Quotes About Indeterminacy

Counterfactuals highlight how radically open the possibilities once were and how easily our best-laid plans can be blown away by flapping butterfly wings. Immersion in what-if history can give us a visceral feeling for Taleb's vision of radical indeterminacy.

we cannot rule out the

Einstein's favorite line of criticism revolved around his claim that Quantum Mechanics, as known then (and as still known) may not constitute a complete theory of the subatomic realm. In ordinary language, this means that the Uncertainty and Indeterminacy of quantum equations — however useful these equations prove every day in technology — contains a possible hole through which an entirely new Quantum Theory may someday march.

To state our major thesis again in different words, Uncertainty, Indeterminacy and Relativity appear in modern science for the same reason they appear in modern logic, modern art, modern literature, modern philosophy and even modern theology. In this century, the human nervous system has discovered its own creativity, and its own limitations.

No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent.

The major producer of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thought and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself. And what Phaedrus saw in the isolation of his own laboratory work years ago is now seen everywhere in the technological world today. Scientifically produced antiscience—chaos.

Sometimes the probabilities are very close to certainties, but they're never really certainties.

Sam grudgingly acknowledged the role of consciousness, but argued this, too, was based on unexamined assumptions, dependent on an unfounded faith in the collapse of quantum indeterminacy, and we debated the many minds theory, hidden variables, multiverses, and materialism until the coffee went cold and I'd managed to forget I was anything but pure consciousness myself.

La estructura del espacio no está determinada hasta que no sea conocida la funcióng-nyu-v. También se puede decir que la estructura de un espacio tal está, por sí mismo, completamente indeterminada.

the indeterminacy of individual behavior can be regularized by considering people statistically at the level of the mass.

The indeterminacy specific to quantum mechanics offers no foothold: If my brain is a quantum computer, the brain of a fly is likely to be a quantum computer, too. Do flies enjoy free will?

There's a lot of randomness in the decisions that people make.

Instead, I was interested in what I guess I could call narrative indeterminacy, in questioning the apparent, taken-for-granted authority of any particular representation of the events in question.

the universe, according to quantum mechanics, participates in a game of chance.

Some of them carry paralytic rabies, but it is hard to know which ones.

No program can say what another will do. Now, I won't just assert that, I'll prove it to you. I will prove that although you might work till you drop, You cannot tell if computation will stop.

Now, what that means is that there is fundamental indeterminacy from quantum mechanics, but besides that there are other sources of effective indeterminacy.

El hecho de añadir a causa de hace que el hecho parezca más verosímil, y mucho más probable. El cáncer producido por el tabaco parece más probable que el cáncer sin una causa determinada; una causa indeterminada significa la inexistencia de una causa.

or it can be just plain randomness, nothing else.

I think that quantum mechanics has revealed three aspects of the nature of things: granularity, indeterminacy, and the relational structure of the world.

The physical substratum that determines duration and physical intervals—the gravitational field—does not only have a dynamic influenced by masses; it is also a quantum entity that does not have determined values until it interacts with something else. When it does, the durations are granular and determinate only for that something with which it interacts; they remain indeterminate for the rest of the universe.

with the possibility that he might never

Flat ubi vult

If we look at the way the universe behaves, quantum mechanics gives us fundamental, unavoidable indeterminacy, so that alternative histories of the universe can be assigned probability.