[extropy-chat] Note on "Random (effects without a cause)" comment

[John K Clark]

"Jeff Medina" <analyticphilosophy at gmail.com>

> A lack of knowledge of a deterministic model of a
> physical system does not  entail a lack of the
> existence of a deterministic process
> underlying that system.

A tiny minority of Physicists have been singing that tired old song for
about 80 years now, without one scrap of experimental evidence to support
the claim and plenty that seems to refute it. They've desperately looked for
loopholes in Bell's inequality and they've found one, sort of. The universe
can be deterministic but then it must also be non local; meaning that the
reason this Carbon 14 atom right here decayed into a Nitrogen 14 atom is
because of what an atom in the Andromeda Galaxy 2 million light years away
is doing right now, and that atom is acting the way it is because of an atom
in the Hydra Cluster 8 billion light years away, and that atom is acting the
way it is because...

So in order to predict what this Carbon 14 atom is going to do I'd have to
know all there is to know about the universe, and that's about as un-
testable as you can get, so I would have no embarrassment calling such a
thing random nor would at least 98% of the world's physicists.  And 100% of
the world's biologists would have no absolutely no objection in using the
phrase "random mutation" in a sentence as I did.

  John K Clark