Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> I chose to reply to this post.

  Maybe you didn't. Not at the most basic level. Maybe it was just a
consequence of physics, not a true choice.

> I think people sometimes confuse "deterministic" with "predictable".

  I don't think so. The very definition of "deterministic" is predictability.
The very word itself is saying so. It's the opposite of "non-deterministic",
which is unpredictability.

  A chain of events is deterministic if it happens in a certain way because
there's no other way it could have happened. If the exact same initial setup
can be replicated, then the chain of events will happen in the exact same
way again, completely predictably. That's the very definition of
deterministic.

> The 
> weather is deterministic, and well-understood. And yet, after millennia 
> of trying, nobody can predict the weather.

  Just because something is extremely hard to predict doesn't mean it's
not deterministic and impossible to predict. It just means that we don't
have the computing power to predict it yet.

  (But weather is probably affected also by quantum randomness, so in that
case it's really non-deterministic and impossible to predict with exact
accuracy. You can only make statistical approaches.)

  Anyways, whether physical events are predictable or not, it doesn't
change the philosophical concept of "free choice" which I wrote about.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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