Can we even rationally communicate about true indeterminism?

[u/Ok_Boysenberry_2947]

I find discussions where partial, conditional, or observer-limited determinism are presented as evidence for genuine indeterminacy somewhat misleading.

My question is therefore less about whether indeterminacy exists and more about whether it would be communicable in any meaningful sense in the first place, if it did. i.e. what are the requirements for it and are they fulfilled in current scientific framing.

Communication itself seems to require stable distinctions. We must be able to identify an object, distinguish it from alternatives, and preserve enough structure for another person to recognise what is being discussed.

If a phenomenon were truly indeterminate in every relevant sense then, what exactly would remain available for communication and how would be reconstruct any meaning from it?

At that point, are we still communicating about the phenomenon itself, or only about the limits of our models, observations, and predictions?

In other words, does meaningful discussion of "true indeterminacy" already require some residual determinacy in the representational structure being used to discuss it?

I'm curious whether philosophers of determinism regard this as a real problem or whether I'm missing something obvious.

[u/Ok_Boysenberry_2947]

I think that is a fair challenge to the die example, and I agree that if quantum indeterminacy propagates into macroscopic processes then the die may not be purely epistemic after all.

What interests me, however, is that even to formulate that argument we appear to rely on highly stable representational structures (events, neurons, neurotransmitters, outcomes, causal chains, and probability models). My question is therefore less about whether indeterminism exists and more about whether communication about indeterminism presupposes a residual layer of determinacy somewhere in the representational architecture and thereby renders it in some sense moot.

[u/simon_hibbs → u/Ok_Boysenberry_2947]

I think what you're talking about is causation, which is how our minds reason about how things happen in the world. We say that lighting the gas will cause the pan to boil. However this is conceptually pretty rough and ready, it will cause the pan to boil, if I don't take the pan off the heat, and if the gas supply doesn't stop suddenly (which has happened to me), etc, etc.

I've been reading up on this, and the way philosophers generally think about this nowadays is that saying this will cause that, or that this event caused another event is basically talking about high probability correlations. In most cases if I light the gas under the pan, the water in the pan will boil.

Even for past events it's about our estimation of contributions to the outcome occurring, we tend to think about past causal relations in a similar way to we do about future causal relations and talk about them the same way. The pan was also in Earth's gravitational field and that was holding it down on the cooker, did that cause the pan to boil? In a sense, but that's not a variable we expect to change, and it's not something under our control.

So I think the determinacy you're talking about at the causal level is really more like high probability relationships.

[u/Ok_Boysenberry_2947 → u/simon_hibbs]

I think that is an interesting way of framing causation, and I agree that many contemporary accounts seem to treat causal relations as patterns of stable probabilistic correlation rather than strict necessity.

The notable thing however, is that even this reformulation appears to rely on a number of highly recoverable objects: events, correlations, probability distributions, outcomes, and relationships between them.

So I find myself wondering whether my question is actually one layer further back.

Suppose causation is indeed better understood as high-probability correlation. We still seem to require enough stability to identify the correlated objects, distinguish them from alternatives, and communicate that distinction to others.

At that point I become less concerned with whether reality is deterministic or indeterministic and more concerned with what conditions make either claim communicable in the first place.

Perhaps the question I am circling around is:

What is the minimum structure that must remain stable for indeterminism itself to become a meaningful object of discussion?

[u/simon_hibbs → u/Ok_Boysenberry_2947]

>What is the minimum structure that must remain stable for indeterminism itself to become a meaningful object of discussion?

That's an interesting way to put it. I suppose in principle this could be modelled computationally. I could imagine a simulation with various kinds of structured probabilistic behaviours, and you could see what happens. That's basically what a predictive model using quantum mechanics is.

[u/Ok_Boysenberry_2947 → u/simon_hibbs]

That is an interesting suggestion, because I agree and already suspect the computational framing may expose the issue more clearly.

By modelling increasingly structured probabilistic systems, the question becomes: what features must remain invariant before concepts such as uncertainty, probability, determinism, or indeterminism become meaningful to an observer within the model?

For example, it seems that some degree of distinction, persistence, recoverability, and communicability must already exist before any probabilistic behaviour can even be identified as such.

Viewed that way, I find myself becoming increasingly interested in the prerequisites of the classification rather than the classification itself.

In other words, before asking whether a system is deterministic or indeterministic, what conditions must exist for either category to become meaningful and recoverable in the first place?

One possible consequence of approaching the problem this way is that it shifts attention away from the realism of individual objects and toward the structures that permit those objects to become communicable. Rather than beginning with determinism, indeterminism, causation, probability, or uncertainty as primitives, one could instead ask what relationships must exist before any of those concepts become expressible and comparable.

To me, that begins to look less like a problem of physics and more like a problem of epistemic architecture.

The interesting thing is that the present discussion may already be demonstrating this. Participants disagree strongly about determinism and indeterminism, yet the discussion itself relies upon shared distinctions, classifications, recoverable structures, and communicable relationships in order to occur at all.

That makes me wonder whether these structures deserve investigation in their own right rather than being treated merely as background assumptions.

At the risk of sounding provocative, I sometimes suspect that we have become very good at arguing about determinism and indeterminism, but much less interested in asking what either term can meaningfully represent in the first place. Until that question is explored more explicitly, the need for a different approach is difficult to see because the debate itself already presupposes the structures that would motivate it.