Determinism Is Self Defeating

[bennyboy]

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).

"High-level" lol.
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states that we cannot know precisely both the speed and position of any given particle....
But... just because we can't measure it, it doesn't mean that the particle can't be at a given location and with a given velocity... does it?
Well, all particles must have some length, so a precise position is a strange concept, unless you go for the position of the center, where QM gives you the maximum of the wave function... which tends to be the same.

However, on a slightly less nanoscopic level, these uncertainties become a bit less pronounced and statistics takes over... the averaged wave function gets interpreted as a probability distribution and you get a very accurate (as far we've been able to measure it) probability for each state of the particle.
And, armed with those probabilities, you can determine the what's going to happen and how often.

But what do I know? I'm just a low-level physicist...

Great news!

Okay, given the starting position of the balls in a lottery machine, and their tumbling time in milliseconds before being dropped down their little chutes for display, tell me the winning numbers. Or tell me what the weather will be like on my next birthday.

You will say, "If I had accurate enough information, and enough computational power, I COULD tell you those things." But that's like saying, "If I could go faster than the speed of light, I could . . ."

The reality is you can't calculate the individual particles of even a simple system, and probably will never be able to. You can calculate ONLY on the statistical level, and in many cases not accurately. This is hardly a strong enough foundation on which to establish an absolute philosopy like that of determinism.