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Whenever I face the arguments of determinism vs. indeterminism, I wonder how indeterminism would be defined in a purely indeterministic world. I don't know. But
by protez 12y ago
Whenever I face the arguments of determinism vs. indeterminism, I wonder how indeterminism would be defined in a purely indeterministic world. I don't know. But in this seemingly deterministic universe, we define indeterminism as a negative sense to the deterministic dynamics we observe, but we can't do it in a positive sense. All of our conceptions of "indeterminism" and random/chaos like concepts is all "determinism-biased" in that sense. Maybe, determinism might be a tiny, tiny small subset of a huge set of indeterminism, as if integers are a tiny subset of all real numbers. There's no such a thing as integers vs. real numbers. Integers are also just real numbers. In that sense, determinism might be a small part of indeterminism.
- hiker 12y ago> In that sense, determinism might be a small part of indeterminism. I agree. The astonishing thing about quantum mechanics to me is that it describes how deterministic laws emerge from completely non-deterministic processes. For example, in quantum electrodynamics, a photon going from A to B, chooses a random path with a well defined probability density assigned to each possible path. When you do the math, it turns out that the shortest path between A and B is the most likely one and that's why the classical "deterministic" law that light goes in straight lines is a good approximation for large distances. Yet the path which the photon chooses to take is completely random, chosen by the photon's free will, if you will.
- backlava 12y agoBut we would still have the concept of determinism in the macro world even if physics turns out not to be deterministic in the small.