Is the future inevitable?

1.6 etc writes: Tangle, he said not deterministic.

I know, I am agreeing with him (not that I could disagree with his physics) but NoNukes appears to be making distinctions between stuff at quantum level - which we all agree appears to be prperly random - and stuff at a macro level. I'm giving an example how a macro sized lump of stuff - me - could use quantum level randomness to create a non-deterministic outcome.

Son Goku writes: Let us say an atom etc

Well, I'd say so.

I know, I am agreeing with him (not that I could disagree with his physics) but NoNukes appears to be making distinctions between stuff at quantum level - which we all agree appears to be prperly random - and stuff at a macro level. I'm giving an example how a macro sized lump of stuff - me - could use quantum level randomness to create a non-deterministic outcome.

Ah, I see, you are talking about bootstrapping indeterminism up to the macro scale by making a classical object's next state depend on a quantum event. In which case, certainly yes macroscopic objects can be made indeterminate in this sense.

In fact such issues (how quantum indeterminism propagates up to the classical world) is the "real" point of Schrodinger's cat.

Son Goku writes: Can you though? All your actions could be (and evidence indicates are) completely determined by the initial conditions of the particles in your brain.

In an indeterministic universe, aren't final outcomes only incompletely specified by initial conditions, whether a human or an electron sent toward two slits?

AbE: Just saw Son Goku's Message 108. I believe I just made the same point. Quantum effects easily influence the macro level, obvious examples begin Schrödinger's cat and an experimenter writing up the results of a two slit experiment. In those cases we know the macro level outcomes of quantum influences. The human mind must be continuously influenced by those same quantum influences, but we just have no data telling us the specific quantum events and macro outcomes.

--Percy

Edited by Percy, : Grammar.

Edited by Percy, : AbE.