My point about probabilities may not be clear. If individual events are genuinely uncaused, then there is equally no explanation for the distribution they exhibit collectively. Statistical reasoning in domains outside of fundamental physics can be justified by distributional hypotheses, e.g. that events are normally distributed, and that hypothesis may have a causal explanation arising in another domain. But when you get to fundamental physics there’s no more scope for passing the buck. Justifications for fundamental probabilistic laws can be imagined: for example, one might assert that all possible worlds exist, that there is a natural measure on the set of those worlds, and that this is where the fundamental probabilities come from. (At that point, the next thing which needed explaining would be why all possible worlds exist, and not just some, or none.) Or, you could trace it back to cosmological initial conditions (such an approach might be feasible in Bohmian mechanics). But normally people don’t even notice this problem.
Indeed, a well-defined probability distribution cries out “deterministic complex system!”; it doesn’t really support indeterminism at all. We know how a die roll manages to obey a probability distribution, because it’s designed specifically to have several stable states reachable through highly unstable bifurcation points, and the whole thing is made to be as symmetric as possible. But how could the universe manage to obey a probability distribution?
But how could the universe manage to obey a probability distribution?
How could it not? The Kolmogorov axioms are not very restrictive.
Obviously, the probability distribution over the state of the universe is not going to be as easy to characterize as the die’s Multinomial(1/6,1/6,1/6,1/6,1/6,1/6).
My point about probabilities may not be clear. If individual events are genuinely uncaused, then there is equally no explanation for the distribution they exhibit collectively. Statistical reasoning in domains outside of fundamental physics can be justified by distributional hypotheses, e.g. that events are normally distributed, and that hypothesis may have a causal explanation arising in another domain. But when you get to fundamental physics there’s no more scope for passing the buck. Justifications for fundamental probabilistic laws can be imagined: for example, one might assert that all possible worlds exist, that there is a natural measure on the set of those worlds, and that this is where the fundamental probabilities come from. (At that point, the next thing which needed explaining would be why all possible worlds exist, and not just some, or none.) Or, you could trace it back to cosmological initial conditions (such an approach might be feasible in Bohmian mechanics). But normally people don’t even notice this problem.
Indeed, a well-defined probability distribution cries out “deterministic complex system!”; it doesn’t really support indeterminism at all. We know how a die roll manages to obey a probability distribution, because it’s designed specifically to have several stable states reachable through highly unstable bifurcation points, and the whole thing is made to be as symmetric as possible. But how could the universe manage to obey a probability distribution?
How could it not? The Kolmogorov axioms are not very restrictive.
Obviously, the probability distribution over the state of the universe is not going to be as easy to characterize as the die’s Multinomial(1/6,1/6,1/6,1/6,1/6,1/6).