Can we ever know that?

Selecting and using the quote feature that pops up might help

I think you haven’t asked me anything about this.

You say a lot of things. I responded to one of them, the thing about science. I can respond to one but not the other. If cultural determinism effects how science is about the discoverable laws of nature, then make your case.

I s that a double negative, “no a science book will not be the same”, but then you say the environment will have changed. I’m confused.

Well your are right we have to narrow this down to one topic.

I thought I had illustrated how science is cultural determinism. How the science of using a stone tool becomes AI.

There is a reason why the idea of “laws of nature” has gone out of fashion. It is linked to why people grab on to Quantum physics as an argument against absolute determinism. Laws, all laws are arbitrary. They use reductionistic red lines that are inherently arbitrary. In a way they reflect how evolution is conservative or limited to what is necessary for fitness. I used the example that we only have the senses and cognitive ability necessary to serve fitness. Cultural evolution escapes that easy to see fitness test because it operates in abstract reality. It is tied to a complex relationship to physical reality through group selection. That part we can ignore for now but I did cover it. Science it turns out deals with a complex chaotic system that we have found to be irreducible. To compensate for that we have switched from laws to extreme accuracy and precision withing the abstract space. To compensate for the current understanding of limitations on knowledge we will probably switch from top down design to bottom up design to mimic evolution as can be seen in Stephan Wolfram’s “New Kind of Science”.

A simpler explanation might be that the more you know the more you know what you don’t know. What we can know has been extended by the extension of our senses by tools such as the Large Hadron Collider and our cognitive abilities by computers. What we have come to realize is there doesn’t seem to be any limit. When Newton wrote his laws of physics it was assumed that laws made sense because there would be some sort of limit. But cultural evolution like physical evolution doesn’t seem to have any limit that we can define or predict.

I understand I’m talking in short hand here. It is hard to decipher. But one thing that is limited is time and space. Communication breaks down when something isn’t reducible to a simplified form. It is why everybody loved E equals MC squared. The genius is in the simplification. I’m not a genius. If you want a clearer explanation you will probably have to look to Dennett and Wolfram. Maybe E.O. Wilson and David Sloan Wilson. The problem there is I can’t just provide references because the ideas have to be taken in whole not parts. And honestly nobody is going to want to take the time to sort through the pages of arguments necessary.

I will work on clearer and more concise arguments but I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for them.

It’s pretty rare when that happens. Nothing to worry about

I didn’t see it. It was more of an assertion.

I believe that many people mistake the term deterministic to mean being predetermined over time, but that does not hold in a chaotic environment.
The action may not be determined until the actual moment of “collapse”, that can be a quantum instant.
Until that moment the action is probabilistic, with increasing certainty as the interactive moment approaches.
But once the action begins it becomes deterministic at that point in time.

This is described with chaos theory. Where nothing is ordered as yet but deterministic patterns spontaneously self-form, beginning at the Planck time, the smallest mathematical unit of spacetime…

In quantum that is the collapse of the wave function, which may not be predetermined (in superposition), but becomes deterministic at the time of collapse.