quote:
You seem like you're advocating pure determinism. I'd really like to know how you reconcile that with free will, but that's for another time.
I think pure determinism (in a scientific sense) is much more comfortable to me than randomness. And it seems much more logical. Randomness as an
observed phenomena is very different than randomness as a
fundamental driving principal. Making the case of "this is random within the scope of the mathematics or experiments being applied" is quite different from "this is truly random". Something which is truly random has equal influence from nothing as it does from everything. It's just as susceptible to what I ate for breakfast as it is to poking it with a metaphorical stick - and that susceptibility ranges from zero to infinite sensitivity. It's also not testable, because, as we all know, observing either changes it not at all or completely, or both.
Some of this becomes philosophical for me, because the notion of random behavior doesn't seem to square with a universe that proceeds in a deterministic fashion (that is, in time). The reason I said I don't think we can believe anything else is because I don't think our minds are capable of actually grasping randomness. There is a baked in assumption of some degree of determinism because even when we accept randomness, we accept it only within a fixed boundary (e.g., it may be one of a fixed number of quantum states, but nothing else, and only within this area. The particle may not become a daffodil - we're quite sure of this. It would shock our sensibilities, we and we say this very primly).
As far as how I "deal with that" - it's fine. I have to get religious because for me my philosophy is informed by my religion; at some point they merge. I believe in Cause because I believe in God. The identification of Christ as the Logos of the Father is
Reason of the universe -- the underlying principle by which all things exist. In this regard, God is Math. Or, I guess, Math is God, describes God in a real way...as real as saying God is Love. Even if, more or less, the entirety of the universe is required to eliminate all influencing variables to finally solve the riddle of randomness, that's ok. If the whole universe's metaphorical random number generator was seeded at the beginning - that is, we have a pseudorandom function which is in the end still deterministic - that's fine. This is no different than saying God is Omniscient, because this omniscience of the underlying principle (i.e., knowledge of Himself) doesn't violate statistical agglomeration of probabilities for free will to exist practically for participants in reality.
The fact that a card shuffle is determined by the dealer in a Real Way based on any number of variables -- how hard he holds the cards against his thumb, what force he applies with his fingers, how he angles them, etc -- doesn't preclude it from being random to the observer, and it also doesn't violate the free will of the player.