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

I forgive you Sally, no worries..

@MustangMate has left the building...

Evolution would be impossible because it wouldn't be evolution. It would be something else. However we know that evolution happens so we know that determinism is false.

That's all the proof that's necessary, apart from the fact that all determinism is, is a simplistic plan of the universe constructed by the equivalent of a 12-year-old who knows it all and expects the universe to conform to his knowledge of it.

With determinism, you can't make any decisions. There's only the illusion of making decisions but they aren't real. To what purpose? You can't name a single reason why that should be so .... why you have the illusion of choice but it isn't real. And because choice isn't real, the brain couldn't evolve, because the brain is an organ that uses perceptions and memories to plan future actions. But if no choice is possible then nothing depends on having an illusion of choice. The argument that people are kept alive by the illusion of choice and independence is invalid, because they wouldn't be able to kill themselves or allow themselves to starve. They wouldn't have that choice available. Unless they couldn't choose not to, of course.

Trouble with some people ...they think they can think but they can't manage it well enough to answer these criticisms of determinism. They look to someone who may not actually be the person here with the answers but if you aren't capable of even entering into a discussion about the points I have raised then is your belief that determinism may be real worthy of being taken seriously? There is simply no reason to assume that it even MIGHT be true. 

There are potential flaws in the above points I have raised but they exist only if something that is even less likely than determinism were to exist. That something cannot be discussed here.

no....go ahead.

Although I would say determinism has been proven false by the scientific method, I would observe that arguments such as the one that evolution requires randomness are not actually valid. The reason is the existence of pseudorandomness. For example, finite programs can produce infinite amounts of functional structure using a finite, deterministic evolutionary algorithm that uses a source of pseudorandomness instead of a source of true randomness. 

To think of it more generally, any stochastic real world system can be simulated (at least in principle - the simulator may be very slow) by a deterministic computer program that uses pseudorandomness to model the random parts of the behaviour being modelled (one example is the modelling of quantum processes).  Given that the simulator can exhibit any behaviour that can occur in the real system, you can see that behaviour cannot itself exclude the possibility of underlying determinism.

(The argument from empirical physics against underlying determinism is much more precise in the way it quantifies variation and shows that the observed variation is incompatible with underlying causal determinism. It is possible in principle to have a deterministic simulator for our Universe of course, but such a simulator does not make the behaviour we observe deterministic. The difference here from the example of evolution is that physics is fundamental, not a high level phenomenon).

Here is some proper RANDOMNESS.

About the 5 G towers and how they’re being weaponized to cause fevers, colds, etc.

I think that the reason I'm a better thinker, the brilliant thinker, is that I'm not diverted by the unrealistic. If people had thought the way you do, with your post-modernistic scepticism, in the past 400 years, we'd still be living in medeival times.

...wow !

Fact: nothing in physics contradict Determinism. (and i challenge anyone to prove me wrong)

so whats the big deal? because causality is the core of physics and the most natural way to think about the behavior of matter is that it behave deterministically (causally) while obeying natural laws. its not just a 'possibility', it should be our default understanding of physics. and there's no need to add any "funny randomness" to it.

so why do we even come up with all sort of delusional interpretations? simple.. it just a bad habit we picked up some 100yrs ago when QM was discovered. basically they are nothing but story telling, because they add nothing useful to physics.

whats the problem with D? none really. its only became a problem because it contradict (arguably) with the materialism/naturalism belief. the thing is.. if living things are made of matter alone, and matter is determine.. so are we. and that's a big problem because it mean that consciousness is just an illusion. to me? this is a ridiculous proposition.

but here's the good news.. because materialism/naturalism is just a belief. theres no real reason to hold on to it religiously. in fact.. once we remove it from the equation, a lot of the contradictions goes away. for example..

consciousness and free will are exactly as we experience them. how cool is that? lol. and there's no contradiction whatsoever with physics, biology (evolution included), math, etc.

now im not talking here about any funny business.. all that it really means is that biological life has some 'special ingredient' that yet to be found. should be kinda obvious really.

Apparently the process of human communication/understanding/acceptance/rejection/refinement.. is circular and a waiting game at that for various reasons. How lovely.

My stance remains.. Free Will has an overseer.

Gut feeling, screw the sledgehammer.. don't need it.

Again? Did you miss the previous times? Seems to me you are going to ignore the reasoning for personal reasons (possibly including not understanding it).

I'm afraid that many people reading this (if there are any) are going to get used to Elroch coming out with a bit of science, Sillver completely ignoring it and Elroch being right. There's a problem there for me because they are likely to get stuck in the way of thinking that Elroch is right again, whereas he doesn't answer me half so well, making strange and irrelevant comments and not really addressing the issues I raise, so I was right to think this is unproductive so far as the possibility of achieving anything is concerned.

4.4 Quantum mechanics

As indicated above, QM is widely thought to be a strongly non-deterministic theory. Popular belief (even among most physicists) holds that phenomena such as radioactive decay, photon emission and absorption, and many others are such that only a probabilistic description of them can be given. The theory does not say what happens in a given case, but only says what the probabilities of various results are. So, for example, according to QM the fullest description possible of a radium atom (or a chunk of radium, for that matter), does not suffice to determine when a given atom will decay, nor how many atoms in the chunk will have decayed at any given time. The theory gives only the probabilities for a decay (or a number of decays) to happen within a given span of time. Einstein and others perhaps thought that this was a defect of the theory that should eventually be removed, by a supplemental hidden variable theory^[6] that restores determinism; but subsequent work showed that no such hidden variables account could exist. At the microscopic level the world is ultimately mysterious and chancy.

