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Sunday, April 3, 2011

A self-infuriating scientist?

Grice is a bit naive when he writes that the introduction of indeterminism and chance 'can only infuriate the scientist without aiding the moral philosopher'. What if the moral philosopher has been a scientist?

This from Informationphilosopher.com, B. Doyle:

"In his Gifford Lectures of 1927, Arthur Stanley Eddington had described himself as unable "to form a satisfactory conception of any kind of law or causal sequence which shall be other than deterministic." 44 Eddington had already established himself as the leading interpreter of the new relativity and quantum physics. His astronomical measurements of light bending as it passes the sun had confirmed Einstein's general relativity theory.
A year later, in response to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, Eddington revised his lectures for publication as The Nature of the Physical World. There he announced "It is a consequence of the advent of the quantum theory that physics is no longer pledged to a scheme of deterministic law," 45 and enthusiastically identified indeterminism with freedom of the will."

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