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Old 2013-01-03, 16:58   Link #16
willx
Nyaaan~~
 
 
Join Date: Feb 2006
Age: 40
Personally I feel that hard determinism which is what you are talking about here is an amusing distraction, but otherwise pointless outside of academic and philosophical discussion. It is similar to theology in that it espouses one perfect absolute solution or answer to the question that is everything -- and ultimately states that the question itself is the answer.

It is applicable to any and all of life's problems as Macroeconomics is applicable to one single person balancing his weekly grocery budget. The scale you propose with which determinism can be relied upon to accurately gauge the results of "All Things(tm)" has already been succinctly pointed out by other posts above as needing to be "outside the system" -- which in theory requires some theoretical computational device that not only contains all the information of the universe, but is able to sort through this information, which .. aside from the "chicken & egg"-style allegory of how something can be outside of the Universe, simply presents the issue of relevancy of scale. So in summation, if we're talking about determinism and it's impact on our daily lives -- what time scale are we also talking about? Within discrete time there's no guarantee that even mean regression has occurred .. which is what the coin-flipping someone else previously mentioned was attempting to point out.

The chicken & egg allegory itself is quite amusing .. how is determinism itself affected by the existence of something that can calculate and thus deduce all outcomes? It's very circular.

My perspective: So, basically, it's novel and amusing .. but unless someone is paying for you to think about it .. it is about as relevant as spending an afternoon having a long brunch.
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