrees that whether or not chance is knowledge (ie Bayesian) is an open question in physics and I guess metaphysics as well. He knows far more about it than me.
I would put the nature of cause as more in the field of open questions in philosophy of science than metaphysics. I am not an expert there either (where is KN when you need him?), but I believe that although cause is still not fully understood, chance is not considered a cause philosophically.
I find the way you use chance and rare, unmodellable events to criticize evolution reminds me of Nassim Talebs use of rare events (Black Swans) to criticize financial modelling. I think the essence of his criticism is that such models are worse than useless since they fail badly when you most need them.
On the other hand, I don’t think this criticism applies to evolution, since it makes many useful, testable, ongoing predictions, even if we decide to class external, rare events like asteroid strikes (or volcano eruptions) to be chance events outside the model.
Blas,
Informally, of course we are. Your father met your mother ‘by chance’. The genes from their own parents that recombined at gametogenesis were mixed ‘by chance’. The egg that descended into the Fallopian tube and the sperm that won the race to it likewise … there is, of course, a causal history underlying the actual events. Chance did not ’cause’ them; we use the word to denote the idea that other possibilities could as readily have occurred.
‘Rewind the tape’ with some change of initial conditions and you would not be here. Perhaps if we could get every atom to reoccupy its precise original position (a process that would require us to relocalise energy against entropy) the same thing would happen; perhaps not. We have no way of knowing.
But just as your personal existence is apparently subject to a degree of probabilistic uncertainty, so is the summation of uncertainties in the trajectories and genetic combinations of the set of all lives – ie Life, and hence its evolutionary trajectories. There are potential convergences – Conway Morris wrote a book about them, somewhat unconvincing to my mind. There appears nothing in evolutionary history that rendered humans inevitable, any more than you as an individual.
Thanks for this!
Then you are one of that darwinists Lizzie is looking for. Darwinists that say chance is a cause.
But only “informally”, Blas, which is my point. Scientifically, chance is not a cause. It’s the part of the data we don’t model; it isn’t the part we do.
Blas,
Chance exists. So does free will. Both present the same problem theologically – that is, freedom of action within divine providence. If you can accept one, then you ought to accept the other.
Quick one for you Blas. Does “Chance” exist for God? If not, why not?
Then you’ve misunderstood both Gould and Lizzie. No, Gould wasn’t wrong, but he was talking about contingency.
Like a giant meteor hitting your planet and causing a great extinction event, which caused many ecological niches to open up and subsequently shape the history of evolution. We don’t model evolution with complete solar system models, so in that sense meteor impacts are “due to chance”. But that doesn’t, of course, actually mean that “chance” was the cause of the meteor impact. The trajectory of the meteor no doubt has it’s own deterministic causal history, it’s just not part of the model of the history of life. Events like that are what Gould called “chance” events that shaped the evolutionary history of life. In that sense it would be absolutely correct to say that we are here due to those events. They just don’t constitute “chance” in the strange strawman way creationists think about it, which seems to never go beyond the semantic caricature of “exceedingly improbable lucky accident”.
Blas,
Nowhere in my post do I say that chance is a cause. I say precisely the opposite – there were actual causal reasons why your parents met, why this sperm or that got there first, why a crossover formed here rather than there. But things could causally have been otherwise. There is a probability distribution. You seem to delight in misunderstanding, and linguistic differences are becoming less and less of an excuse.
I was running up Mount Ngauruhoe in NZ and a chap I know was coming down. He recognised my distinctive running style from afar and said to his companions “I’d swear that was Allan Miller”. And it was. We’d both booked holidays from the UK to New Zealand and had both ended up, through different paths, on the same hill at the same time. Two causal paths intersected, in neither of which did ‘chance’ play a causal role. Chance did not cause us to meet, but still we met by chance. Had we been the opposite sex, we may have fallen in love and had babies. But it so happens – by chance – that the sperm that made it to his mother’s egg bore a Y chromosome. Chance did not cause that either. The X went to another sperm. They both had to go somewhere.
No, Monod when writed Le hasard et la necessite were not talking informally, when Gould said that if we rewind the history we could not be here were not talking informally. You probably change the meaning of chance accomodating the speach to your personal view. If you really think that chance it is not a cause you would never ask the question of this OP because the only answer for you is a deterministic one.
Thanks, Blas, I wondered if you meant Monod. Have you read it? It’s a good book, but I’m much more impressed by his use of word “teleonomy”, than his conceptualisation of “hazard”. But in any case, he uses “hazard” exactly as Alan does above, to mean contingency stuff that happens, that has its own causal chain, but is not predictable in terms of the stuff it affects, just as, to use rumraket’s example, the trajectory of a meteor is absolutely driven by “law” and you decision to park your car in the drive is a matter of will, and yet if the meteor strikes your car we say it is “chance”. Chance caused neither the car in the drive nor the trajectory of the meteor – the fact that each met the other is nontheless “chance” in the sense that there is no general law that we can use to predict whether cars parked in drives will be struck by meteors.
