At least in its famous context, I always interpreted that quote as a metaphorical statement of aesthetic preference for a deterministic over a stochastic world, rather than an actual statement about the behavior of a hypothetical omniscient being. A lot of bullshit’s been spilled on Einstein’s religious preferences, but whatever the truth I’d be very surprised if he conditioned his response to a scientific question on something that speculative.
This is more or less what I was saying, but left (perhaps too) much of it implicit.
If there were an entity with perfect knowledge of the present (“God”), they would have perfect knowledge of the future, and thus “not need probability”, iff the universe is deterministic. (If there is an entity with perfect knowledge of the future of a nondeterministic reality, we have described our “reality” too narrowly—include that entity and it is necessarily deterministic or the perfect knowledge isn’t).
So therefore a person with perfect knowledge would not need probability. Is this another interpretation of “God does not play dice?” :-)
I think this is the only interpretation of “God does not play dice.”
At least in its famous context, I always interpreted that quote as a metaphorical statement of aesthetic preference for a deterministic over a stochastic world, rather than an actual statement about the behavior of a hypothetical omniscient being. A lot of bullshit’s been spilled on Einstein’s religious preferences, but whatever the truth I’d be very surprised if he conditioned his response to a scientific question on something that speculative.
This is more or less what I was saying, but left (perhaps too) much of it implicit.
If there were an entity with perfect knowledge of the present (“God”), they would have perfect knowledge of the future, and thus “not need probability”, iff the universe is deterministic. (If there is an entity with perfect knowledge of the future of a nondeterministic reality, we have described our “reality” too narrowly—include that entity and it is necessarily deterministic or the perfect knowledge isn’t).