> rev.goetzyahoo.com> wrote:

>> On Jul 5, 3:53 am, j.wilki...@uq.edu.au (John Wilkins) wrote:

>>>rev.goetzyahoo.com> wrote:

>>>> On Jul 4, 1:51 am, j.wilki...@uq.edu.au (John Wilkins) wrote:

>>>>>rev.goetzyahoo.com> wrote:

>>>>>> On Jun 28, 8:03 pm, j.wilki...@uq.edu.au (John Wilkins) wrote:

>>>>>>>rev.goetzyahoo.com> wrote:

>>>>>>>> On Jun 28, 6:05 am, j.wilki...@uq.edu.au (John Wilkins) wrote:

>>>>>>>>>rev.goetzyahoo.com> wrote:

>>>>>>>>>> On Jun 26, 8:10 pm, j.wilki...@uq.edu.au (John Wilkins) wrote:

>>>>>>>>>>>rev.goetzyahoo.com> wrote:

>>>>>>>>>>>> On Jun 26, 2:22 am, j.wilki...@uq.edu.au (John

> Wilkins) wrote:

>>>>>>>>>>>>> Average Joe comcast.net> wrote:

>>>>>>>>>>>>>> On Mon, 25 Jun 2007 22:42:47 -0700, Don Stockbauer

> wrote:
>

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Humans have free will.

>

>>>>>>>>>>>>>> I believe all life has free will, plants are not alive
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> they are just animated, neither has free domain, only
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> God has free domain

>

>>>>>>>>>>>>> Everything, including God if he exists, is forced to act
>>>>>>>>>>>>> according to its nature.

>

>>>>>>>>>>>> Are you backsliding into extreme determinism? All freewill
>>>>>>>>>>>> agents act within the limits of their nature, but there is
>>>>>>>>>>>> still freedom within those limits.

>

>>>>>>>>>>> I'm not backsliding. I always was, in this sense, an
>>>>>>>>>>> "extreme" determinist (as a compatibilist, I think that
>>>>>>>>>>> *moral* senses of "free will" are compatible with all our
>>>>>>>>>>> acts being determined). In any case, God has no free will in
>>>>>>>>>>> the determinist sense.

>

>>>>>>>>>> Since I have little free time these days, I will have to drag
>>>>>>>>>> this out into small pieces over an *undetermined* period of
>>>>>>>>>> time.

>

>>>>>>>>>> First of all, are you back to believing that all physical
>>>>>>>>>> events are determined?

>

>>>>>>>>> I don't know at the quantum level, but at the level of
>>>>>>>>> biology, yes.

>

>>>>>>>> Are you saying that there is no randomness in random genetic drift
>>>>>>>> <www.talkorigins.org/faqs/genetic-drift.html> or anything else in
>>>>>>>> biology?

>

>>>>>>> Yes. Every event is causally fully determined (in macro-physical
>>>>>>> terms_. Of course, that doesn't mean that there is no randomness in
>>>>>>> the equations or in drift - just because something is physically
>>>>>>> determined doesn't mean it is biologically determined. There's a
>>>>>>> physical cause, for example, of every mutation. But it isn't
>>>>>>> biologically caused as such - that is extraneous to biology and not
>>>>>>> predictable from it.

>

>>>>>> Does this mean that the outcome of all computer pseudo-simulations of
>>>>>> randomness are deterministic?

>

>>>>> Absolutely. They are referred to as pseudorandom numbers for exactly
>>>>> that reason. They have patterns.

>

>>>> Wow. So pseudorandom numbers have pseudorandom distributions. And
>>>> these distributions are predictable. And this proves that pseudorandom
>>>> computer programs are determinstic.

>

>>> Of course it does. Did you imagine that there was a quantum particle
>>> source in a computer? It's [pretty close approximation of] a universal
>>> turing machine, so of *course* it is deterministic.

>

>> My point is that predictability of a distribution has nothing to do
>> with the predictability or particular events, other than the
>> probability of a particular outcome of a particular event. And I will
>> add that when indeterminate events build upon each other, then we can
>> have an unlimited number of possible outcomes. And I do not see how
>> this can work with any concept of determinism.

>
> Each call to rand() or its equivalent runs a deterministic algorithm
> (which I saw last night on the TV news spelled "algorithum"!). Because
> it is deterministic, the distribution of these pseudorandom outputs ins
> not actually random. One way they taught us to get around this was to
> "seed" the algorithm with a key press - the stochasticity of these
> physical events was enough to avoid the problems of pseudorandomness.

>
> If rand() truly was random in its output, then the processes that
> generated each value would be nondeterminate.

>
>
>

>>>> I think that we need to distinguish that predictable distributions
>>>> have nothing to do with predictable outcomes of a specific event.

>

>>> That wasn't what you asked. Each aprticular event is computible, and so
>>> it is deterministic. You seem to be confusing chaotic with random.

>

>> Please explain as if you were teaching a freshman class.

>
> You asked if the outcomes of pseudosimulations of randomness were
> deterministic. I gathered you were asking if that meant that each and
> all outputs from that processes were deterministic. They certainly are.
> Their "randomness" is relative to our knowledge of the inputs and
> outputs, not to their being determined by a turing computation.
>
> A lot of people think that the complexity of outputs must imply that
> there is something random, when what they seem to think is that the
> outcome is chaotic - something too hard to simply describe. But chaos in
> the mathematical sense is fully determined.
>
>
>

>>>>> I heard an *excellent* talk on randomness in evolution at the conference
>>>>> I just attended. He made the very clear point that there are at least
>>>>> four distinct interpretations of statistics in play.

>

>>>> And is one of them that all random events are actually deterministic?

>

>>> No. Why would it be, Jim?

>

>> I am attempting to follow you logic to its, well, logical conclusion.

>

>> snip

>
> I do not see how what I said implies that random events are
> deterministic. In fact I think that if we but had a full description of
> each event they would indeed be deterministic, no matter how random they
> seemed. In short, in a broad sense I deny randomness exists (we just do
> not have the math to describe subquantum determinacy yet).
>
> But in the context of *evolution*, which is very much a matter of
> macrolevel events, the "randomness" required is either a lack of
> correlation between mutation and functional requirement, as in classical
> selection, or it is some populational property like a distribution
> (which can be determined - in fact, as Gould once noted, distributions
> *are* a kind of determination. If they weren't, populations might have
> any old distribution). In the case of fitness there is also epistemic
> uncertainty versus expectations.
>
> --
> John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Biohumanities Project
> University of Queensland - Blog: scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts
> "He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor,
> bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious."- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -