ellauri096.html on line 55: Michael Scriven (1964) tried to refute predictive determinism (the thesis that all events are foreseeable), by conjuring two players, “Predictor” who has all the data, laws, and calculating capacity needed to predict the choices of others. Scriven goes on to imagine, “Avoider”, whose dominant motivation is to avoid prediction. Therefore, Predictor must conceal his prediction. The catch is that Avoider has access to the same data, laws, and calculating capacity as Predictor. Thus Avoider can duplicate Predictor’s reasoning. Consequently, the optimal predictor cannot predict Avoider. Let the teacher be Avoider and the student be Predictor. Avoider must win. Therefore, it is possible to give a surprise test. This sounds silly. The Predictor can predict that the Avoider double guesses her. Both can fiture out that this will go on and on, until time runs out, and they still just sit on their asses doing nothing. Thing is, you must remember that the players are part of the game, not outside of it as idealists would have it.
ellauri096.html on line 59: Predictive determinism states that everything is foreseeable. Metaphysical determinism states that there is only one way the future could be given the way the past is. Simon Laplace used metaphysical determinism as a premise for predictive determinism. He reasoned that since every event has a cause, a complete description of any stage of history combined with the laws of nature implies what happens at any other stage of the universe. Scriven was only challenging predictive determinism in his thought experiment. The next approach challenges metaphysical determinism.
ellauri285.html on line 755: The first consequential re-evaluation of the mathematical modeling behind the critical positivity ratio was published in 2008 by a group of Finnish researchers from the Systems Analysis Laboratory at Aalto University (Jukka Luoma, Raimo Hämäläinen, and Esa Saarinen). The authors noted that "only very limited explanations are given about the modeling process and the meaning and interpretation of its parameters... [so that] the reasoning behind the model equations remains unclear to the reader"; moreover, they noted that "the model also produces strange and previously unreported behavior under certain conditions... [so that] the predictive validity of the model also becomes problematic."
xxx/ellauri113.html on line 46: General relativity also works perfectly well as a low-energy effective quantum field theory. For questions like the low-energy scattering of photons and gravitons, for instance, the Standard Model coupled to general relativity is a perfectly good theory. It only breaks down when you ask questions involving invariants of order the Planck scale, where it fails to be predictive; this is the problem of "nonrenormalizability."
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