GLOSSARY ENTRY (DERIVED FROM QUESTION BELOW) | ||||||
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17:30 May 3, 2015 |
English language (monolingual) [PRO] Science - Philosophy / science and religion | |||||||
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| Selected response from: Charles Davis Spain Local time: 13:10 | ||||||
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SUMMARY OF ALL EXPLANATIONS PROVIDED | ||||
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4 +3 | natural causal determinism (without randomness or divine intervention) |
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Discussion entries: 3 | |
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natural causal determinism (without randomness or divine intervention) Explanation: I think the comment you have found is broadly correct, and that by "the rule of fixed necessity" Einstein means, essentially, causal determinism: the idea that "every event is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature" http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/ I don't think this is exactly a standard phrase; it simply means a system governed ("rule") by necessity that is fixed in the sense that the laws that necessarily lead from certain conditions to certain results do not change and always apply. Einstein is claiming that biological systems are of this kind. I think it is helpful to read this paragraph in the context of those that precede and follow it in Einstein's essay. "It is the aim of science to establish general rules which determine the reciprocal connection of objects and events in time and space", he writes. He claims that such rules have been found, and that they enable us to "predict the temporal behavior of phenomena in certain domains with great precision and certainty". An example is the movements of the planets. He goes on to refer to more complex systems, such as the weather. Here we cannot predict the behaviour of the system precisely, but not (in his view) because of the system does not obey fixed laws, causal connections, but simply because there are too many factors involved for us to calculate them. He moves on the the paragraph you have quoted, about biological systems, and then comments that when people are convinced of this "ordered regularity" they are not willing to admit "causes of a different nature": divine will as an "independent cause of natural events". So the "rule of fixed necessity" refers to the idea that in biology, as in physics, certain events necessarily follow from certain causes by the operation of fixed laws. We can't predict these events perfectly because we don't know all the connections, not because of "any lack of order in nature". He is convinced that there are no special causes, no random events, no divine intervention in the natural world. Einstein published this essay in the New York Times in 1930. http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm Although he is not writing here about quantum mechanics, it seems certain to me that what he is saying is informed by recent events in physics. As is well known, Einstein was dismayed by Heisenberg's famous "uncertainty principle" in 1925, followed by Max Born's proposal in 1926 that mechanics were governed by probability and inaccessible to causal explanation. It was this that led to Einstein's famous comment (in a letter to Born in 1926) that "God does not play dice". So Einstein remained deeply wedded to determinism in the face of developments that seemed to be undermining it, and I think this lies behind what he wrote here in 1930. |
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