[Irenicus]

Originally Posted by ZGoten

You asked me why, I gave you why, so in my book that's an answer.

It's a deeper why. Metaphysical why. Philosophical why. Not just why you think so, but why you think it matters -- and more, really, why not, why else, why the hell, etc., etc. I wanted to see your worldview you stated you have in the first post.

Basically, what Archon_Wing is questioning you on which seems to be a tangent to your main point, but is actually quite important to the rest of us reading what you write down -- what, aside from pure, implacable philosophical curiosity, does this belief means? To you, to your thinking, to your concept of your very ability to think.

But I guess I should ask you a more direct question: what do you think is sentience, then?

Probability is just a term used for something that we cannot calculate sufficiently. Your coin example is one of them. If I flipped a coind right know, I wouldn't know the result. That doesn't mean that it's theoretically impossible to predict it. What the result is, is dependent on factors such as the mass of the coin, gravitation, the power and angle you flipped it with, air pressure, the composition of whatever it is landing on etc. It is extremely complex to exactly predict a result, but that result is still dependable on factors that could in theory be analized sufficiently - according to determinism. Whether we ware capable of this or not, has no impact on whether or not it's true.

The coin was computational, the most famous display of random probabilities really, but even if it were physical -- atomic level, so to speak -- then you've already put a pretty sharp knife on your own belief when you acknowledged the inherent uncertainties of [the current models of] quantum physics. If the particles are not entirely where they should be, or they have a million possibilities to be at a million places all at once but actually aren't or maybe are or whatever ["until observed"], why would you think air pressure ten thousand years from now when the last bajillion coin gets flipped, would be predictable today even by the theoretical bigger-than-the-universe machine?