And that is my point: nobody claims, not even Monod, that “chance” caused life, but rather that many alternative things could have happened, all within the laws of the universe, that would not have end up with life, or produced life very different from the biology we observe.
The difference may be subtle, but it is important. We do not model, in science, chance as a “cause” but precisely the opposite – we treat it as the portion in the variance of our data that is not modelled
No Allan it is not me that make linguistic differences, are you darwinist that do not understand what is behind. KN made a post about “Plato trichotomy” because that is the issue here. If there is a cause because my spermatozoa won the race and my mother met my father and so on, I am an unavoidable consequences of the “laws of nature”. Humans are not here by chance. Do you agree with that?
Then it was unavoidable that humans exists?
That probably depends on whether quantum events really are truly undetermined or not. I think many physicists would say they appear to be. But the short answer is we don’t know.
Then science cannot answer the question if chance is a cause or not?
I think you might credit me with understanding evolutionary theory, and the role of probability.
I fail to see the relevance.
It could have gone other ways.
If you think that, given every condition from the Big Bang onwards, the Universe unrolled in some Laplacian sense where every subsequent state was an inevitable consequence of that prior, then everything is ‘unavoidable’, humans included. Doesn’t seem to leave much room for free will, you non-determinist, you!
I don’t think that is the case, myself, though I’m agnostic on the matter of ‘free will’. I think that, if it were possible to get every fermion and lepton back into its original place with its original energy at the Big Bang, the universe would still unroll differently, because of the amplification of quantum uncertainties.
A better thought experiment might be to consider a huge population of seeded life-bearing earth-like planets. How many of them do you think would (eventually!) have humans on them?
If you were you would answer differently.
And what would changes the outcome. Given the same conditions what makes the result A ine time and result B another.
Wich is the cause of quamtum uncertainities, are they “ramdom” because we do not know the variables and also that uncertainities are determined or not determined and “ramdom” caused by “chance”?
If humans are determined in the seeding conditions all of them, if not none.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
Apparently it is.
phoodoo,
Praise be to God! phoodoo reads Wikipedia, spots the right animation.
What’s next? Peace on Earth? The lion and the lamb lie down together?
Blas,
Depends what you mean by ‘the same’. Winding back every fundamental particle to its original state is much more ‘the same’ than generating separate instances, which will inevitably differ in some degree. In either case, differences will arise because we appear not to live in a ‘classical’, Laplacian universe.
I dunno, I’m not a physicist (and they don’t really know eiither). Einstein favoured hidden variables. So do I, if I’m honest. But experiments such as Alain Aspect’s on Bell’s Inequality have, I’m told, turned out badly for the ‘hidden variable’ brigade. The causality and properties we are familiar with simply breaks down at the quantum level.
How on earth can anyone – even a God – ‘determine humans in the seeding conditions’? Even getting an earth identical to this one historically, with every atom the same, is subject to quantum uncertainty. It only takes one atom to be out of line and the whole future state is amended. Are you familiar with chaos theory?
Your proposal also seems at odds with free will. One can of course regard free will as purely a property of human minds, but once it arises, all ‘pre-seeded’ bets are off. You could have a Laplacian evolution, doubtful but unprovable since we cannot rewind the tape in practice, but your own existence includes a huge dose of choices made by ancestors. As does all human evolution since this mysterious moment when free will arose.
So are you saying it is an example of chaos or it is not? What is the point of your posts?
phoodoo, you are starting to ask the right questions! Keep it up!
We are making an argument not defining an experiment. If we were at the same initial condition are we going to have the same result? Yes or no? If no what produce the different results?
Then the scientific answer is “we do not know if chance exists” or if you want “we do not know if the universe is fully determined, then chance may exist”.
Defining chance a cause, as I said many times at TSZ, is a metaphysical position. Not a scientific one. Make your choice and accept the consequences.
You proposed a though experiment I gived a tough answer, you are saying that your though experiment is impracticable?
That is a possibility, my only point here is that darwinists usually, maybe unconsciusly, think chance as a cause.
The point it is not if it is practicable rewind the tape. The point is if evolution it is not “Laplacian” what makes it “not Laplacian”. We do not know, but that is an expression that darwinists don´t like to say, then they out there the word “chance” and in that context has the meaning of “cause”.
The short answer, Blas, is it depends. Now for the long answer.
