Agreed
Things are fixed by natural law, but’s it’s more. Fixed by its own nature.
For science it becomes how
For philosophy it becomes to what extent.
Religion and a few random posters will tell us the Why’s, but we all are fully capable of recognizing and smelling baloney.
nice. we can easily troubleshoot this if you keep working with me. but i think it would be best if you allow me to point you in the right direction and make your own discovery.
can you pinpoint the one major difference between your own definition of D and the one bellow?
" all events are determined completely by previously existing causes."
Without being too fussy, the two are compatible. However, if you try to define "cause" in yours, you may find you get to the notion that there are things in the past about which sufficient information is known to be able to deduce the event in question. And that can be rephrased compactly by saying it is possible to predict the event.
It's worth mentioning that the observability of information about past causes is extremely important. Without this, you can imagine that in the past there is a complete recipe for the results of all future possible experiments, which happens to be carefully designed to reproduce the predictions of quantum mechanics, but that this recipe is impossible to directly detect in any way (it just permeates all of space-time after its creation).
The reason this is not a way round the key results disproving determinism is that in order to get the right results, when you do a Bell's experiment and make two observations of entangled photons at random angles, in order to get the right results, at each of the observations you need to know what angle the other observation was made. This is a breach of causality (since the choices of angle can be made simultaneously (in any frame) so there is no time to communicate them between the two points).
It has the same effect as the unclosable loophole that says that although it might appear that you have complete choice of the angles you pick (eg by using any source of randomness of your choice at each location) they are really all predetermined by a global conspiracy.
good. but they are not compatible at all. lets not argue about it yet. instead.. lets talk first about 'real determinism', and once we get over that, we can compare it to yours.
here's a quote i just grabbed from stanford:
"Traditionally determinism has been given various, usually imprecise definitions. This is only problematic if one is investigating determinism in a specific, well-defined theoretical context; but it is important to avoid certain major errors of definition. In order to get started we can begin with a loose and (nearly) all-encompassing definition as follows:
Determinism: The world is governed by (or is under the sway of) determinism if and only if, given a specified way things are at a time t, the way things go thereafter is fixed as a matter of natural law. "