Determinism Is Self Defeating

[bennyboy]

If that's your point, then I have some bad news. Establishing deterministic behavior does not require such complete knowledge or even an accurate prediction, we only need to show that a prediction -is possible-. What you're doing is wrapping non deterministic things like fate and destiny into the mix and essentially, arguing against those two things via ignorance by consequence.

I've said nothing about fate or destiny. In fact, just the opposite-- I'm saying that it's possible that one set of circumstances in the universe might have more than one possible outcome-- in other words, that the reason some things aren't predictable isn't only that we lack computational power-- but that there is some random or unknowable element involved that makes the future NOT set in cause/effect determinism.

I'd also point out that the only system complex enough to predict the outcome of the entire universe is the universe itself. Try even to predict stock market outcomes a few months from now, and you'll find out how unpredictable things are. Or lottery tickets. Or whatever.

So how do you KNOW all those things are deterministc? You can't predict them. You cannot access another time stream in which they are confirmed to be the same still (or maybe shown to be different). What can you actually do to prove that the lottery numbers on a day couldn't have been other than they turned out to be?

Let's say you are working with QM. You say it's deterministic, but unknowable. I happen to know that there's a high-level physicist on this site, and I believe he will disagree with that (i.e. I remember him having said something in the past that I think disagreed with that). But I still want to know how you think you could establish that for a given state of the universe at a given t, and its resultant state r, that r is a set with only one member. What experiment would you do to establish this? What observation would you make to confirm it?

The answer is none, and none. It cannot be confirmed, because we don't have that much control over this universe, let alone hypothetical ones (or multiple real ones if they do exist).