What is Chance? - Probability | WIRELESS PHILOSOPHY
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- čas přidán 21. 09. 2017
- In this Wireless Philosophy video, Nina Emery (Mount Holyoke College) explores the nature of chance and probability.
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A philosopher who actually properly acknowledges the constraints of science! Thank you, it is frustratingly rare. I've been trying to get Ollie over at philosophy tube to do that for a while. He responded to a comment of mine in his last video, but mischarqcterized my comment as saying that physics just answers these questions, and then dismismissed that straw man answer. I like his channel, but his aversion to the use of science as a contraint on philosophical theories frustrates me about, not only him, but way too many philosophers.
It's getting more common that philosophers will take this into account properly, as you did. You don't need to understand WHY your carbon 14 example works, only what the conclusion is and what premises must be rejected in order to throw that conclusion into question. It's helpful to understand the physics in between, but not a prerequisite for good analytical metaphysics, as this video demonstrates.
Sam 😳 Are you conflating by association metaphysics - a term in philosophy, with physics, a term within science? Surely philosophy asks us to think and use language appropriately? It is not the remit of non philosophers to opine on philosophy; neither should the reverse occur concerning the details of physics or any other subject. Where there is a connection is when we ask for the rationale or philosophy underpinning a particular intellectual activity. The 'why' plus the 'how' should lead to improved understanding, whatever the issue being considered.
Sir Meow The Library Cat No. Metaphysics is the broad collection of topics Aristotle though were appropriate to discuss in his untitled book he wrote before writing the book "Physiks", as well as other topic that have evolved from there. Both metaphysics and physics are, to some degree, ways of examining how the world works, including hiw we know that to be true.
I don't suggest the physicists wade into philosophy or vice versa, at least not without being very careful to understand the subject. On the contrary, I've seen brilliant physicists make basic errors in philosophy and, again, vice versa. I'm also not discussing the epistemological underpinnings of science. That is an interesting topic, but it isn't what interests me.
Rather, I argue that when you have a philosophical theory that cannot be true unless some scientific theory is wrong, you had better account for that. You may account for it by arguing we shouldn't trust the scientific evidence or that the scientific reasoning from the evidence to the conclusion should not be trusted. And there are philosophical views theories that do that. But if you accept the evidence and the reasoning, and the conclusion invalidates your theory, then your theory is invalid. That's all I'm saying. A good example is the discussion in this video on Carbon 14.
Typo, it's C11 not C14
There are a lot of philosophers who suggest we should look to science for answers to philosophical questions (especially regarding metaphysics and ontology). Sadly/amusingly these philosophers themselves rarely seem to look at what the science actually says (which is often painfully obvious in the examples they give).
I think there's too strong a desire to see scientific explanations as a series of causative statements rather than really strong correlative. The universe doesn't need to be 'understood' any deeper than saying about it what we can observe. If Carbon-14 decays in 20 mins half the time, then just be aware of that observation. If further study reveals something about which Carbon-14's will and will not do this, add that information to your correlative knowledge base.
Are you skeptical of causation in general, or just in the case of scientific explanation?
Typo in your comment, it's C11, not C14. C14 has a half life of 5,730 years.
Great!
Great video! :D
True
As a proposition about what will happen has more factors included, as it grows into a longer and longer conjunction, it will cease to really be about chance, and asymptotically approach the point of being a statement of strict causal determinism. In popular discourse they talk about, e.g. your chances of dying in a plane crash. They don't take into account the fact that some people never fly, which just makes such talk seem foolish most of the time.
Software?
This notion of chance seems to rest entirely on non-determinism in quentum mechanics. After all, if truly complete information would let you predict the future exactly, a Laplace's Demon, then there are definitely no chances, just credences.
The strangeness and potential non-parsimony of fundamental chances may be the best argument, then, for a deterministic interpretation of QM. This might not show up in a chemistry textbook, but you can make QM deterministic by adding another object that moves along with the particles (Bohmian mechanics), or even just by a highly literal interpretation of the equations that doesn't allow chance but raises some questions about subjective experience (Everett interpretation).
