philosophy :thinking: Show more
@garbados It is baked in at the quantum mechanical level. At the most fundamental level, everything is a probability density, not a certainty.
@garbados The density can be known and accurately calculated but the outcome of any *single* interaction of individual particles can never be accurately known, only the average behavior of large numbers of interactions.
@mona heck! i get what you're saying. thanks for illuminating these aspects of quantum possibility ❤
@garbados :=3 *tailswishes* What if anything this has to do with consciousness and free will, if anything, I have no idea.
@amphetamine @garbados @mona Fascinating! I had not heard of this before. I am inclined to think it reasonable.
@garbados @mona @mona I know right? it's #whimsical
@amphetamine @garbados Also, I admit, it fits my mental model of a universe in which absolutely everything is governed by probability and absolutely nothing is entirely certain.
@garbados What you think of as "physical laws" have no definite existence. Just as the laws that we call "thermodynamics" can be derived from the statistical analysis of the motions of individual molecules of matter, other "laws" are simply the average behavior observed in huge number of interacting particles. Under the right conditions, even on the macroscopic level, these averages do not apply, and we get anomalous large-scale behavior that seems to "break" these laws.
@mona but! that probability density can be known. a future can be represented as a series of collapsing probabilities, such that even if a moment has multiple possible futures, those possibilities remain potentially calculable at the quantum level.
right? i might be out of my depth here