http://vimeo.com/30934073

e/ its good movie that gives some interesting perspective.

This post was edited by cletus7seven on Dec 13 2012 01:23am

Determinism has been dead for 40+ years.

I think you're making a leap in saying with enough information about their past, you can predict someone's future choices

I have a theory (very undeveloped) that many of the fundamentally irrelevant choices which propogate under capitalism serve to assuage the anxiety that would ensue if people were aware that in actuality the range and impact of their choice is being reduced.

If you knew the way all of their brain cells were connected you could.

Lets take a robot who's movement is totally deterministic, when set down it will walk 1cm/s north, that is all it does.
Now we put him in a box that is not deterministic, it has "punching gloves" that push the robot around like crazy, randomly.
We certainly can't describe the system of the robot + box as a deterministic system.

The same goes for humans, even if humans are totally deterministic (which I doubt), it matters not since the world is not deterministic.

For example: We assume that humans are totally deterministic and lets say we magically have enough information to predict that John Doe will order soup from the lunch counter tomorrow. But poor John Doe is killed by a random event the day before!

You see that a deterministic object, that is part of a system that is not deterministic, does not behave deterministically. And we know the world is not deterministic. So even IF humans are deterministic, a human being + his environment is not.

This post was edited by Azrad on Dec 13 2012 03:53pm

Seeing it that way, than we dont have free will.

Because,

Free will = Insanity

There are no random events. The entire universe is deterministic down to the subatomic level. Currently scientists believe there is true randomness at the quantum level but luckily things at the quantum level do not directly effect the subatomic and greater.

So in essence if I knew everything about the universe I could tell you what any entity is going to do at any point in time because it is simply a culmination of all causes prior. Just follow the causal chain.

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, my man. It's completely impossible to know EVERYTHING about any given system, so therefore it will never be possible to know EVERYTHING about the system's state in the future. Therefore it's impossible to be able to predict with 100% certainty how anyone will react to a given stimulus.

And even if for some reason we didn't have free will, we have enough conscious thought such that we feel like we can make conscious choices of one thing over another, so for all intents and purposes it feels like we have free will. Supposing anything beyond that is getting into the realm of philosophy.

Its not that hard to amplify those random events into the macroscopic world. In fact, devices are already being sold that do this; that create truly random numbers and feed them into computers (since a regular computer can not create truly random numbers, although they can make some pretty good pseudo random numbers).

for example:
http://www.idquantique.com/true-random-number-generator/products-overview.html

As I said before, this idea that there is nothing truly random is dead, and has been for decades.

Have you been outside on a dark night, and looked though a window into a well lit house? You can see a weak image of your face in the glass, but you can also see inside the house. Someone in the house can also see a weak image of you as well. Some of the photons that leave your face are reflected by the glass and come back to your eyes (so you can see a weak image of your face), but some of them pass through the glass and reach the person inside eye's. The percentage of reflected vs transmitted light is determined by the situation (distance, the wavelength of the photon, thickness of the glass, and so forth), but what determines if any given photon is reflects or is transmitted is totally random, and can not be predicted, ever. This is exactly how the device above creates random numbers (based on whether or not a single photon was reflected or transmitted).

This post was edited by Azrad on Dec 14 2012 06:20am