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Carey: I think we're talking about two different aspects of science: you're speaking of principles, and I'm speaking of practice. Yes, everything is determined, in the sense of which you're speaking….
I've expressed the same principle in a different post: “Stochasticity doesn't mean we're free, just that it's harder to trace what's going on.â€
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The term “stochastic†is typically defined as a “process with an indeterminate or random element as opposed to a deterministic process that has no random elementâ€â€”are you now suggesting/implying that “random†elements in a stochastic process are actually just “unknown†(or possibly unknowable) elements?
Also Carey, in your post 36 above you spoke of systems “in principleâ€:
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The idea is not that the math would be difficult - if that were the case, someone would have figured it out - but rather that some (surprisingly simple) systems cannot, even in principle, be described by deterministic equations.
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So which way is it? Apparently Tom doesn’t see the inconsistency here, unhelpfully labeling it “nuance,†but then Tom often doesn’t seem to require much rigor in certain things, even insisting that mass murderers aren’t morally responsible . . . and the nice thing about Tom’s bullshit “nuance†is that it might enable you two to reach some sort of circle-jerk consensus. Or am I being too harsh?