Or the turbulence that overcomes determinism or "near-determinism."
Traditionally, knowledge gained has always been special, not universal. (Gleick, 1998 - 123)
Maybe the knowledge of physics was believed to be universal during some time after the laws of Newton were put in place. But we are now in the XXI century, after findings in Chaos theory, Quantum field theory, etc... and all we could gather so far is how knowledge and nature remains elusive. If scientific investigation is indeed the one to give us insight into the truth of determinism, therefore, taking into consideration the actual state of research in physics, determinism or near-determinism can only be wrong.
Determinism as a logical scientific standpoint is non-falsifiable and we don't want to see that it is the case, because our Christian background blinds us to searching for a different thinking pathway. We don't need to be God and know all the knowledge in the Universe to be able to feasibly falsify determinism or any other theory. Maybe AI would be the closest we can get to an idea of all knowing GOD (Generated Objective Determinism). If that is the path we want to pursue, of course, that of fitting nature to our perception of reality.
Current Western science, in trying to continue being deterministic, tends to ignore incongruences and anomalies that may take their calculation to chaotic results and instead find non-perturbative frameworks. In the past, for example, to be able to ignore incongruences in their quantum field theory formulations, they introduced the S-matrix theory, which then led to what nowadays is considered a waste of decades of time to many physicists: the String Theory. In addition, scientific investigation limits degrees of freedom in calculations, and by limiting anything that either doesn't fit or makes calculations overly complex, because they lead to uncertainties, scientists are intentionally ignoring every clue that breaks with the deterministic view of nature.
Let's take Landau's picture of turbulence, for example:
When more energy comes into a system, he conjectured, new frequencies begin one at a time, each incompatible with the last, as if a violin string responds to harder bowing by vibrating with a second, dissonant tone, and then a third, and fourth, until the sound becomes an incomprehensible cacophony.
Any liquid or gas is a collection of individual bits, so many that they may as well be infinite. If each piece moved independently, then the fluid would have infinitely many possibilities, infinitely many "degrees of freedom" in the jargon, and the equations describing the motion would have to deal with infinitely many variables. But each particle does not move independently--its motion depends very much on the motion of its neighbors--and in a smooth flow, the degrees of freedom can be few. (...) The particles in a column of cigarette smoke rise as one, for a while.
Then confusion appears, a menagerie of mysterious wild motion. (Gleick, 1998 - 124)
Based on Landau's picture of turbulence, let's consider a different framework of approach. Imagine we can empty our mind of all knowledge and past deeds. If you manage to do so, what action or movement do you think will come next? Can you predict it? In quantum mechanics you can confidently defend the hypothesis that before movement there is no knowledge, but emptiness. But then, it is an unproven hypothesis, mathematically speaking, but falsifiable.
The answer to turbulence and to end determinism you will find in emptiness, not in fullness.
Yes, I know I am neither a mathematician nor a physicist. I can only go with my theological and phenomenological references, my intimacy with poiesis, and my associative instinct to present a possible approach to a problem of paradigm that I can easily see and which affects the lives of every human being on this planet. And I think is fair to use a philosophical approach, considering that the scientific investigation is not the only way of reaching insight into the truth of nature, howbeit the most materialistic way.
Karinna Alves Gulias
