Stathis:
please see my interjected remarks/questions
John
--- Stathis Papaioannou
<stathispapaioannou.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>
> Tom Caylor writes:
>
> >1) The reductionist definition that something is
> determined by the
> >sum of atomic parts and rules.
>
> So how about this: EITHER something is determined by
> the sum of atomic parts
> and rules OR it is truly random.
"Sum of atomic parts"? I am not sure about the figment
based on primitive observations and on then
applicable explanatory calculative conclusions within
the narrow model of the ancient scientist's views,
called "atom".
Then again the phrase restricts its validity to THAT
(figmentious) bunch of allaged atoms, period. Nothing
exists as a cut-off singularity without intereffects.
"RULES" to the rescue! how far are you willing to
accept the rules? Do they involve the ambience, all
the way to the 'end' of the existing world with ALL
its intereffectiveness? In that case a different
wording would be more appropriate...(Not the closed
model)
The bigger thing is your "OR" (in caps, meaning that
it is exclusive). You prescribe only TWO alternatives.
That would be right if we are onmiscient and exclude
any other ways of that interactive endless world -
allowed to be followed.
Truly random IMO means that we truly believe in our
ignorance to detect some (so far undiscovered?)
'order' with 'rules' leading to those 'truly random'
results.
Same with chaos: we just did not (yet?) learn that
kind of processes in the wide world existence that
would result in our "chaos"- called process. (Like
random.)
Your following words underline this position:
>
> There are two mechanisms which make events seem
> random in ordinary life. One
> is the difficulty of actually making the required
> measurements, finding the
> appropriate rules and then doing the calculations.
Amen (difficulty?)
>
> Classical chaos may make
> this practically impossible, but we still understand
> that the event (such as
> a coin toss) is fundamentally deterministic, and the
> randomness is only apparent.
Amen again ("we don't know".)
>
> The other mechanism is quantum randomness, for
> example in the case of
> radioctive decay. In a single world interpretation
> of QM this is, as far as
> I am aware, true randomness. In a no-collapse/ many
> worlds interpretation
> there is no true randomness because all outcomes
> occur deterministically
> according to the SWE. However, there is apparent
> randomness due to what
> Bruno calls the first person indeterminacy: the
> observer does not know which
> world he will end up in from a first person
> viewpoint, even though he knows
> that from a third person viewpoint he will end up in
> all of them.
Sorry to agree both with QM and the new version of the
classical MWI. The former is a 2nd tier (linear?
-after Alwyn Scott) version of the "model" 'physical
views', the latter is beyond the level I like to
speculate on.
>
> I find the randomness resulting from first person
> indeterminacy in the MWI
> difficult to get my mind around. In the case of the
> chaotic coin toss one
> can imagine God being able to do the calculations
> and predict the outcome,
> but even God would not be able to tell me which
> world I will find myself in
> when a quantum event induces splitting. And yet, I
> am stuck thinking of
> quantum events in the MWI as fundamentally
> non-random.
Make yourself a god that could figure it all out.
>
> Stathis Papaioannou
>
John M
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Received on Thu Apr 06 2006 - 11:24:30 PDT