----- Original Message ----- From: "Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Thursday, April 11, 2002 7:54 AM Subject: Re: You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows
> I didn't say that determinism (that every event has a cause), was true. I
> said that physics and chemistry are determinsitic if we ignore quantum
> effects,w hich we do at the level of the weather.
Which means our models yield only approximate answers, but we'd never be able to tell the difference.
> By the way the sentence "every event has a determinate cause" is
> meaningless or false even if determinism is true. There is a sense in
which
> any event might be said to be caused at least in part by everything in its
> backward facing light cone.
Which sense? Perhaps any given event is contingent upon everything that preceded it, but why think that's the case?
> Five word too many for you? You can leave out the "hopelessly" and get it
> down to four.
Five word too many.
> My point has nothing to do with chaos theory. Chaos theory makes the
weather
> _more_ predictable.
And neither does mine. I'm just asking for a different term.
-- Luke
> Btw, I wrote on this in my diss, you can look it up, it's in the final
> chapter, on Davidson.
>
> jks
>
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