In Devs, the powerful protagonists
those who possess knowledge firmly
believe
that the universe is deterministic.
there is no free will. There are no
choices. There are no
options. Everything in the universe is
governed by cause and effect.
The idea of determinism was formulated
by French philosopher Laplace
in his 1814 thought experiment famously
known as Laplace's
demon although laplace himself never
used the term demon he went for
something
more akin to erudite or intellectual
but the thought experiment would go on
to be known and famous as
Laplace's demon where he argues that the
universe is a deterministic,
and that it is governed by causality and
causality alone,
and he says that if you can gather
enough information about
any element in the universe together
with forces
that set things into motion and if you
could
analyse all this information, you would
know
exactly the past of this element and you
would predict its
future with immaculate precision.
let's take another example, and say you
use a bow to shoot an arrow into the sky.
take this arrow at any given point. If
you can gather
enough information about this arrow
information like
what it is made of. how long it is.
what sort of bow you used to shoot the
arrow,
information about the atmosphere like
temperature humidity
wind. And if you could analyse and
process all this information maybe
using a very powerful computer you would
know the
history of this arrow meaning its past,
and you would know its future. How it
will behave and how it will be
in the future. In this example the arrow
symbolises
life my life your life the life of a
tree the life of a mountain
the life of a river anything. If you take
anything in the universe if you can
gather enough information about it
and if you could process this
information, you would know without
any error its past and you would predict
its future.
This is a strange idea because it
nullifies many concepts like
free will and justice and responsibility.
you look at how societies try to catch
criminals and to punish them for their
crimes,
but if you think that those criminals
did not have a choice they were
made and destined to commit those crimes.
Then, you do not have any right
to judge them or punish them. There is
further science that substantiates that.
Neuroscientist James Fallon devoted 20
years of his life to studying brains
of murderers, and he found out that most
murderers had
something in common. Most of them had
very low
orbital cortex activity. This further
shows
that those criminals were wired
to commit those crimes. There isn't a
point at which those criminals were
faced with two options,
and could have chosen not to commit the
crime
they were destined to commit their those
crimes and they did
Based on that, society does not have any
rights to judge them or to punish them.
This is a determinism. The one thing that
is very hard to combine with
determinism is quantum mechanics because
in quantum mechanics there are
superpositions and probability states
and the uncertainty principle and things
are moving
everywhere all the time. This is why it
is very hard
to combine determinism and quantum
mechanics.
But the show Devs manages to
brilliantly marry those two ideas
and this is what we're going to see in
future videos
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matters, and until we meet again have a
great day
