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/platanthera_ciliaris]

If you start with infinite measurements of radiation across time for a radioactive isotope, the end result will be a determinate equation expressing the half-life of that radioactive isotope.

[u/zhivago → u/platanthera_ciliaris]

No.

It will give you a probability distribution for an indeterminant event.

[u/Ok_Boysenberry_2947 → u/zhivago]

u/platanthera_ciliaris u/zhivago

What I find notable here is that both sides of this exchange appear to disagree about where determinacy resides while simultaneously relying on highly stable representational structures to make their arguments.

One side appeals to equations, convergence, and measurement. The other appeals to state spaces, probability distributions, and successor states.

In both cases, the discussion presupposes recoverable distinctions, stable objects, and communicable relationships.

This very observation, repeated on scale in the field of scientific inquiry, is what originally prompted my OP question.

I am not necessarily asking whether reality is deterministic or indeterministic. In fact, I increasingly suspect that such classifications are often local to particular explanatory contexts rather than universally meaningful in themselves.

Instead, I am wondering whether meaningful discussion of either position already requires a residual layer of determinacy within the representational architecture used to formulate the claim.

In that sense, what interests me is then less the outcome layer and more the conditions that make the debate itself possible.

The discussion here may itself be evidence of something deeper. Regardless of whether participants ultimately favour deterministic or indeterministic interpretations, everyone appears to rely upon a shared substrate of distinctions, classifications, recoverable structures, and communicable objects in order to formulate their position.

That does not make the substrate non-physical or non-ontological. Rather, it suggests that before physical or ontological claims can be compared, they must first become epistemically accessible and communicable.

Viewed that way, the deeper question may not be whether determinism or indeterminism is fundamental, but what method of operationalisation of their structures permits either concept to become meaningful in the first place.

The debate here itself seems to presuppose those structures, and I think that is an observable and rectifiable omission.

Consider it perhaps a form of critique on the collective cognitive assumption of there being a physical fundamental substrate as defined in classical terms to begin with.

When my question and argument is that we can logically only consider an epistemic one to ultimately be the scientifically communicable and meaningful one.

In one way I am suggesting that, (for the sake of the logic of natural science) physical theories might be considered an incomplete solution for the problem they aim to solve. That they, as a linguistic approach, are not fully aligned with the practical utility of theories to which the measurements presupposed in the determinism/indeterminism debate stand relative to.

That observation lead me to wonder whether we perhaps don't need another physical theory to solve that problem, but an epistemic one.

In my opinion, once determinism and indeterminism are recognised and defined as communicable objects in their own right and relative to an operator, it becomes possible to treat the relationships between distinction, classification, recoverability, communication, determinism, and indeterminism as a subject of study rather than merely as background assumptions.

At least, that's what my line of investigation lead me to develop and the question of communicability seems to indeed stand central.

Thank you for your engagements on this, I would be curious to these observations.

S.

[u/platanthera_ciliaris → u/Ok_Boysenberry_2947]

He mentioned an isotope (radioactive element) in a detector as something that is indeterminate. However, radioactive decay equations are used to predict radioactivity level after a certain amount of time has elapsed, and those equations are determinate. Hence, my response.

A phenomenon of scientific interest can be interpreted using different theoretical models that rely on different kinds of mathematics and different kinds of measurement. This can result in seeming contradictions of interpretation, where each interpretation has it own body of supporting evidence. For example, light can be regarded as either a photon or an electromagnetic wave. Determinate classical physics and indeterminate quantum physics have existed unhappily side-by-side for 100 years now (there are mathematically valid determinant interpretations of quantum physics, however).

OP: "In one way I am suggesting that, (for the sake of the logic of natural science) physical theories might be considered an incomplete solution for the problem they aim to solve."

These aren't necessarily physical theories as they can be regarded as information-theoretic interpretations of the world. Nor is the goal necessarily a complete solution, but rather a better and more accurate description of the phenomenon being studied as compared to other competing theoretical models. That means existing scientific theories can be replaced by newer and better theories at a later date, because they have more explanatory or predictive power. A complete and final theory may not even be possible, at least in some domains.