Determinism
Listen now
Description
Transcript: It is fundamental to how science works, and to our understanding of the everyday world, that events have causes.  This is called Determinism.  Sometimes our belief that events have causes leads us to confuse causation and correlation. Bertrand Russell told the story of a chicken growing up on a farm. Every day the Sun rose and the chicken was fed.  The chicken came to associate the Sun rising with being fed and believed that one caused the other.  One day the farmer comes out after sunrise and strangles the chicken for the dinner table. Obviously, induction has failed in this case because one event does not cause the other.  Imagine one morning you try to start your car, and it won't start. You know a little about cars, but after inspecting under the hood and looking everywhere you can you can't figure it out.  You go up to your roommate who knows more about cars, and after getting himself dirty he can't figure it out either.  Your car just won't start.  Eventually, you get your mechanic over and then the dealer of the car itself, and after using complicated test equipment, the dealer says, "I'm sorry. I can't find anything wrong. The car just won't start."  If you could imagine this situation you would clearly decide that this is an unreasonable outcome.  There has to be a reason that your car won't start. We fundamentally believe that events have causes.  Thus is the strength of our belief in determinism.
More Episodes
Transcript: In the year 584 B.C., on the coast of Asia Minor, two warlike tribes were engaged in a fierce battle: the Medes and the Lydains. As written by the Greek poets, these two cultures were hacking away at each other on the battlefield with burnished swords and shields, when suddenly the...
Published 07/12/11
Transcript: Thales was a philosopher who lived in the 6th century B.C. in Miletus, in what is now Turkey. No written work by Thales survives, but we know that he kept accurate eclipse records and he speculated about astronomy. He decided that the source of all things was one thing, and that...
Published 07/12/11
Transcript: The apparent motions of the stars in the night sky depend on your position on the Earth’s surface. At a northern temperate latitude, the stars rise in the east and set in the west, and they travel on slanting paths across the sky. The north celestial pole sits in the northern sky...
Published 07/12/11