On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 7:39 PM, John Clark <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, May 9, 2013 Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> wrote: > >> > Roulette wheels are not random, they can be modeled as Newtonian >> > mechanisms, exactly like cuckoo clocks. > > > No they are not exactly alike. A tiny change in a cuckoo clock causes a tiny > change in the clock's performance, but a tiny change in the roulette wheel > causes a HUGE change in the wheel's performance,
True, but chaotic systems are still explainable in terms of forces and interactions, like any other Newtonian mechanism. There is no fundamental randomness needed to explain why you can't predict the outcome. > and conceivably the change > might be so small that we're talking about a quantum event. Could be, but a roulette will still work as a pseudo-random number generator even if that's not the case. > And if you don't > like roulette then a electronic circuit that detects shot noise or a Geiger > counter. Ok. >> >> > You can accept that true randomness is fundamental, and thus, not >> > explainable > > > I can accept that it is conceivable. I do not think that nature is obligated > to arrange things in such a way that human beings can always understand > them. Agreed, but Science ultimately suffers from the halting problem. We can never be sure if it's hopeless or if there is a possibility of discovery ahead. >> > but the MWI and Bruno's FPI provide a compelling contrary hypothesis. > > > I like the MWI because it doesn't have to explain what a observer or a > observation is not because it gets rid of randomness. Personally I don't > see much difference between saying something happened for no cause and > saying something happened for a cause that can't ever be detected even in > theory. I think the MWI suggests something a bit simpler than that: there is no cause AND no randomness because everything happened. My personal (although, I'm sure, not original) take on it is that the idea of minds being in a superposition of states is consistent with observation. If I made a bet with you on the outcome of one double-slit experiment, there would be a set of macro states where I won the bet and a set where I lost it. I'm inclined to believe I would actually experience both of these outcomes. Each outcome would appear to me as a self-consistent storyline, but that would be just an illusion. This is a hard to swallow idea by the mainstream because it sounds ridiculous / a bit too sci-fi-ish, but it requires less assumptions than the alternatives, so it's the best choice so far according to Occam's razor. > And to tell you the truth I can't keep up with Bruno's homemade > acronyms and terms and have quite forgotten what "FPI" even stands for. Are you sure it's homemade? Maybe he was at the office when he first thought of it. On a more serious note, it would be great to have an everything list wiki for reference. We could have a gigantic section just for monads. > And speaking of profound mysteries, why isn't acronym a acronym? Hey wait a > minute it is! Arranged Chronological Reassignment Of Names You Manipulate; > acronym for short. You might like this one too: http://xkcd.com/917/ Telmo. > John K Clark > > > > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
