In the time travel game Achron my sense of what determinism is was really put into a stress test and I think it teased out distinctions that are not relevant in more casual settings.
The game has a world where time travel is not involved things appear very reliable and deteministic. When time travel influences things there are previously unfamiliar concepts to take into account. There are mechanics about that and it forms a system. The overall rules end up being deterministic in that the enlargened ontology works like a clockwork. However from the perspective of a entity that is not privy to the more esoteric parts fo the ontology things are not pure chaos but their sense of determinism will be of a different kind than what ontologically holds.
In the system you can have a system in grandfather paradox which approximately means that in half the timelines the system will be in one state and in half the timelines the system will be in another state. It’s not obvious to non-time-travellers how paradoxes work (but there actually are rules about it). In all the timelines they can be in exact same epistemological state before they come in contact with such paradoxed systems. After they interact they are aware what the systems state is in this timeline. Ofcourse they do not think in terms of multiple timelines but it happens to be that in different timelines they are now in different epistemological states (ie the paradox has “spread” to them). It pretty much must appear to them that what the state of the system is is stochastic before they have done such interaction.
A being in such position might be well served to take note of when “weird” things happen and they might be able to narrow down what the relevant choice outcomes might be. For example if it is now T and someone is ordered to enter a chronoporter at T+20 to go back 10 seconds to shoot themselfs at T+10 you know that at T+15 the ordered person will either be alive or dead ie you know that those are the relevant alternatives. however becuase you don’t know the esoterics you don’t have the capability to determine which one of those it will be. The situation has strong paralells to schrödingers cat. However in this game we know that god does not indeed throw dice althought we might make use of two kinds of time to specify the esoterics. But even if we know that on game mechanics level no dice is thrown it would seem useful to refer to the fact that a person not having good access to the second kind of time really has a super hard time / impossible for them to figure things out. It’s not because they observe the system sloppily or are undiligent. So in a sense it’s not illusory that it’s stochastic for them but really is effectively stochastic for them.
So it becomes meanigful and useful to say something to the effect of “The best linear time understanding of the game verse will neccesarily be stochastic”.
In the time travel game Achron my sense of what determinism is was really put into a stress test and I think it teased out distinctions that are not relevant in more casual settings.
The game has a world where time travel is not involved things appear very reliable and deteministic. When time travel influences things there are previously unfamiliar concepts to take into account. There are mechanics about that and it forms a system. The overall rules end up being deterministic in that the enlargened ontology works like a clockwork. However from the perspective of a entity that is not privy to the more esoteric parts fo the ontology things are not pure chaos but their sense of determinism will be of a different kind than what ontologically holds.
In the system you can have a system in grandfather paradox which approximately means that in half the timelines the system will be in one state and in half the timelines the system will be in another state. It’s not obvious to non-time-travellers how paradoxes work (but there actually are rules about it). In all the timelines they can be in exact same epistemological state before they come in contact with such paradoxed systems. After they interact they are aware what the systems state is in this timeline. Ofcourse they do not think in terms of multiple timelines but it happens to be that in different timelines they are now in different epistemological states (ie the paradox has “spread” to them). It pretty much must appear to them that what the state of the system is is stochastic before they have done such interaction.
A being in such position might be well served to take note of when “weird” things happen and they might be able to narrow down what the relevant choice outcomes might be. For example if it is now T and someone is ordered to enter a chronoporter at T+20 to go back 10 seconds to shoot themselfs at T+10 you know that at T+15 the ordered person will either be alive or dead ie you know that those are the relevant alternatives. however becuase you don’t know the esoterics you don’t have the capability to determine which one of those it will be. The situation has strong paralells to schrödingers cat. However in this game we know that god does not indeed throw dice althought we might make use of two kinds of time to specify the esoterics. But even if we know that on game mechanics level no dice is thrown it would seem useful to refer to the fact that a person not having good access to the second kind of time really has a super hard time / impossible for them to figure things out. It’s not because they observe the system sloppily or are undiligent. So in a sense it’s not illusory that it’s stochastic for them but really is effectively stochastic for them.
So it becomes meanigful and useful to say something to the effect of “The best linear time understanding of the game verse will neccesarily be stochastic”.