Quote:
Originally Posted by VeeDDzz`
How does a macro world of cause-and-effect originate from a micro-world of chaos?
Is this not paradoxical?
If you do have a legitimate way of explaining this, then I'd imagine that the explanation would also allow for a micro-world to emerge from a macro-world?
Cause and effect are terms that depend on how you define systems and what you call influence. What is the most dominant component of the reasons something happened. If i decide that a light turns on every time the detector "sees" a muon decay inside a particular volume then the light that my eyes see (macroscopic objects) was caused by the decay of that particle when it did.
I do not understand what you mean by your question. Its obvious to me how it all builds.
If you flip coins and put a grain of rice in each side of a balance depending what the outcome was each time, after something like n^(1/2)>K type thing n flips you will get the balance to drop to one side, clearly a macroscopic result. The coins you flip can be spins you detect up or down for example.
Many small random things can add up to a macroscopic influence or in very well fine tuned cases (very sensitive detectors say detecting individual particles and multiplying the effect) you can even have individual microscopic events have a big macroscopic influence.
I do not see what you mean so maybe explain more?
Microscopic systems build larger macroscopic systems. Interactions build up causation at larger scales eventually.
When you segment things you observe in steps of local influence you can recognize the influence propagating. Now if you can find an argument that gives the seemingly random character of Quantum measurements/interactions as part of a more intricate system then you may be able to claim the decay didnt "cause" the macroscopic effect, whatever produced the decay when it did was the one that caused it, that itself may take you further down the chain to a completely deterministic world of influence or a place of true universally clean randomness but at another level not yet understood (a somewhat open question as long as the randomness of QM measurements isnt or maybe cant be perfectly tested to eliminate any subtle signals in them ie imprints of a deterministic machine at play ie pseudorandom numbers).
The problem is that time and space themselves are required to define causality in the way we imagine it. And if geometry is quantum mechanically fluid so should causality and it becomes an emergent form of causality build on statistical effects. I am not yet decided if the entire thing can still be deterministic in another manner that generates spacetime through a fundamental process taking place in another "mathematical kind of space" (eg maybe a cellular automata world). Maybe that would completely kill all genuine causality since all would be "written" from the beginning so your parents and the time/environment etc they lived didnt all cause you, they were unavoidably destined to meet down to the exact sperm and egg cells that started you. By that i mean if something is truly random locally and delivers that particle decay for example then you can honestly say the decay (and so many other random things too) caused the ...whatever chain of events you have macroscopically defined. If the decay is not really random though and nonlocally determined how it happens (to offer the illusion of randomness to observers) then the decay didnt really cause anything. It was one of the dominoes that had to fall but all was written from the first one anyway. So although the 1678th domino "caused" (was needed to be there the way it was) the fall of the 1679th one, it wasnt really a true source of original causation, just part of the inevitable steps game. I use the domino example in a very clean idealized sense. In reality any domino chain is still a macroscopic statistical summation of many small microscopic systems that can introduce randomness and determine how long for example the chain takes to fall from one run to another or even lead to a rare miss if the fluctuation gets wild enough in some close enough placement cases.
A totally mechanical world (which is not what we have at least within the spacetime we observe it) would be destined to evolve in a particular way always. So any cause and effect is part of a script really. You may claim that the last domino fell because of the one before so it caused its fall but that domino didnt really have a choice to begin with (so its a weak kind of causation). If the decay of a particle though is truly random then its a source of original causation. Moving that to the free will talk, all physical systems, according to current QM, are locally generating responsibility, but nobody really owns all of it - even if human law is designed to assign it to individuals anyway ie the one that eg killed is the last part of the dominoes but we judge only the last domino that did the killing for the blame and not so much everything that took it there - to achieve more responsible constrained logically superior behavior as judged by the outcomes - until we learn better etc. So there is no free will but you need to exist to determine what happens - to build that net wisdom - partially responsible for some of the "luck" introduced through your own "system of particles participating in the big game with the environment and others - basically just the generalized concept of environment plus the concept of your body as 2 interacting macro systems)
If you see causality as the relationship between 2 events (donimo 1 fall and domino 2 fall) then you have causality in both cases (the deterministic and the standard QM version) but only one is kind of original and unwritten so to speak and a source of genuine responsibility (current QM assumes all interactions are that type of original causation - ie not written part of a script - and the macroscopic effects are just large scale integrations of many microscopic influences added up).
Keep in mind that perfectly well designed macroscopic systems can operate as if from a script though if the statistical fluctuations needed to deviate from an orchestrated macroscopic perspective plan are so unlikely that they typically dont happen. For example domino 1 can cause the fall of domino 2 from a variety of positions and orientations and temperatures of its own body etc. In all these cases the same macroscopic effect takes place, the fall of the second domino always happens. But if you care to pay attention to the fine details of how it happens, you would be able to spot the fine grain structure of the causation (ie the other domino being a big collection of quantum particles dancing, all defining how the aggregate you call domino behaves, determining how the second domino falls even if it always falls anyway).
