Determinism

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Scientific reductionism taken to its logical conclusion, a conclusion that is so plainly illogical you think it would cause pause for thought, but because reductionists are so terrified of post-modernism, people tend to swallow it and just go with it, no matter how insane its consequences.

Determinists reason, deductively, that seeing as the universe is wholly and exclusively a material thing, and is governed by immutable laws of physics and causation — but is it? — anything that will happen to any part of the universe can, with enough computational horse power and the right amount of information, be calculated in advance, and the fact that something hasn’t been so pre-calculated, or predicted, and that the trajectory of every atom in the universe has not, yet, been charted from its origin at the big bang to its final logical end point in the gnab gib, being the same singularity with which our universe began only with the arrow of time reversed — is merely a reflection of the inadequacy of our computational apparatus, and our approach to data-gathering.

Since, if everything were solved, there would be no point to existence at all, this is a pretty desolate worldview. All that saves us from that place is a marginal degree of ignorance. Great.

Causal intervention and substrate neutrality

So Complexity and Chaos by Roger White is a fun read.

See also

• Iteration