Does True Randomness Actually Exist? ( ^&*#^%$&#% )

It's clearer to ignore the first half of that post. The "freedom" there means that the choices come from outside of the system, so they are free with regard to the system.

The formulation in terms of information seems a lot clearer to me.

I accept the difficulty of communicating about this. I have tried to strip it down to fundamentals and am guilty of thinking out load.

But if you think my musings are opaque try reading this sort of stuff!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_causality

There are simple ways to describe the world and there are correct ways. Unfortunately there are no simple, correct ways.

Firstly, our world is relativistic. That means light cones are fundamental and replace the simple notion of universal time where each point separates the Universe into past and future to the relativitistic truth that each point in space-time separates all other points in space-time into a a past, a future and a region between then which is neither, with past and future being bounded by separate light cones.

So discussing causality in the real Universe requires a basic grounding in relativity and familiarity with these facts.  You will find plenty of philosophical discussions that ignore this. Some date from before Einstein, so are simply based on an out of date Galilean perspective. Others are just not keeping up.

elroch:The "freedom" there means that the choices come from outside of the system, so they are free with regard to the system.

dont you think that we would be better off if you use another term all together instead of overlapping different ideas with the same term? ..if just to avoid confusion.

anyways, skimming your post it seems that youre highlighting the problem of non-locality. (althou its not clear how it relate to your "coin in a box" example)

what i dont understand at all is in what context did you post it. were you just adding to what opti already said about causation? because on its surface it doesnt even seem that you contradicted him. or maybe you were going back to our conversation about FW, and trying to answer a previous Q. or maybe you are arguing determinism all over again?

Yes, I do agree with your first comment. I did say to kind of ignore the first half of that post (I only left it there to show how my thinking had gone).

My objective was to come up with a more intuitive idea of causality in a relativistic Universe.  It is normally expressed in abstract terms like:

"No information can be communicated faster than the speed of light"

Perhaps I should have left well alone!

Note that the classical equivalent of this would be "No information can be communicated to the past", which is not how most people think of classical causality, but it is a good way to express it.

yes, no information can be communicated to the past sounds like a necessity. 

on a totally different note..

https://youtu.be/oTbObag1r0I

lol

Call that squeaky? Pah. Minnie Riperton owns squeaky.

Seriously, this singer had a uniquely amazing voice and it is tragic that she died just a few years after becoming highly regarded. She kept making live and recorded music in the last six months of her illness.

A neat thing about this song is she sings part of it in the same register as the birds in the background (actually 3 parts of it).

No. It is one of the rock solid principles of modern physics, simply referred to as "causality". I would guess you were exposed to a misrepresentation of the implications of entanglement, but perhaps you can clarify it by being more specific.

neat ??...ohhh kaaayyy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrip_QVuWWQ

Causality is the fact that information only moves one way. We call that way forwards in time, and the region it can reach from some point in space time "the future" of that point.

Time travel being impossible is a simple corollary of this, since sending anything back in time carries information (eg one bit of information to say whether it did or did not go to the destination).

Note that a more important corollary that works in both paradigms is that information can only arrive from the past (with "the past" having a different technical meaning in each case, like "the future").

It's how causality is defined. Don't complain to me!

My guess is that you couldn't describe in a meaningful way that is means to be "meaningful within the philosophy paradigm".  Physics has replaced part of what used to be philosophy and finds its meaning through the much clearer scientific method. (If Aristotle had realised this, some wrong physics could have been discarded from his philosophy).

It's a simple challenge. If you can't even communicate what "meaningful within the philosophy paradigm" amounts to in the way I can explain what a meaningful statement in any scientific context is, then it is not substantial.

it seem like you two dont agree on the meaning of causality, so obviously you wont agree on a definition either (similar to FW definitions). for example, a probabilistic causality will have a very different meaning from a deterministic one.

so maybe a more meaningful way to go about it, would be to highlight the differences of how you two perceive causality first. then defining it should be quite ez.

probably should waited till friday, but hey..

https://youtu.be/UXs1mMnVr3Y

i've been blamed for liking those before. yes..

muchas gracias!