The Impossible Test For Universal Indeterminism

The Impossible Test For Universal Indeterminism

No one has ever established whether the universe is fundamentally deterministic or probabilistic. This is one of those strange, counterintuitive facts that change the way you view reality (not just physics) once you comprehend it. It’s similar to how it’s counterintuitive that your feeling of “weight” is actually never due to pure gravity; instead, it’s due to electromagnetism.

You can’t conclusively rule out hidden non-deterministic factors in actual physical systems through experiment alone.

Any observed agreement with deterministic equations may also be explained by suitable probabilistic theories that mimic determinism within experimental error.

Similarly, for so-called random systems, any observed randomness could still be deterministic in some hidden manner. If measurements match a probabilistic model, that doesn’t exclude an undiscovered deterministic theory that mimics those probabilities.

The bold are Jaimungal's so I decided to leave them in. I think this is a great introduction to Philosophy of Causation...

...That said I think it is missing some key points. The first is that our current evidence does show indeterminism, and as Scott Aaronson notes to say otherwise is to claim that Nature gives out "anti-clues". Rovelli makes a similar point in Hegoland, that the deterministic interpretations seem to be based more on rejecting indeterminism than making any real advancement in knowledge.

I also think the picture shows a misunderstanding of what true randomness is. The "hyper chaos" (see here & here) of philosopher Quentin Meillassoux is not stochastic, rather both sides of the picture can look exactly the same for trillions of years or longer until the right "random" side changes.

The key issue if we are assuming the "physical" world IMO, is that it ignores the Pedesis of Thomas Nail - the movement of Nature is neither determined nor random.

Things get even more tricky if we start considering there is no "physical", that all causation is mental, etc...