*blush* hmmmm. i don't know how to react to that. i kinda feel pathetic. my roomate races cars, and he's eventually going to phoenix to get a carbon fiber hood. i think i might go with him. and i kinda want to say i think your amazing too, but something's telling me that would be really cheesy and dopey. so i guess i won't. but im sure ive told you before.

Prove that I'm not typing from Neve-never Land.

This all comes down to basically a question of physics. If chaos exists in the Universe, then it exists in the human mind. If it doesn't exist in the Universe, then it doesn't exist at all. If chaos exists, free will exists. If it doesn't, then there is no free will. I believe chaos does exist in the Universe. If the Universe started at one infinitely small, and therefore (presumably) perfectly round point, all of the same material, then the only reason for there to be fluctations in the shape such as the dispersion of Galazies, is chaotic movement. But that's just my theory, and I'm only a High School student that failed Biology.

What makes free will and chaos tied together so that only one cannot exist?

Because without chaos, there is only order. With only order, things are only done for a reason, both mentally and physically. If so then everything has a predetermined chart. That is fate. If chaos exists, however, things can happen randomly, and therefore, things can be done for no reason. That is the root of free will.

its like the ''chicken or the egg?''

isn't chaos a result of of free will?

with a powerful enough computer, i think you could predict every event. the human brain, though it is the most complex thing in the known universe, will never suffice.
i think chaos exists.
i think sometimes that free-will exists, and other times that it doesn't.
i think the chicken and egg thing also applies to the human mind vs. physics: dark messiah says that if chaos exists in the universe, it must exist in the human mind. but every mind perceives differently. a pit viper can see in infrared, and so can see stars invisible to us, and in a sense lives in a different world. it's not so much that chaos exists in the universe and that we perceive it, but that we are able to perceive it, and so it exists in the human universe.
but of course, we evolved to live in this universe. we'll always have that going for us. though we may not be complex enough yet to grasp all that we would like to see, we must be on the right track. even if there is some petty creator, we must be able to outguess him sometimes. even if he has a computer for a mind that defies all our attempts at understanding, he has a personality, and limits, if he exists, so he can't control everything.
wow, this is quite a puzzle.

If you can predict everything perfectly with a computer, no matter how advanced it is, then free will and chaos do not exist. What chaos means is that a prediction that seems perfectly valid to a computer can turn out differently. If that happens then chaos physically exists. If so it would have influenced the development of life and the mind. If that happened then people would be able to make choices regardless of what they should do, in other words, free will.

well, every particle in the universe must be numbered, just as the bible says every hair of your head is. in other words, though some particles seem to jump in and out of existence, like keys thrown from passengers on one loop of a roller coaster to passengers on another, there is conservation of mass, and there should be no new energy entering the universe from anywhere.
so a large enough computer should be able to document any play of existence, even before the whole thing is played out. such a computer would fit the profile of a creator that i mentioned, and would be a finite mind constantly growing to document infinite circumstances.
i meant that a hypothetical computer could predict any event because any event must follow logical paths for growth, even the ones that seem irrational and unplanned, or unpredictable to us.
again, i'm sorry, it's a bit of a stalemate: with enough resources, anything can be predicted, but an infinite universe makes the idea of totally sufficient resources for prediction absurd.
with unknown forces constantly acting on a model from outside, a system will always have chaos, though its known components should yield a predictable result.

Chaos isn't subjective, it only looks that way to an outsider. There's no way to know if it possible at all to build a computer that would predict everything. If a large enough computer could, in fact, predict everything 100% correct, then chaos does not exist, and neither does free will. If it's impossible to build such a computer (which it seems to be), it's because chaos exists. When chaos exists, free will exists. Free will is basically a balance between chaos and order that allows one to make your own selections.

how is that different from what you said before?

chaos is subjective, everything is. "where is that which is not subjective but in the mind of a fool?" sometimes you feel like seeing it, sometimes you don't. as the observer, you make the measurements.

a supercomputer or a god able to predict everything wouldn't need to predict everything in the whole, infinite universe; just everything that went on on a planet like earth, or in one's life. computers are artificial, and so can't be infinite, so chaos will, as i said, exist outside their computational range, but a large enough computer could make eveything you do seem fated, even before you do it... even reading its printouts and reacting to them in various ways.

It's not. Should it be?

Quote:

chaos is subjective, everything is. "where is that which is not subjective but in the mind of a fool?" sometimes you feel like seeing it, sometimes you don't. as the observer, you make the measurements.

Everything isn't subjective. Most things are a mix of subjective and objective. If you observe chaos or not it's subjective. But objectively chaos doesn't need an observe to exist. It is the randomness in events. That which cannot be predicted. Which transfers over to your next statement.

No, it couldn't. That's entirely theory. I've said this already. You can't predict chaos, by definition. So if chaos exists, then a computer would fail at predicting occurences with complete accuracy. If you can build a computer to anticipate everything someone does, then chaos and free will don't exist. No such computer exists however, so I maintain that it would be impossible and that free will exists.