So goes the story; but like much popular wisdom, it is partly mistaken and/or misleading. Ironically, quantum mechanics is one of the best prospects for a genuinely deterministic theory in modern times! Everything hinges on what interpretational and philosophical decisions one adopts. The fundamental law at the heart of non-relativistic QM is the Schrödinger equation. The evolution of a wavefunction describing a physical system under this equation is normally taken to be perfectly deterministic.^[7] If one adopts an interpretation of QM according to which that's it—i.e., nothing ever interrupts Schrödinger evolution, and the wavefunctions governed by the equation tell the complete physical story—then quantum mechanics is a perfectly deterministic theory. There are several interpretations that physicists and philosophers have given of QM which go this way. (See the entry on quantum mechanics.)

More commonly—and this is part of the basis for the popular wisdom—physicists have resolved the quantum measurement problem by postulating that some process of “collapse of the wavefunction” occurs during measurements or observations that interrupts Schrödinger evolution. The collapse process is usually postulated to be indeterministic, with probabilities for various outcomes, via Born's rule, calculable on the basis of a system's wavefunction. The once-standard Copenhagen interpretation of QM posits such a collapse. It has the virtue of solving certain problems such as the infamous Schrödinger's cat paradox, but few philosophers or physicists can take it very seriously unless they are instrumentalists about the theory. The reason is simple: the collapse process is not physically well-defined, is characterised in terms of an anthropomorphic notion (measurement)and feels too ad hoc to be a fundamental part of nature's laws.^[8]

In 1952 David Bohm created an alternative interpretation of non relativistic QM—perhaps better thought of as an alternative theory—that realizes Einstein's dream of a hidden variable theory, restoring determinism and definiteness to micro-reality. In Bohmian quantum mechanics, unlike other interpretations, it is postulated that all particles have, at all times, a definite position and velocity. In addition to the Schrödinger equation, Bohm posited a guidance equation that determines, on the basis of the system's wavefunction and particles' initial positions and velocities, what their future positions and velocities should be. As much as any classical theory of point particles moving under force fields, then, Bohm's theory is deterministic. Amazingly, he was also able to show that, as long as the statistical distribution of initial positions and velocities of particles are chosen so as to meet a “quantum equilibrium” condition, his theory is empirically equivalent to standard Copenhagen QM. In one sense this is a philosopher's nightmare: with genuine empirical equivalence as strong as Bohm obtained, it seems experimental evidence can never tell us which description of reality is correct. (Fortunately, we can safely assume that neither is perfectly correct, and hope that our Final Theory has no such empirically equivalent rivals.) In other senses, the Bohm theory is a philosopher's dream come true, eliminating much (but not all) of the weirdness of standard QM and restoring determinism to the physics of atoms and photons. The interested reader can find out more from the link above, and references therein.

This small survey of determinism's status in some prominent physical theories, as indicated above, does not really tell us anything about whether determinism is true of our world. Instead, it raises a couple of further disturbing possibilities for the time when we do have the Final Theory before us (if such time ever comes): first, we may have difficulty establishing whether the Final Theory is deterministic or not—depending on whether the theory comes loaded with unsolved interpretational or mathematical puzzles. Second, we may have reason to worry that the Final Theory, if indeterministic, has an empirically equivalent yet deterministic rival (as illustrated by Bohmian quantum mechanics.)

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/

In 1952 David Bohm created an alternative interpretation of non relativistic QM—perhaps better thought of as an alternative theory—that realizes Einstein's dream of a hidden variable theory>>>>

It's perfectly relevant and correct to look for alternative possibilities, Sillver, simply due to the desire to further thoroughness, because part of testing any theory is to compare it with alternative theories re. its productiveness. One of the reasons I'm so critical of modern cosmology is that has been forgotten wrt Universal Origination and the Big Bang. It is the internet which, as well as spreading ideas has also produced conformity in that people are less sure about the wisdom of questioning the consensus.

One of the ideals that should be pursued in theory formation is elegance and another is Occam. Parsimony. Hidden variables is the very opposite of those ..... very much a sledgehammer to crack a nut .... the nut being a misinterpretation of QM and the sledgehammer being the invention, our of thin air, of an infinite number of universes, whether real or somehow notional, when we don't really even understand THE universe yet. That's nonsense and so is the invention of hidden mechanisms that conspire to create the impression of real randomness whilst being deterministic.

Disrespectfully, that is the stuff of schizophrenia.

I am not alone in thinking Bohm's interpretation is rather ugly.

Regarding the concept of some deeper level of reality which is deterministic but not accessible to us. I like the analogy of chess. The tree of all possible chess games, branching with every possible move in every possible position after every possible sequence of moves is a static object with no uncertainty. But individual chess games may not be predictable.

I'm afraid that many people reading this (if there are any)

i am. u ppl are all teachers  !

https://youtu.be/UWeBKnCU6qM?t=108