Re: Re: Uncaused events?
wipeout said:
It's simply human preference.
Many physicists just found it easier to believe things are fundamentally determined by chance than by undiscovered causes, so indeterminism was adopted as the way the universe is.
However, it's not hard to imagine that the universe is like a simulation running in a computer and it appears indeterministic to any artificially intelligent person inside the simulation but is in fact deterministic and following a set program with only one possible past, present and future.
I believe you are mistaken. Most physicists, especially of the era in which most of the interpretations of modern physics were hammered out, would vastly have prefered that the universe was determined by as-yet undiscovered causes. That's the way the rest of science works, after all. Shroedinger's famous cat parable, for example, was originally intended as a
rebuttal to the now-mainstream squishy interpretation of an unresolvable mixture of quantum states. After all, we know how cats work -- and the point is that a cat simply
can't be a mixture of both dead and alive. A concept like that doesn't make sense applied to a cat, so why should it make sense applied to an electron or an atom.
Modern scholarship has simply reversed the parable, stating (in the teeth of common sense, I might add), that it
does make sense to talk about a cat being a mixture of alive and dead, and if you don't see it, you don't understand quantum mechanics. But the reason that modern scholarship has taken that path is because the experimental evidence is so firmly against underlying unknown causes.
Bell's inequalities directly address this question. A "deterministic" universe where quantum fluctuations were determined by unknown local variables would not be compatible with our experimental evidence. The situation you describe :
If the program was written so that there was no way for any AI person inside the simulation to tell if it was determinisitic or not, than that is that as far as the AI person's investigation goes.
We could be in a similar situation, not in the sense of being in a computer but in the sense that the causes for events might simply be something that we can never know.
is not accurate precisely because we
can determine that, whatever the causes for events are, they're not simply an unknown conventional universe with a conventional set of hidden properties. They're either genuinely non-determininstic causeless events, or they're something even stranger.
