From: SMTP%"savitt@unixg.UBC.CA" 22-OCT-1996 10:51:54.26 To: STAPP CC: Subj: Determinism/Becoming Message-Id: <9610221750.AA00355@> Content-Type: text/plain Mime-Version: 1.0 (NeXT Mail 3.3 v118.2) From: Steve Savitt Date: Tue, 22 Oct 96 10:50:05 -0700 To: Henry Stapp Subject: Determinism/Becoming Dear Henry Stapp, In response to the discussion of the "now" in PSYCHE - D, I sent a message to be posted, which the moderator killed. I think he (probably correctly) thinks the discussion is getting off topics appropriate for his list. At any rate, I wished to put a question to you that you might (or might not) wish to address off-list. ---------------------------------------------------------- Stapp responded: The key point here is that classical mechanics is deterministic, and hence specifies in terms of initial conditions the entire spacetime description, so that there was no concept of "becoming" within the theory: everything was, from the theoretical point of view, all laid out. And within his realm of readings everything was also all laid out. I comment: Let us suppose for the sake of argument that the claim that classical mechanics is deterministic is unproblematic. This means something like: if you have an "entire spacetime description" at a time t [We are dealing with classical spacetime here, with (hyper-)planes of simultaneity.], then the state of the entire spacetime at future times t* (and the state at past times as well) is completely fixed. But I have never understood the move from that idea to the claim that there is no genuine evolution or "becoming" of the system as it changes from t to t* (or from t* to t), though many thoughtful persons, including Hans Reichenbach, have seen a connection. Another way to ask this question is: suppose we say that given the "entire spacetime description" at t, the probability of the state description at t* is 1 (determinism). Why should reducing that probability to any value below 1 (and so introduce INdeterminism) somehow be connected to the idea of a genuinely dynamical time or becoming? My answer to this question, by the way, is that there is *no* logical connection between the two sets of ideas (determinsism/indeterminism vs dynamical/non-dynamical time). Thay neither exclude nor ential one another. What are the *arguments* to the contrary? Steve Savitt Dear Steve, I am not suggesting that it is logically impossible for there to be genuine becoming in a deterministic system such as Newtonian mechanics. On the other hand, there is no *need* for becoming in that system: all that it really says is that the properties labelled by different times are related to each other in a specified way. If one just stared at the equations one would not be able to detect the notion of "becoming" there: indeed in some `least action' formulations of the dynamics the whole spacetime structure is conceived to be laid out, and global properties of the entire structure are identified. From a mathematical perspective the notion of "becoming" is an ad hoc addition to Newtonian mechanics, appended to the structure to bring it into accord with the nature of our experience of the world. This perspective on "becoming" comes to the fore when one goes over to special relativity, if one buys into the notion that there really is no favored frame, ontologically. For it is impossible to get any clear idea of the process of becoming without introducing something like a favored frame, or favored advancing spacelike surface, or some such thing. Einstein's boldness consisted in the fact that he did not allow this conceptual difficulty to hold him back: he basically just ignored the problem of how to comprehend the becomingness of nature. In some sense he just considered it all laid out: he spatialized time. He considered the entire 4-d continuum of "observers", and specified global relationships between their instantaneous views without worrying about the metaphysical issue of the coming into being of these views, or their fading away. Going over to QM is more than just bringing in probability: it is about what the probabilities are "of". Given that the universe is at some time in a classically describable state, it soon evolves deterministically into a superposition of different classically describable states. So in relation to our possible experiences the entire structure is like a collection of possibilities, which are specified or determined on out into the infinite future. Neither experience nor becoming are part of this mathematical structure: there is no need to append becoming because there is no experience. But Bohr says it is to be interpreted as being about experiences: it is to be interpreted as providing a mathematical tool for making statistical experiences about our experiences. This view is "ontologicalized" in the BHvNW interpretation: the theory is construed as being about "events" that are both "becomings" and "experiences", where now "experiences" are taken in the broad sense of including the precursors to " human experiences". So "becomings" are made the ontological core of the theory, rather than being some strange appendage that has no logical rationale within the mathematical structure of the theory. Best regards, Henry