Here's some examples:

strong - nothing ever accelerates faster than the speed of light

intermediate - lower value currency is more widely circulated than higher

weak - the sunrise regularly follows the beating of my heart

Further to my post #444 and Night Ripper's reply at #445:



Kennethamy - If you regard Night Ripper's "strong regularities" as caused, and his "weak regularities" as accidental, how would you categorise his "intermediate regularities"? Can there be a halfway house between causation and accident?

I believe in causation, by the way.

That it is not logically necessary that water turns to ice when cooled does not mean it is not physically necessary, and that it would not be physically impossible for cooled water to turn to steam.

Cool your water by putting it outside your space-ship. Have a guess, will it boil or freeze?

I believe in causation, by the way.

Let me start by saying I think physical necessity is being used (and ought to be used) in the same way empirical necessity is being used here.

"Something is empirically necessary when it could have happened otherwise but didn't. So, it might be an empirical necessity that there are no orange elephants or that I have to go to sleep at some time. Someone might talk of it being "unthinkable" not to act in a certain way, as if it were impossible not to, or for it to be "impossible" for something not to be the case. However, these examples only show what is the case, not what must be the case. These are called contingent or synthetic truths."

But with that said, and given that any change in water's form is not logically necessary, it does not follow that:

A.) We cannot know that water will not turn to steam when cooled.
B.) We cannot be certain and have good reason to believe water will not turn to steam when cooled.

Your position, I think, is thus: If X is not logically necessary, we can not know that X is true or false. But that is false. That X isn't logically necessary doesn't mean that we can't know that X is true or false. For instance, the proposition "There are no orange elephants" is not logically necessary (it is contingent matter), but we know that that proposition is true. Don't mistake the fact that X isn't logically necessary as a reason to think we cannot know about X. That the matter with the orange elephant isn't logically necessary is no reason to think we are mistaken that there are no orange elephants.

1) randomness doesn't "govern"
2) you're equivocating over two notions of randomness

Randomness, as opposed to unpredictability, is held to be an objective property - determinists believe it is an objective fact that randomness does not in fact exist. Also, what appears random to one observer may not appear random to another. Consider two observers of a sequence of bits, when only one of whom has the cryptographic key needed to turn the sequence of bits into a readable message. For that observer the message is not random, but it is unpredictable for the other.

Because it's complete, it cant be done in any finite period of time, in other words, it cant be done.

Because the cardinality of the reals entails that almost nothing in a continuous world is computable.

1) a determined world must be, in principle, fully and exactly computable
2) empirical observation does not suggest anything remotely resembling determinism.

There is not and cannot be randomness it only appears that way. I gave you 1 solid theory in my last post but you completely ignored it. De Broglie?Bohm theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia such theories posit such things as "hidden variables" which make a thing seem to be working by random factors simply because we have yet to observe the necessary thing to make the proper predictions....see the quote about need the cryptographic key

to say the world is random is still to say that you are not in control.

I gave you 1 solid theory in my last post but you completely ignored it. De Broglie?Bohm theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia such theories posit such things as "hidden variables" which make a thing seem to be working by random factors simply because we have yet to observe the necessary thing to make the proper predictions

this stems directly from 2 things...our equipment and our inability as of yet to predict the subatomic world

It should also be noted that Bohm is widely ignored by scientists because it's an ad hoc theory. It was designed exactly to fit all the data just like Quantum Mechanics does however QM was the theory that we had first and gave us stunningly accurate predictions while Bohm's theory was retrofitted in hindsight.

Another example comes the study of finite-state machines. Any indeterministic finite-state machine has a completely equivalent but more complex deterministic finite-state machine.

So, the fact that you can describe anything as deterministic rather than indeterministic means there should be little surprise when it does happen. It certainly isn't provide evidence for one over the other.

Y

So, the fact that nothing is X doesn't imply that X is physically impossible. Of course, that's all experiments can do. They can only confirm or deny the existence of X. They can't demonstrate X is physically necessary or physically impossible because we can't rule out the possibility that some things just always or never happen, even though they are contingent.

this is true but simply because something is more complex does not mean it's wrong.

No one is arguing that merely because something does not happen, it could not happen. Where did you get that idea?

I never claimed otherwise. Why don't you stick to replying to what I've actually written?



I got it from you because that's the only possible thing you can ever learn from an experiment, that something does or does not happen. There's no experiment that could ever tell you something could not happen, only that it does not happen. If you have anything more to add then it can't be based on experiments and therefore can't be based on science, scientific explanation, or anything else outside of the fictional world you've created.

You are equivocating. The randomness which conflicts with determinism is mathematical, the randomness which conflicts with free will is intentional.

1) Bohm's model is global, this conflicts with locality, locality is observable, globality isn't
2) Bohm's hypothesis is unecessary, QM is in any case irreducibly probabilistic
3) his hypothesis fails to Ockham's razor
4) his hypothesis is psychological, not philosophical.

Outstanding questions:
1) other than your claim of inductive suggestion from partial prediction, do you have any non-psychological reason to espouse determinism?
2) what do you mean by "magic"?

I never claimed otherwise. Why don't you stick to replying to what I've actually written?

Intentional, controllable randomness?

1. I espouse determinism on purely metaphysical grounds as it is impossible for you to tell me that anything which actually happens can be uncaused.

2. By magic I mean the explanation of that something which cannot logically be to something that is being observed.

To repeat, they all have livers because all dogs are mammals, and all mammals have livers.

So, the fact that nothing is X doesn't imply that X is physically impossible. Of course, that's all experiments can do. They can only confirm or deny the existence of X. They can't demonstrate X is physically necessary or physically impossible because we can't rule out the possibility that some things just always or never happen, even though they are contingent.

Anyways, nothing physical is ever explained, only described

Order your spoken and written sentences for the day, assign a zero to sentences containing an even number of letters and a one to those containing an odd number. Concatenating these numbers and appending them to "0." gives the prefix of a real number. It is a theorem that the continuation of this string is computable with probability zero, that is to say, it is mathematically random with probability one. But your utterances are intentional, aren't they?
1) if determinism were true, the continuation of this string would be computable
2) the continuation of this string is uncomputable with probability one
3) therefore determinism is false with probability one.

Cause has nothing to do with determinism...

It's not clear what you mean, but I take it you think that human beings can, in principle, understand and explain everything. This view is obviously mistaken, and as it's provenly mistaken and you've been pointed to the proofs, your espousal of such a view would be irrational and a matter of faith. I have no intention of continuing to repeat things until you demonstrate a rational basis for realism about determinism.

No I take it to mean everything has an explaination.

In other words, like I tried to say in another thread, you're arguing over nothing. No one is disagreeing with you, and for some reason you just won't accept that people are using the term differently.