Given the dependence non-trivial physics topics, does this mean philosophers who want to talk about these issues should take an advanced physics course?
„if truly complete information would let you predict the future exactly“ there is no exact objective prediction of the future in a deterministic world possible, because a system cant watch himself. you cant see you own eyes. ;) i think determinism is in quantum mechanics too, its just that u cant see determinism, because you are part of the world, therefore the notion of chance makes sense in a deterministic world- even it is not really a chance.
Indeed, the strangeness of objective probabilities seems to be a good argument for deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics.
I wonder whether a similar argument could be made about infinities: Real infinities seem to be rare in physics. E.g. the "resolution" of the universe seems to be limited due to Planck units. So it would be strange if the universe was infinitely large. For all we know it may be, but this would require infinite complexity which is maybe infinitely improbable (Occam's razor). Difficult to give a good a priori justification for this however...
I'm having trouble understanding the purpose behind this video. Is there a confusion that probability is based on perception and not on events?
_Is_ there no difference between atoms that decay and those that don't? Just because something is so far unknown doesn't make it unknowable, and because atoms are so hard to observe, that's probably the case here.
There has to be. Our physical instrumentation and observation methods are just not granular enough, not a high enough resolution at our current state of technology. At one point in time, humans observed the passing of time using a sundial. Now we have atomic clocks.
Yes there's no difference, the theories that suppose that there is are labeled "hidden variable theories", and those are been excluded with high confidence via Bell's theorem.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_variable_theory#Bell.27s_theorem
So it's not just a case of "we haven't looked hard enough", we probably need a deeper conceptual revision to fix these issues.
Subjectivists are obviously correct.
A mind-independent concept of probability either butchers the word "probability" beyond all recognition, or posits magic.
Nothing can explain itself?
What about autological words, you know, words that describe themselves.
fatsquirrel75 Autological words happen to describe themselves, but don't give themselves meaning, which is a closer analogy to the point in the video. It would be like defining the word fzztagh to mean fzztagh.
If one in a million people get killed in plane crashes each year, year after year, they say "Your chances of dying in a plane crash are only one in a million." But if the description is changed, and we say, "Your chances of dying in a plane crash this year, given that you fly every day, would be one in 900,000." So chance seems to depend upon what description (of all those possible) is used to represent the situation.
Quantum Bayesianism does what is described here as very difficult. It takes a Bayesian, i.e. knowledge-based, definition of probability and uses it as an interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. ("Interpretation": philosophical position about what the equations of QM means. There is no difference in equations or what they predict; this isn't about science. It's about what reality the science is describing.)
www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-bayesianism-explained-by-its-founder-20150604 seems like a good canonical reference, because finding the *best* popularized description was proving too hard. Hit Google.
Let another planet have the chance
i didnt understand
The creators of "The secret" didn't like this
What if facts were all mind-dependent? And why not?
mind-independent is the wrong word for objective probability. the mind is part of the “independent” world! objective probability is more like a not achievable concept of everything watched!
Hannes Günther Exactly, I‘d quote Rowbottom and use „world-based“ - this seems to fit much better than „mind-dependent“
HAHASHAH! LOL. I am a simpleton, never been to "higher education" nor theological studies so ex..cu..se me. However, from what I heard presented and what I read in the comments, the word chance, is the non-religious person expression for that hated word GOD. Take careful note, a horse by any other other name is still a horse. The "pure" scientist with his scientific methodology will have nothing to do with the word chance or GOD and the "great thinkers" philosophers are tripping all over it.
Talk about objective probability how many "Big Bangs" should it take to have analysis in which each measure is based on a recorded observation or a long history of collected data. What data could we analyze before the bang objectively? The religious among us stumble and fight over the word GOD and their counterpart does the same with the word Chance. Both are seeking to understand, comprehend a reality that they know does exist, but refuse to believe it is beyond their analysis or dogmatic interpretation.