Feather

You are confusing "determined" with "predictable." Every event that has happened was indeed "bound to happen," despite there having been alternatives. This doesn't mean it was ever (or ever will be) possible to predict the event.

Kent Stevens

Maybe we have a kind of quantum predeterminism. With old fashioned predeterminism we have only one possible history or future. With quantum predeterminism we have some slightly different histories or futures, that vary at random.

To illustrate how things could have been different, take the hypothetical of a magic time camera. What is magical about this camera is that it allows you to shoot videos of the identical time period over and over again. If you applied this hypothetical magic time camera to the history of the Universe, I think you would get the same histories or nearly the same histories. Quantum effects become predictable if you have enough particles. The only disclaimer might be for the first instant of the Universe's creation, where quantum effects might be paramount in their importance.

Determinism can be interpreted as the idea that everything has causes. Perhaps quantum effects can be thought of as a cause, albeit a random cause. In this way quantum effects could be incorporated into causation and determinism.

Laurentius

I'm not - and frankly I don't see how you could have reached this conclusion either.

AVE

Starboy

There are so many physical concepts that we take for granted that don’t make any sense when applied at the quantum scale. Take the concept of a trajectory. The two-slit experiment indicates that the particle travels through both slits at the same time. However even stranger than that, Feynmann has shown that by using the calculus of variations you can compute the probability function by assuming that the photon took every possible path between it’s starting point and it’s ending point. Does that mean that is what happened or is it all a mathematical construct or do we just don’t understand how matter expresses itself in the universe? Bell’s theorem indicates that by using entangled states it is possible to send information faster then the speed of light. This would appear to violate causality. This is only the tip of the iceberg. The wave/particle nature of matter is a very real phenomenon that indicates to me that our perception of reality is at best an average of what is really going on.

Starboy