Warp schrieb:
>   Sometimes quantum effects can escalate to macroscopic scales, and thus
> affect macroscopic events. What this means in practice is that these random
> quantum effects may change an otherwise deterministic chain of macroscopic
> events in a completely unpredictable way. In other words, the purely
> deterministic and predetermined chain of events is sometimes disrupted
> at random, resulting in a different chain of events from that point forward.
> (How often this happens, I have no idea, as I am no physicist.)

It happens every time and always.

Cause and effect appear to be present at quantum scale as well, but they 
have a statistical nature there. At quantum levels, there is no such 
thing as an /inevitable/ consequence.

The same actually goes for the macroscopic scale: There are only 
/extremely probable/ consequences, to such an extent that they can be 
considered inevitable for practical purposes.

If you shoot a bullet right at your head, serious head injury is not an 
/inevitable/ effect. But for statistical reasons, it is pretty unlikely 
that even half of the lead atoms will miss your skull (unless you're a 
pretty bad marksman :-)).

>   Now we come to the philosophical concept of human free choice. By its
> very definition free choice is necessarily something which transcends both
> deterministic and random behavior. In other words, free choice can change
> a deterministic chain of events non-randomly. Thus it overrides both
> determinism at macroscopic levels and randomness at quantum levels.

An interesting philosophical question is whether events at quantum 
levels are /truly/ random - or whether they may be driven by a 
particular purpose.

Some quantum stuff experiments exhibit strange effects in this respect, 
indicating that cause and effect may even work backwards at those scales.

Maybe the whole universe is "heading towards a particular purpose", and 
any chain of events that would cause it to miss this purpose is 
automatically cancelled out.

That is, maybe life and death of Schrodinger's Cat depend on whether the 
universe "wants" it to be alive or dead - and the cat will be both so 
long as the universe doesn't care.

And after all, isn't that the hope cryptanalysts place in quantum 
computers? As far as I understand, they want to start a machine with all 
possible sets of input values in superposition, have it perform some 
math on it - still will all values in superposition - and then collapse 
all the superposed states into the one single state which gives the 
desired result; then, so they hope, all they need to do is examine what 
input values were /effectively/ fed into the machine. That is, the 
machine would sort of "un-do" every possible chain of events not 
matching the desired result.

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