![Above: an image from the Random Walk theory page at Wikipedia; it discusses the path of a drunkard stumbling through a city and asks: will he make it home?
A few moments ago, reading Popper on determinism and indeterminism (which he nicely frames as being ‘clocks and clouds’), I came across a reference to Charles Sanders Pierce, the obscure semiotician and logician and philosopher so adored by Walker Percy.
Popper calls Pierce “one of the greatest philosophers of all time,” a statement of significant scope; it is not as though Popper wrote casually, and he goes on to credit Pierce with being “the first post-Newtonian [to suggest] that all clocks are clouds; or in other words, that only clouds exist, though clouds of very different degrees of cloudiness.”
With the term ‘cloud’ Popper is referring to the indeterminable, not merely the not-yet-determined. That is, while we know (more or less) exactly how clocks operate and predict everything they might do based on what we know of them, we cannot perform this feat with clouds.
The question of whether the world -and humans- are clouds or clocks or what degree of either has been a significant problem for philosophers, and until quantum physics nearly all thinkers felt that everything was clock-like; there was no free will, nothing unpredictable, just the odd phenomena we didn’t yet know how to predict.
Physical determinism may sound absurd, but it was indeed the inescapable conclusion of pre-quantum thought (except, it seems, for the prescient Pierce) and had profound implications for human life, particularly politically; the basic premise of totalitarian rule is that, with enough information, the economy and society can be utterly understood, controlled, and programmed for the greatest good.
The restoration of indeterminism supports the development of systems of government and interaction that maximize the agency of actors who -it turns out- may possibly have free will after all. It also connects in a way I find highly satisfying to my previous post.](http://media.tumblr.com/2KfNZVJct86d7h5am67A7VeE_400.png)
Above: an image from the Random Walk theory page at Wikipedia; it discusses the path of a drunkard stumbling through a city and asks: will he make it home?
A few moments ago, reading Popper on determinism and indeterminism (which he nicely frames as being ‘clocks and clouds’), I came across a reference to Charles Sanders Pierce, the obscure semiotician and logician and philosopher so adored by Walker Percy.
Popper calls Pierce “one of the greatest philosophers of all time,” a statement of significant scope; it is not as though Popper wrote casually, and he goes on to credit Pierce with being “the first post-Newtonian [to suggest] that all clocks are clouds; or in other words, that only clouds exist, though clouds of very different degrees of cloudiness.”
With the term ‘cloud’ Popper is referring to the indeterminable, not merely the not-yet-determined. That is, while we know (more or less) exactly how clocks operate and predict everything they might do based on what we know of them, we cannot perform this feat with clouds.
The question of whether the world -and humans- are clouds or clocks or what degree of either has been a significant problem for philosophers, and until quantum physics nearly all thinkers felt that everything was clock-like; there was no free will, nothing unpredictable, just the odd phenomena we didn’t yet know how to predict.
Physical determinism may sound absurd, but it was indeed the inescapable conclusion of pre-quantum thought (except, it seems, for the prescient Pierce) and had profound implications for human life, particularly politically; the basic premise of totalitarian rule is that, with enough information, the economy and society can be utterly understood, controlled, and programmed for the greatest good.
The restoration of indeterminism supports the development of systems of government and interaction that maximize the agency of actors who -it turns out- may possibly have free will after all. It also connects in a way I find highly satisfying to my previous post.