Determinism

Full Title or Meme

The doctrine that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by prior events and conditions together with the laws of nature,

Context

The assumption of an absolute determinism is the essential foundation of every scientific enquiry. — Max Planck

In 1976 Niklaus Wirth appears to make the statement that computer programs could be understood with the following statement:

In recent years the subject of Computer Programming has been recognized as a discipline whose mastery is critical to the success of many engineering projects and which is amenable to scientific treatment and presentation. It has advanced from a craft to an academic discipline. The initial outstanding contributions toward this development were made by W. E. Dijkstra and C. A. R. Hoare. Dijkstra's "notes on Structured Programming" open a new view of programming as a scientific subject and an intellectual challenge, and it coined the title for a "revolution" in programming. Hoares's "axiomatic Basis of Computer Programming" showed in a lucid manner that programs are amenable to an exacting analysis based on mathematical reasoning.

Computer science education has since focused on object-oriented computing and verification of correctness, which had some successes, but have not lived up to the hype that accompanied their introductions. This is very similar to the path that physics took starting in 1900 with Plank's solution to the radiation equation. The statement of de Broglie after quantum mechanics had been widely accepted sounds a lot like that the computer scientists are saying today

A number of physicists will manifest the greatest repugnance to consider as final the abandonment of a rigorous determinism, as present day [1953] quantum physics must do. they have gone to the length of saying that a non-deterministic science is inconceivable. This opinion seems exaggerated to us, since quantum physics does exist and it is indeterministic. But it seems to us perfectly permissible to think that, some day or other, physics will return to the paths of determinism and that then the present stage of this science will seem to us to have been a momentary detours during which the insufficiency of our conceptions had forced us to abandon provisionally our following exactly the determinism of phenomena on the atomic scale.

Problem

Alan Turing had proven that the full progress of a program cannot, in general, be known without actually running the program. While Wirth's book does not mention it, all computer scientists have learned Turing's theorem; but it does not appear that they understood how Turing's limitations would apply to the everyday work of computer programmers. That day has certainly arrived. Writing about algorithms and Donald Knuth, Siobhan Roberts commented:

Algorithms written by humans — tackling harder and harder problems, but producing code embedded with bugs and biases — are troubling enough. More worrisome, perhaps, are the algorithms that are not written by humans, algorithms written by the machine, as it learns. Programmers still train the machine, and, crucially, feed it data. (Data is the new domain of biases and bugs, and here the bugs and biases are harder to find and fix). However, as Kevin Slavin, a research affiliate at M.I.T.’s Media Lab said, “We are now writing algorithms we cannot read. That makes this a unique moment in history, in that we are subject to ideas and actions and efforts by a set of physics that have human origins without human comprehension.” As Slavin has often noted, “It’s a bright future, if you’re an algorithm.”

For a different view of algorithms as a cloak hiding the reality of what developers build see the views of Nagy & Neff

"We argue that the conjuration of algorithms allows the tech industry to forge vivid, overly positive, and deterministic narratives that make it challenging for their critics to call attention to the very real harms that algorithmic systems pose to users. We call for discourses of reality instead of magic, as a way to support responsible technology design, development, use, and governance."

Solution

If the course of a computer program cannot be known in advance, any prediction about the real intent of the program cannot help inform the way that humans lead their lives in the current world as we cannot, in theory, know the results of any complex device that we may build in the future. That is not a statement that in any way should limit the responsibility of the programmers from their responsibility to society, even though their own code of Ethics refuses to articulate that ultimate responsibility.

Biology

At the time that Watson and Crick discovered the DNA double-helix, it was expected that biology development of an organism was completely determined by the DNA. James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA, is often quoted as saying, "We used to think our fate was in our stars. Now we know, in large measure, our fate is in our genes," which expresses a view of biological determinism, suggesting that a significant portion of our characteristics are determined by our genetic makeup.

Philip Ball has created an entire book to fully develop the idea that life is not like that. He said: "It seems as though, once you have the basic ingredients of living matter, all things are possible. I don't think we are surprised enough by that."" Perhaps the one very clear example of that is the prion infection called "Mad cow disease" which is initiated by one misfolded protean that, on contact, can cause a deadly cascade of misfolded proteins caused by just ingesting the meat from an infected animal carrying that misfolded protein. The implication that our health and life choices may be determined by the somewhat random folding of many of the proteins in our body should make it clear that much of our destiny is fully random.

References

Other Material

• See the wiki page on Uncertainty which includes a quote on Determinism from Laplace.