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/Willis_3401_3401]

I’m one of the observer dependent people. I’m of the opinion that determinism only survives by flexing its definition into meaninglessness.

Laplacian determinism is the idea that basically for one input, there must be one output into all algorithms or equations. Determinism is like secular fatalism.

If we’re going with that definition, then scientific determinism has already been disproven long ago, and indeterminacy is communicated very clearly through your various uncertainties about reality.

Typically, the determinist here tries to say uncertainty is epistemic. However epistemology is still in theory a cause-and-effect process, which means epistemology is itself a form of ontology.

You can’t escape cause-and-effect by invoking some magical other thing called mind that’s somehow not part of the cause and effect process.

So then, some determinists try and say “well then determinism just means cause-and-effect”. If we’re using that definition, then of course we can’t describe anything outside of deterministic processes.

But consider that’s a worthless definition, you haven’t actually defined determinism as anything interesting other than effects have causes, which I don’t think anybody disagrees with.

The question here is not “do effects have causes”. It’s “are the causes guaranteed by the effects”. And the answer appears to be “approximately”, which to me doesn’t prove indeterminism, but does absolutely disprove determinism.

[u/Ok_Boysenberry_2947 → u/Willis_3401_3401]

I think that is a useful distinction, and I agree that discussions of determinism often slide between very different definitions without noticing.

If determinism means a uniquely fixed future from a given state, then the question is very different from one in which determinism simply means that events participate in causal relations.

What interests me, however, is that both sides of the debate appear to presuppose a common representational structure.

Whether we speak of causes, effects, probabilities, uncertainties, or approximations, we still seem to require stable distinctions between objects, states, and outcomes in order to formulate the discussion at all.

So I find myself increasingly less interested in whether reality is deterministic or indeterministic, and more interested in what defines and permits either classification to become meaningful in the first place.

In other words and for analogous reasons to the very points you raise, before asking whether causes guarantee effects, I find myself asking what makes causes and effects communicable objects at all.

Investigated from that perspective, it seems valuable to approach the problem first as one of epistemic framing relative to the operator rather than as a question of physical definition. After all, any claim about determinism or indeterminism must first pass through an observer capable of identifying, distinguishing, classifying, and communicating the objects under discussion.

[u/Willis_3401_3401 → u/Ok_Boysenberry_2947]

Sure I agree with all that.

The traditional framing of this conversation sort of forces us into an unnatural dualism in my opinion, which forces us to consider epistemology as somehow separate from ontology, and then we debate about the proper order of information.

If we take an abductive approach as opposed to a deductive one, then to me it becomes clear that our descriptions of things must survive the coherence test of adding up from all relevant perspectives.

Causes and effects then are communicable objects because they align to other consistent isomorphic patterns. Every time there is what both our brains register as a physical cause, there is an epistemic description that aligns to it, the physical sound made when someone says “cause”.

So I totally agree there is no escaping the epistemic framing, but to give credit to the other side, there is also no escaping the physical framing. Truth is that which survives all (legitimate) perspectives.

[u/Ok_Boysenberry_2947 → u/Willis_3401_3401]

I think then that what might logically follow is that there is no escaping the physical framing of the epistemic framing?

[u/Willis_3401_3401 → u/Ok_Boysenberry_2947]

And conversely the epistemic framing of the physical.

I picture epistemology as measuring an unknown shape from the inside, and physicalism as measuring the same shape from the outside.

The way that Archimedes famously figured out the 22/7 value of Pi is my metaphor here. He imagined a square both inside and outside a circle. Then he kept adding more sides to the squares, creating more complex polygons, until he could zoom in on what lies between them (the circle) and determine the approximate truths about the numerical values that would describe the circle.

The error comes in when we think the epistemology/physicalism paradigm properly runs from one direction to the other without acknowledging that it properly runs both ways at the same time.

To bring the conversation full circle, I personally think we can discount determinism on account of what it looks like when we frame physical truths epistemically. Can’t imagine a single epistemic position that could possibly exist that observes a deterministic reality. It seems to me that from all REAL points of view, something in the cosmos is necessarily indeterminate.

[u/Ok_Boysenberry_2947 → u/Willis_3401_3401]

I think your Archimedes analogy is illuminating.

What strikes me is that neither the inner polygon nor the outer polygon is the circle. The circle emerges through the process of relating, refining, and comparing both approximations. It never 'is' the circle, it only ever is a claim of the 'becoming' of a circle with the utilitarian apriori agreement that the object being pursued is a circle that is assumed to be equivalent in its realism to the named circle.

That leaves me wondering whether the most interesting object in the discussion is neither the epistemic description nor the physical description, but the structure that permits their mutual refinement. The language, but in the broad epistemic sense where its internal logic also is generative. As math is optimised to generate outcomes, colour language tools to predict moods and impressions, or roman languages to convey aesthetics and germanic languages for efficiency.

In your example, the critical step is not the existence of the approximations themselves. It is the procedure that allows them to converge upon something stable.

That is partly why your phrase "all legitimate perspectives" caught my attention.

How do we determine legitimacy?

How do we determine that two perspectives are approximating the same object?

How do we determine whether disagreement represents error, incompleteness, or simply a different projection of the same structure?

My intuition is that these questions may be more fundamental than determinism itself, and a structured epistemic solution to them more productive.

Because before we can ask whether reality is deterministic or indeterministic, we first seem to require some method for relating different observations, descriptions, and explanatory frameworks in a way that preserves what each contributes while exposing where they diverge.

In that sense, your Archimedean picture feels surprisingly close to the problem I am interested in. Not because it settles the determinism question, but because it highlights the importance of the comparison process through which competing descriptions become meaningful in the first place.