[Dilettante_]

Thank you, but I seem terribly out of my depth for that level of discussion.

If Claude helped me understand correctly, the error is on me for taking determinism as a base assumption and rejecting the assumption of "randomness" at a universal level? Is this something I would need to buff up on the quantum stuff to come around on?

All I have in my head is Laplace's demon, all I've ever observed is deterministic events: If you flip the coin the same way everytime, it'll come up the same way everytime?

[wartywhoa23]

Laplace's demon requires being able to tell velocity vectors of individual molecules, and tossing a coin predictably takes being able to throw it with equally enormous precision, correcting for the net effect of all collisions with molecules of air along the way, etc.

So in the end of the day posessing such knowledge, or rather having a mind with this much focus, depth and resolution would indeed mean a win of determinism over entropy. How can a cup break irreversibly if we know how to put back all of its shards so that they click in place at atomic scale without gaps and lost pieces?

But our reality is a battlefield between pure will/determinism and pure chance/entropy, and it's depicted vividly in The Matrix as the battle between The Architect and The Oracle. And we seem to be cursed/blessed to be Neos trying to balance that out or escape that Sisyphean task altogether.

[Dilettante_]

Now I think we're having two different conversations again? If I understand your point about the "battlefield between pure will/determinism and pure chance/entropy" correctly, you're talking about more of a psychological, individual, "is there a meaning to life, the universe and everything" type direction?

What I was trying to drive at was really more of a "in the framework of Laplace's Demon, your choices in the present can be 100% predicted, no different from the movements of molecules. It follows that you have no more options of choosing than the molecule does and your future has been set in stone from the beginning of time."

[wartywhoa23]

False dichotomy, we're talking about the same.

In the framework of Laplace's Demon, no single human, the whole humankind nor any machine or algorithm it creates is capable of 100% precise prediction of anything at the level of operation of said Demon. If there's any experiment proving otherwise, I'd like to know.

If you insist that we talk about 100% prediction of my personal choices, let's play a simple game of guessing UUIDs. I generated one and changed a single digit in it at my free (or predetermined) will. Here it is, protected by another UUID which I'll post as soon as you make your prediction.

https://eu.onetimesecret.com/secret/2ttgx3flngktuelcswh861hm...

[Dilettante_]

  [nothing] is capable of 100% precise prediction of anything at the level of operation of said Demon

No see I actually agree. See my original post:

  It's complicated and functionally impossible to predict with any certainty, but the future *is* certain.

I thought your disagreement was with my central point of strict determinism, meaning past, future and present are all set in stone, but you've agreed with this on account of the Demon. So I am entirely lost on what your point actually is.

[Dilettante_]

Too late to edit: Learned about the Stern-Gerlach apparatus as relating to the uncertainty principle. That's a huge puzzle piece and I'm probably gonna shut up about determinism for a while as I stew on this.