Dear nancy walters,

In your shor essay you brought out another perspective of life... Then you want to live a unpredictable universe, where no one knows when some bad event may happen always in fear. It can be war or some form attack....

Dont you feel a peaceful and predictable universe is better???

By-the-way have a look at my essay A properly deciding, Computing and Predicting new theory's Philosophy in your perspective please

Best

=snp

    Dear C.C Walters

    I totally agree with you. I would never like to live in a predictable universe. Must be a horror.

    And yet, the laws we know are more or less deterministic. Not everything can happen in the universe. There are some boundary given by the laws of nature. It is puzzling, why there is so much unpredictability in our live despite the laws. Complexity, not knowing the initial conditions, quantum randomness, all these answers seems not really satisfactory.

    So how comes so much is unpredictable having deterministic laws? Or vice versa how are laws possible, if the is so much unpredictability around?

    Best

    Luca

    Please visit my essay

    6 days later

    Nice essay, C.C.! I think you make an excellent point with just a few simple words: "Who would have it any other way?"

    The fact that there is some balance between predictability (the Sun rises and sets every day, the seasons come and go at regular intervals, rocks don't just spontaneously turn into elephants) and unpredictability (you never quite know where life will take you next, and you can't exactly predict what other people will think or do) is precisely what makes life tolerable, in my view. Would you really want to know the future if all your future actions were predetermined, and there was nothing you could do to change them? I wouldn't. Life is better with the uncertainty of tomorrow.

    In a way, I guess, it's nice that the conclusion of lots of high-minded sciency arguments matches the common sense view that we can't exactly know what tomorrow holds.

    John

    Dear Nancy.very elaborate essay,rated you highly for a start. Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.Does selection bias have a role in our understanding of the universe at all scales ?please read/ rate here https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3525.Thanks.All the best in the contest.

    8 days later

    Hi, I agree with you in that a predictable universe is safer. I do look at weather reports often. I'm very grateful to know if it will rain tomorrow, or to know if an astroid is heading our way, or to know if a tsunami is heading our way. Predictability is valued.

    However my point is that it is not absolute. Predictability is based on probability. A 40% chance of rain tomorrow tells you the odds are it will not rain. But it could. Our universe is predictable to a point. But it's that point that keeps it from being predictable, computable and decided. There is always an unknown factor that can disrupt the system.

    cc walters