enegue wrote:If you can forgive my light-hearted gibe, you might like to consider my thoughts about that post.
I've been a bit edgy lately. Other threads have gotten me worked up a bit. My apologies to you.
enegue wrote:There are so many variables involved it wouldn't be reasonable to suggest you could predict the outcome, BUT the outcome is still the result of the forces in play.
Agreed. That's why I had stated that randomness, even if it happens to be actual, need only be apparent since that is all we can perceive. It is fundamentally impossible for Humans to ever have the capacity to have knowledge of all associated variables in any given event. As far as I'm concerned, that is randomness.
enegue wrote:Is the roll of a die on a crap table, random?
By my logic above, I would say it is a random event, even though the outcomes are limited, they can never be consistently predictable to within a reasonable repeatability.
enegue wrote:We can't know all the forces involved, but we know enough about them to be able to tinker with the die so that it's motion is more predictable. The more we learn about the forces in play, the more subtle can be our tinkering.
We can also add more variables to offset the tinkering. In the end, I think the unpredictability of consciously adding variables would cause randomness to prevail over any tinkering we could do to increase predictability.
Case in point: In the vase example, even if we carefully engineered all of the conditional factors involved that we could possibly "control", we still could not predict the resultant chaotic effects of such a complex event.