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Originally Posted by Shkspr
I could answer these questions - the answers would get more and more complex and esoteric, until I too was examining mesons and bosons on a quantum level. But it would take so much time to answer them, and so much effort and resources to predict that behavior, that I'd run out of universe to store the results in.
I suspect that if we were to take the time and effort to try to determine future events on a macro scale, we would be doomed not because the future is so unpredictable, but because the number of variables that would need to be accounted for to make any reasonable assumption is so large as to require more time and room than the universe provides. We can't build a model big enough to house the answers at anything more than an abstract probability.
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But I do not want to just settle for "it's too hard to calulate" as the answer here. I recognize that there are countless variables and effects happening... and that we can't buidl a model to understand it. But I still want it to
be.
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More than anything else, I think THAT is why the clockwork universe is not a problem for us. No matter how deterministic the universe actually IS, we're inside it, and can't see the gears. For all intents and purposes, the complexity of the universe enforces free will on us.
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And to me, this is a complete cop-out. I understand that it may not even
matter that the universe is completely deterministic... but I want to understand
why it is or is not so (or even just how we understand it to be so or not so) and am falling short on this. I won't settle for "it doesn't matter."