Determinism and indeterminism

Determinism is relative and dependent on the perspective of the observer. If we take the space-time window of the universe, the deterministic event there is the Big Bang. This event produces a single trajectory and we can say — according to our current knowledge — that this event will one day lead to the entropic heat death of the universe (whether this is so or not is irrelevant here). If we take a smaller space-time window, e.g. that of an hour at a certain location, then there are a lot of deterministic events at work there, so there are many trajectories. From a macroscopic point of view, all the events and trajectories there seem probabilistic. If the space-time window is narrowed down to the level of quanta, indeterminism is — from a macroscopic point of view — infinitely large. Events and trajectories overlap to form fields that are no longer distinguishable as points or lines.

From the point of view of a photon, the same situation is completely different, where the atomic decay is a deterministic event that can be precisely determined in terms of space time — but only from the point of view of a photon.

This relativity also gives rise to predictive power. The more events and trajectories there are in a phase space, the more indeterministic the scenario and the lower the predictive power. For example, our universe is indeterministic when viewed from the perspective of the existence of an infinite number of universes that differ by different parameters. The predictive power for the future of each of these universes is then very low.

The predictive power is maximum when we enter the space-time window of a single event, such as that of the Big Bang with its causal sequence of the evolution of the universe.

So you could say that there are an infinite number of events and thus trajectories, the number of which decreases proportionally with the enlargement of the space-time window. Once the maximum scale of a phase space has been reached, there is only one deterministic event whose predictive power is maximum. This does not take into account the fact that events of the same size can change the initial event.

Seen in this light, indeterminism at the quantum level is nothing more than an observational effect from a macro perspective.

This, by the way, has nothing to do with coincidence. Events that constitute a trajectory arise randomly or non-randomly.

Let’s take any phase space of a few seconds at any location and observe, for example, how a gust of wind blows away a piece of paper. This process can be described as deterministic. The wind is the cause of the blowing away. The leaf flutters to the ground.

Another scenario: a person is sitting at a table, suddenly the wind comes up and the person thinks about whether to stay seated or go into the house. No matter how he chooses to speak of a determinism in terms of his decision, it would be pure physicalism, because the person is not only influenced by a great many things at that moment, he decides for himself what he does in the next moment.

And it does not make this decision according to a simple and banal stimulus-response scheme, but from a highly complex interplay of conscious and unconscious impulses.

One thinks of the well-known Libet experiment, in which this highly complex process was reduced to this naïve formula: Physis decides before the decision comes into consciousness. Several mistakes were made here:

1. A causality between two levels of description has been assumed that does not exist

2. A duality between unconscious and conscious action has been proclaimed.

Both are an epistemic construct.

Free will is thus a relativistic functional system that has its own dynamics, which are not reducible to either the environment or the physis.