On 9/27/2011 4:18 PM, nihil0 wrote:
On Sep 27, 2:46 am, meekerdb<meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
I think Daniel Dennett's book "Elbow Room" is an excellent defense of
compatibilist free
will and why it is the only kind worth having.
Great suggestion. The wikipedia page was fairly informative, but I'll
probably buy the book anyway. From what I gather, he believes the kind
of free will worth wanting is the appearance (or illusion) that we can
control our behavior to a large extent. I agree with him that we don't
want to be uncaused causes (or uninfluenced influences) of events,
which is how quantum particles appear to behave (i.e.,
stochastically).
"Everything that is physically possible" is not very well defined. And in any
case it
doesn't follow that in an infinite universe everything possible must happen
infinitely
many times. For example it might be that almost all universes are
uninteresting and
barren and only a finite number are interesting like ours.
Technically I think you are right. However, I was only talking about
an infinite universe likes ours that operates in accordance with the
laws of quantum physics. Let me explain by using what I've read of
Victor Stenger and Brian Greene. There are three ingredients in the
argument that all quantum-physical possibilities in our universe
happen infinitely many times. 1) There is an infinite number of Hubble
volumes in our universe, which are all casually disconnected (as the
theory of inflation implies). 2) There is a limit on how much matter
and energy can exist within a region of space of a given size, such as
a Hubble volume. 3) There is only a finite number of possible
configurations of matter, due to the Uncertainty Principle.
I can explain any of these ingredients in more depth if you'd like me
to, but I hope you see that they lead to the conclusion that all
quantum-physical possibilities in our universe are realized infinitely
many times.
No they don't. There's an implicit assumption that what happens in these other universes
has the same or similar probability distribution as we observe in ours. A reasonable
assumption, but not a logically necessary one. I think it's what Bruno means by
"homogeneous". It's logically possible that all but a finite number of these universes
are just exact copies of the same completely empty universe, for example.
Brent
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