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Originally Posted by roachboy
1. thing is that even the possibility that mechanical causality applies only to limited scales/systems is enough to undo any committment to determinism at all.
2. to think that abandoning determinism means that therefore everything is random is an inversion of the same logic: randomness is more coherent defined as the inverse of determined. the assumption is that to be=to be determined, to have an a priori form. that meanings are transcendent, in short---the reverse of determinacy is indeterminacy, and the transposition of indeterminacy is a chain of words like randomness.
the problem is the way of thinking itself---the trouble created by frames of reference shaped by this way of thinking simply replicate them, follows from them.
3. the problem then is not determinacy/indeterminacy.
it is whether there is another way of thinking about ontology.
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1. It depends on what you mean by commitment. I guess i'm only really casually committed to determinism in that though i think that everything should be able to be understood as being the direct result of something that happened previously, i also think the question of whether existence is determined or not is unanswerable and therefore more of a philosophical exercise. I think it's an interesting idea, and also that it's implicitly a natural extension of belief in the scientific method.
2. I think that randomness is a property of a system that isn't determined and that undetermined systems aren't necessarily completely random. I think that the level of randomness perceived in any system is inversely proportional to the amount of understanding one has of the system.
It's interesting because i think that you and i are approaching this subject from two different perspectives. I don't know how much math you've had, but the words "system" and "determined" have very specific meanings in linear algebra. All a system is is a series of relationships in the form of equations and the system is determined if there are as many equations as there are unknowns. If you have fewer equations than variables the system is underdetermined and you have a uncertainty. I know that it gets much more complicated than that, but the one thing (i think) that doesn't change is that the key to "determining" as system is finding as many relationships between the unknowns as you need to.
Now, i know that math isn't reality, but the two do quite often overlap. I think that if one had enough information concerning the relationships between different phenomena in reality, one could ultimately predict everything that will ever happen before anything actually has. All this is really theoretical, though, since that level of understanding seems a bit beyond the scope of human capability.