Hrrmm.... I like the thought of Chaos... I like it alot... and yet that is what I think it to be.. nothing more than a thought.. an ideal...
Chance and chaos only exist as terms we use to explain that which either seems completely random or that we cannot explain... in truth I think the Universe... Reality... what have you is based on a set of rules...... of course trying to translate these rules into anything we could comprehend seems like it may be an impossibility.... though I think that everything has an explanation I do not think that we will explain all of it anytime soon....

It would certainly be nice if Chaos existed..... yet I think everything holds true to a pattern.... one which we have yet to see...

i said before that this is all pointless, but i keep getting into these debates because they sharpen the mind, and what is not excerised becomes flabby, even if it is not a muscle.
dark messiah, i don't expect you to change your beliefs. i take your steadfastness as a sign of integrity, but no one does any good by repeating one's self.
if you want to get into what's theory, you should accede that the bounds of subjectivity must remain theoretical, as they pose an impossible philosophical problem. i say subjectivity is all, while you say that chaos can exist as an objective reality beyond it. there, we must part.
you say that one cannot predict chaos. i can predict, to use a base model, that every time a ball bounces, i will be less able to predict exactly where it will bounce next. as for that next, unforeseeable bounce, the hypothetical model of a mind that can predict it does exist, even if such a mind, mechanical or not, deity or not, does not actually exist.
so, we agree all this is theory. i have provided a theory that chaos can be disproven by a higher intelligence, while it must remain real to us. can you provide a scenario in which chaos can exist unbounded by any hypothetical calculator?
even if you can, it is still a matter of style on our parts.

a) We were discussing, or I was discussing at any rate, theoretical subjectivity or objectivity, which entirely relates to the argument. Chaos as randomness happening without cause-and effect, whether it exists or not, would be objective. That's pretty much fact.

As for my coming up with a model? My model is the flaw in your model. No computer has ever existed which can entirely predict the outcome of an event with 100% certainty. Theoretically it might be possible to build a computer that predicts everything with total accuracy and is always correct. Theoretically it might be possible to build a perpetual motion machine. Theoretically it might be possible that on the billionth time you drop the ball, gravity doesn't work. But these have all been tried many times and failed so far, so until such a time that they actaully happen it's safe to assume they can't and won't work.

It is not possible to make a computer that can predict everything because the process of trying to predict the future will cause a change in the future which will change what the computer is predicting so it will never be able to predict everything. This appears in quantumm mechanics when observing something actualy alters its outcome. just a thought

chaos is not objective, it is seen in objectivity, the least subjective state of mind, in which life is meaningless, orchestrated by nothing more than impulse, and the imagination and effort necessary to find order is simply not supplied by the observer.
i set out to create a model of a computer smarter than we are, not to create the machine itself. the possibility exists. the existence of the possibility implies two things:
that, as merely an idea, it cannot debunk chaos.
that, as something which must be of a higher order of complexity than any human mind, it can never exist though it serves its purpose.
nothing "real" or "objective" (lord help me) can exist ungoverned by laws of cause and effect. they are all that separate reality from dream forms created and destroyed by no more than fancy.
my models aren't flawed.

god does not play dice with the universe. that's what einstein said, after riding light waves in his mind, and watching the world slow to a stop around him. he took an outside view of our finite human systems from a distant point in this infinite universe, and thus was able to see that the speed at which things move affects their size and shape. a ping pong ball in a game on the ground seems normal, but a similar ball in a game on a train appears from the ground to be streched out and compressed. this is to say nothing of the effects that the movement of the earth, the gravity of stars, and countless other factors have on our units of measure. where, when, and how you measure something determines its outcome, yes. but my hypothetical computer would take that into account. it wouldn't see itself as existing outside the same continuum in which all "real" things exist. even its predictions would be predictable, and it would not alter history by calculating events, it would fulfill it. history cannot be altered. the computer would recognize that.

einstein also said that the sun wasn't there when he wasn't looking at it, but that's another story. why some people refuse to believe in even the possibility of a point of view in which human life seems simpler than it does to us, is beyond me, and really not my problem.

a) Chaos, in the true sense, is objective. What you perceive as chaos is subjective. What is chaos, that is, caused randomly, is not subjective. The Universe is not subjective. Gravity exists whether you believe it or not. The Earth revolves around the Sun despite what some people believe.

b) You didn't set out to create a model of a computer smarter than us. That's already been done, depending on your definition of "smarter". You created a model of a computer that could predict everything with 100% accuracy, which is at best a remote possibility.

c) Things that are real and objective can exist without the laws of cause and effect. You forget that cause and effect is based on a timeflow, and that time exists physically. The Big Bang doesn't require cause and effect, because before the big bang time wouldn't have existed. Things outside the Universe likewise wouldn't require cause and effect, not being subject to time.

d) Your models are, indeed, flawed. Sorry to say it.

You're going in circles. A computer like that couldn't alter history only if it could exist, and if it couldn't exist that would already mean that history could be altered. And Hawking proved Einstein wrong on the dice subject.


Why some people refuse to believe in even the possibility that everything doesn't happen for a reason according to a set pattern is beyond me as well. But then, I'm a chaosist.