If you take a simple mechanical system with just one degree of freedom, like the simple pendulum (caution: standard terminology!) and set it in motion repeatedly with nearly the same initial conditions, you will see nearly the same motion every time. The smaller the error in the initial conditions, the smaller will be the difference. For all practical purposes, the motion will be repeated exactly.
If, however, you take a slightly more complex system, e.g., the double pendulum, there is a good chance that even tiny deviations in the initial conditions will give rise to drastically different motion in the long term. Two trajectories that begin very close to one another will keep diverging as time goes on. You will observe that seemingly the same initial conditions give rise to drastically different outcomes. This is what chaos (again, technical term) looks like in mechanics.
So essentially you are admitting that you didn’t think this was an example of chaos, until I showed you with a link that scientists claim it is. Now you are trying to gloss over your ignorance?
I lose respect for people who are too embarrassed to admit they are wrong.
LOL.
Phoodoo, I notice that you often take what someone said and then claim they meant the exact opposite. Do you think that’s a good way to further honest discussion?
You mean like that guy who insisted fair=random despite being corrected by a dozen knowledgeable people? Yeah, I hear ya.
Olegt said no such thing, and as he is a physicist, I’m sure he knew at once that it was a classic example of a chaotic system. Indeed, he gives a nice explanation of the phenomenon in his post above.
Nonetheless, on this site, the rules are that you must treat all members with respect. And in this case, you have no reason to believe he was wrong, although his original post was not very respectful of you.
So I ask both of you to stick to the rules! Assume the other poster is posting in good faith.
I think the answer to that is entirely contained within the paragraph you are responding to. What you consider ‘the same’ is relevant. It is however not crucial since quantum uncertainty will IMO cause a different result regardless. But in the second case – creating a facsimile, rather than starting with the same thing you are already on the way to divergence, if the system is chaotic. Which evolution is, as can be demonstrated mathematically, computationally and practically.
Since I have explicitly said several times that I do not consider ‘chance’ a cause, I’m finding this line of attribution to me of things I have not said to become rather tiresome. If one looks for a particular quantum object and finds it at position x, when the wave function gives a range of places I could have found it, I do not consider the cause of that object’s appearance to be ‘chance’. The wavefunction is probabilistic.
I think that’s the general idea with thought experiments. You are at liberty to consider the outcome 10% unicorns if you so choose. I was trying to get at the distinction between identity – every atom in exactly the same place – and similarity – an equivalent experimental setup. Your answer is effectively ‘those planets that will lead to humans will lead to humans’, and misses the point by some way.
Oh, that old chestnut. Darwinists are lying to themselves, blind to the obvious, blah de blah. No, we don’t knowingly think of chance as a cause. If we do so unconsciously, how would you know?
One thought on this idea that the unrolling of the universe might be complelely set ab initio, and that the entirety of the future is an unavoidable consequence of the past: so what? How would that change one’s behaviour? If a speeding car is heading towards you, and you exercise your option to get out the way, then that exercising was part of the unrolling. Unless you are stupid, or an adherent of one of the more dumbly fatalistic religions, you get out of the way. Either way (in this hypothetical billiard-ball universe), what you did was what-was-bound-to-happen. This is no more constraining than being part of some sky-being’s Plan.
As I read a book or watch a film, the ending already exists, but the story is no less fascinating (or not) for that. Life is finding out what happens next, and that curiosity would be in no way diminished by ‘hard’, Laplacian determinism. And if that were the actual state-of-affairs, there’d be bugger all you could do about it anyway!
Speaking of “chance;” does anyone remember Chance the gardener, played by Peter Sellers in “Being There?”
One of the funniest parodies of our political system in the US that I have seen.
Dennett makes the interesting point that “inevitable” doesn’t mean “unavoidable”. Just because in deterministic universe (and we don’t know if ours is or not) some Laplacian demon would know the ending and thus that it is “inevitable”, that doesn’t mean that we can’t “avoid” things – and we patently do.
In fact there is a good reason to think that “avoiding” things is one of most important things that animals do, and which means that we have evolved very differently from plants – with brains, rather than bark, or toxins!
Short answer, science do not know if the universe is determinted or not, then the possibility of chance as cause exists.
Well, chance still wouldn’t be a “cause” Blas, in the scientific science; it would just mean that there would always be error terms in our models.
Chance is still not a cause. Chance is still just our common name for the outcome of a stochastic process.
Well we have got something here.
1) We do not know if the universe is determined.
2) We can change the future.
Given the 1) How do you think we can avoid a determined future? How can a product of a stochastic process “avoid” the “inevitable”?
Ok Allan enjoy it. I have no problem if you think that our future is already settled by the physical laws. The only think I would expect from you is to admit that are wrong when Gould or any other darwinist says humans could not be here.