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Old September 12th, 2009, 07:01 PM
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Originally Posted by CaptainBlank View Post
You are obviously living in a world with a later version of Quantum Mechanics than that apparently in force over here
Quantum Mechanics does not bust determinism, it is a challenge to determinism; just like the 'hard problem of consciousness', consciousness does not bust a strictly materialistic world, but it provides a challenge to this philosophy. I happen to think it is silly to jump to the conclusion and say "well, since we have consciousness it means there is a supernatural element in our mind". It is just a gap in scientific knowledge. Likewise with quantum mechanics and determinism. We can fill that gap by saying that God plays dice but that is foolish. There is no reason at all to assume that quantum mechanics is not deterministic. After all, it does operate by laws, so even if you think it is "random" it does obey laws, so that indicates already that it should be deterministic. Furthermore, that quantum world does not exhibit chaos, something that we can find in our human everywhere world, this suggests that if we can find a deterministic account of the quantum world it would be more deterministic (abusing language) than our human world. At best quantum mechanics is just a challenge to determinism not a counterexample. You know there was a time when we were unable to understand the motion of the Heavens. But today we can easily determine how the Heavens shall move. I happen to think that in order to understand the behavior of the quantum world we need to go down the rabbit hole, to see what the quantum world itself is made out of. Hopefully, string theory will finally address this problem.

I want to add that there are two words for "random". The mathematicians concept and the non-mathematicians concept. The mathematical meaning of "random" is that all events in a sample space have equal probability of happening. The non-mathematical meaning of "random" is that events just happen by themselves for no reason at all. I happen to believe that the quantum world is deterministic but random at the same time. Thus, you should be able to predict these behaviors mathematically but at the same time if you compute their probabilities you shall realize they are all equally likely. Do not confuse "random" with "random".
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  #17  
Old September 13th, 2009, 12:15 AM
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Originally Posted by ThePerfectHacker View Post
Quantum Mechanics does not bust determinism, it is a challenge to determinism; just like the 'hard problem of consciousness', consciousness does not bust a strictly materialistic world, but it provides a challenge to this philosophy. I happen to think it is silly to jump to the conclusion and say "well, since we have consciousness it means there is a supernatural element in our mind". It is just a gap in scientific knowledge. Likewise with quantum mechanics and determinism. We can fill that gap by saying that God plays dice but that is foolish. There is no reason at all to assume that quantum mechanics is not deterministic. After all, it does operate by laws, so even if you think it is "random" it does obey laws, so that indicates already that it should be deterministic. Furthermore, that quantum world does not exhibit chaos, something that we can find in our human everywhere world, this suggests that if we can find a deterministic account of the quantum world it would be more deterministic (abusing language) than our human world. At best quantum mechanics is just a challenge to determinism not a counterexample. You know there was a time when we were unable to understand the motion of the Heavens. But today we can easily determine how the Heavens shall move. I happen to think that in order to understand the behavior of the quantum world we need to go down the rabbit hole, to see what the quantum world itself is made out of. Hopefully, string theory will finally address this problem.

I want to add that there are two words for "random". The mathematicians concept and the non-mathematicians concept. The mathematical meaning of "random" is that all events in a sample space have equal probability of happening. The non-mathematical meaning of "random" is that events just happen by themselves for no reason at all. I happen to believe that the quantum world is deterministic but random at the same time. Thus, you should be able to predict these behaviors mathematically but at the same time if you compute their probabilities you shall realize they are all equally likely. Do not confuse "random" with "random".
This is so full of non-sequiters etc., I can see that Mr.F will have an easy time in the forthcoming debate.

CB
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