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   Thunderstrike (tstrike78@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2024 04:27:12 JST Thunderstrike

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   @Radical_EgoCom

   Einstein famously insisted that "God does not play dice with the universe", but decades of quantum theory has prettymuch proven that, on some level at least, random chance does, indeed, govern the universe. There will always be some amount of random chance that plays into everything, therefore determinism is impossible regardless of how much human beings would prefer to believe in the orderliness of the universe.

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     Thunderstrike (tstrike78@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2024 04:27:10 JST Thunderstrike

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     @Radical_EgoCom

     The existence of Hawking Radiation emanating from black holes is a pretty good example of this. We actually *can* predict that in a broad, general sense, but the smaller you get in scale the more difficult it becomes to make predictions about individual particles because it comes down to random chance.

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     ☭ 𝗖 𝗔 𝗧 ☭ (radical_egocom@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2024 04:27:10 JST ☭ 𝗖 𝗔 𝗧 ☭

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     @tstrike78

     1/2 The existence of random chance and unpredictability don't disprove determinism. Determinism simply states that due to the fact that past events influence current and future events, it is impossible for such things as free will to exist because any action that humans make will have been influenced by past actions that they had no control over, and that the nature of those past actions are what caused the outcome of the current ones.

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     Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2024 04:27:10 JST Alexandre Oliva

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     consider the hypothetical schrödinger's cat in the box with radioactive decay-activated poison. you open the box and find the cat dead. was its death determined by past events or by random choice? (or both)
     
     now consider that there are radioactive elements that are important for the functioning of the brain, and that their decay may cause neurons to fire or to misfire, potentially influencing macroscopic decisions. how could those macroscopic decisions be considered deterministic, if they follow from truly random events? don't you see the discontinuity in the chain of determinism there? not that the decision doesn't follow from the random event, but that the random event itself doesn't follow from past events.
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     Thunderstrike (tstrike78@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2024 04:27:11 JST Thunderstrike

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     @Radical_EgoCom

     That makes no sense. Chaos is defined, on a basic level, as predictability that breaks down over time (and therefore becomes unpredictable). But if determinism is defined as all events being determined by previous events so that chains of events could not have occurred any other way, that should be predictable on some level (even if we humans can't do it). The universe cannot be both predictable and unpredictable at the same time.

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     ☭ 𝗖 𝗔 𝗧 ☭ (radical_egocom@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2024 04:27:11 JST ☭ 𝗖 𝗔 𝗧 ☭

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     @tstrike78

     1/2 The universe can be predictable in a sense that, theoretically, it could be possible to predict every event in the universe if one were to have absolute knowledge of every event in the past and present, and unpredictable to us if we will never be able to attain the necessary abilities required to predict every single event in the universe. So, overall, the events of the universe could be deterministic and predictable, but from our limited perspective, it could appear chaotic...

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     ☭ 𝗖 𝗔 𝗧 ☭ (radical_egocom@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2024 04:27:11 JST ☭ 𝗖 𝗔 𝗧 ☭

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     @tstrike78

     2/2 ...and unpredictable, but our subjective and limited perception would be incorrect and incomplete.

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     Thunderstrike (tstrike78@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2024 04:27:11 JST Thunderstrike

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     @Radical_EgoCom

     That's where we disagree.

     What you're describing is a theory of determinism itself, but quantum theory tells us that on a subatomic level it is simply impossible to make predictions past a certain level of accuracy. Not beyond our current ability, flatly impossible. All you can do is approximate probabilities. So that means there will always be an element of random chance and unpredictability in everything that happens.

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     ☭ 𝗖 𝗔 𝗧 ☭ (radical_egocom@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2024 04:27:12 JST ☭ 𝗖 𝗔 𝗧 ☭

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     @tstrike78

     Determinism proposes that all events are determined by preceding events or conditions, making it impossible for them to have occurred differently. Whether those preceeding events were chaotic or not has no bearing on the claims of determinism, and some or even all of these preceding events being chaotic wouldn't disprove the deterministic claim that all events are determined by past events.