Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> 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 you change th N'th fream of a move, the N+1'th frame
does not change
If you change the N'th stage of a causally-linked physical process
the N+1'th stage *does* change.
> 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:
The only way the end of the film can change is if
something happens to the *final* frames. The frames
of the move are not causally interlinked.
What makes a process a process is that changing one part of it changes
other parts.
I have explained this before.
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Received on Sat Sep 02 2006 - 09:44:07 PDT