Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tanseydavid 1874 days ago
Is Brownian Motion deterministic or not?

If your view is that Brownian Motion is not deterministic then does that not contradict the idea 'that cause and effect holds in a closed system' as any sort of absolute?

1 comments

The subject was free will. I said "determined" in contrast to free will. So, if you've got Brownian Motion (or, worse, quantum uncertainty), then you've got some randomness in there, and it's not a purely deterministic system. But that doesn't give you any more free will; it just means that the machine that determines your choices has a random number generator as one of the inputs. You still don't get to choose, because you don't control the randomness.