Posted: Jan 13, 2017 2:53 pm
archibald wrote:ughaibu wrote:.... if all human behaviour is "chemistry and physics doing its thing", then in principle, it would be possible to derive, from laws of chemistry or physics, all behaviour of human beings. But this cannot be done, even in principle, because chemistry and physics are examples of empirical sciences and no empirical science can entail all human behaviour.
As Sendraks said, we do not yet know the limits of what science can achieve.
But even if it turned out to be the case that human behaviour was too complex to predict, that would not call for anything other than physics/chemistry. It would just mean that it is unpredictable. See: stochastic and random.
We do know what computationally-intractable problems are, and having a bunch of beardy guys sit around cogitating about human behavior is not likely to have more success than trying to compute it. You've seen what the beardy guys have come up with so far. You never know, though. Maybe there's still some magic left in pure cogitation.