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Comment by csee | Hacker News Reader

If the underlying physics is deterministic, then a chaotic system (e.g. the Three Body Problem) is just a collection of deterministic parts interacting with each other, and is therefore itself deterministic. The overwhelming complexity and unpredictability we observe is just a commentary on our own ignorance and limitation as humans. There was never room for any non-deterministic thing to magic itself into the system at some point as the complexity and unpredictability of the system got bigger and bigger.

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I appreciate the good faith engagement (cue side glare sigstoat), and I'm in agreement with everything but the use of "never" in the your closing sentence.

> There was never room for any non-deterministic thing to magic itself into the system

Depending what you mean by "into the system," existence itself is a glaring counterexample.

How did any of it get here in the first place? Was there an uncaused cause? Is entropy reversible?

Until we can explain-away these types of questions, it'd be prudent to remain noncommittal on the topic. The type of determinism that sigstoats expect might not even make sense in other regions or eras of reality. Things get profoundly hazy past Planck Era.

I wonder if it's possible to prove that you can't end up with a non-deterministic system if that system is constituted only by deterministic parts? I get the sense that such a proof is possible, but I am not sure. We can trivially prove it for deterministic systems that we can model mathematically, but what about a generic proof for those systems that are beyond our modelling capabilities?

Regarding existence itself, I agree that determinism is not an exhaustive set of possibilities (if it was, it would imply an infinite chain of causes, which presents its own problems). I just challenge the idea that one can possibly get a non-deterministic system if we assume that we're working with purely deterministic components/rules.

I've been thinking about it like we're located in some pocket of reality whose local conditions generate the nature we know and love, but outside of which might be unrecognizable.

Whatever the Big Bang event was, I'm assuming it was a result of some exterior nature.

What I worry about is whether or not its even possible to connect the dots between the two.

Gödel's second theorem may just straight up make this whole exercise pointless.

Just imagining that outcome gives me the urge to primal scream.

All I know for certain is I've got a lot of questions.

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