Is determinism impossible?

[Neogaia777]

The quantum level/realm will eventually be shown to be deterministic, we just simply do not have or know the right math's yet, but just like everything else, we do know that it operates off of a certain set of mathematical rules and laws, even if we don't fully know, or don't have all the correct/right math's yet.

 

[Hans Blaster]

The quantum level/realm will eventually be shown to be deterministic, we just simply do not have or know the right math's yet, but just like everything else, we do know that it operates off of a certain set of mathematical rules and laws, even if we don't fully know, or don't have all the correct/right math's yet.

That's certainly *one* interpretation of QM, but I don't think it has a lot of sway. All of the interpretations of QM have problems.

 

[Bradskii]

...it's the same as assuming that determinism makes reality predictable simply because it seems like it should make it predictable. When in fact we may have absolutely no way of knowing what's going to happen in the future.

There's no 'may'. We don't know. And more importantly, we can't.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

This is a theoretical problem, and in theory complete knowledge is indeed possible. At least as far as proponents of determinism are concerned. Therefore, theoretically, the future should be predictable, and if it's predictable, then it's changeable, and if it's changeable, then it's not predictable.

No - the Halting Problem you mentioned earlier contradicts this. The HP is a computability problem and computation is a deterministic process, but not only do we have computers because we can't predict the deterministic outcome of computations, for some computations there's no way at all to tell whether they'll ever finish, i.e. they're undecidable. So they're deterministic but whether they'll stop cannot be predicted.

There's also a logical fallacy in your analysis - if you make a prediction that turns out to be incorrect because something happened after you made the prediction, then you did not correctly predict the future, you predicted what could happen if that change did not occur.

As for the real world, how does one overcome the ever increasing n-body problem? For example, is it really possible to predict the outcome of a given set of stimuli on a system as complex as the human brain? And if you can't predict the behavior of the human brain with absolute perfection, then determinism ceases to apply.

Just because we can't predict the behaviour of complex systems doesn't mean they are non-deterministic.

From our perspective, quantum uncertainty makes the world fundamentally non-deterministic in any case; the predictability of the macro world is an emergent phenomenon (I say 'from our perspective' because the evolution of the Schrodinger equation is deterministic).