[David M] Cause is the wrong word and not the point I am trying to make. Future event is also the wrong concept, as events are actual and present and I'd not suggest any future pre-existence.
Rather I am pointing out that in processes that have tendencies of outcome rather than certainties of outcome, there is implied in such a process a set of possible states, only one of which will become actual, and therefore what becomes actual is limited by the possibilities available. Beyond these lie the impossible, but within what is possible a choice has to be made, it is called the collapse of the wave function by physicists, where as Dirac says 'nature makes a choice', at the human level we just say we make our existential choice. [Krimel] Sometimes I thing you and I are grappling with the same concepts, we just can not agree on the vocabulary to capture them. History does tend to have some kind of inertia. So for example we have confidence that the sun will rise. But tomorrow's sunrise is not a factor in allowing us to conclude that it will happen. It is the string of past sunrises that gives us confidence in tomorrow. We have confidence in the occurrence of future events because of their consistence in the past. It is the past that lets us construct the future. As for Dirac's quote, don't you think that many of these quotes from physicist are often given in an attempt to simplify their subject for general consumption? I mean I love them too and am fond of quoting them but aren't they often constructed so as to sacrifice clarity for truth? My previous post on probabilities spreading out from the certainty of the present applies here as well. moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
