Peter Jones writes:
> Physical determinism is the idea that the
> future is genrated form the persent by rigid physical
> laws. As opposed to the idea that the future is fixed
> becasue it is already "there", like the end of a movie
> which is already in the can , and need not bear any logical
> relation to what has gone before (especially
> if it is a david Lynch movie).
I don't see how you can distinguish between a movie + projector
system and any other deterministic physical system. If I turn the
projector on with the film in place, the ending of the movie is neither
more nor less fixed than the final arrangement of billiard balls if I hit
one of them with the cue. If I had hit the first ball a little differently,
or the air currents in the room had been a little different, then the
final arrangement of balls would have been different, but then if the
chemicals in the film had undergone some unexpected reaction, or the
motor of the projector started to behave differenltly, then the film
on the screen would also have been different:
film <-> initial conditions
projector <-> physical laws
movie on screen <-> future physical state
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Sat Sep 02 2006 - 05:17:58 PDT