Re: Randomness... or not?
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Correct. If the univerise is deterministic, then there's no such thing as randomness. In that case, randomness is an heuristic device that we use to understand something that is far too complex and obscure for us to ever understand.
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Indubitably.
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I read a book on chaos theory once and found it unsatisfying in a few places. Small changes in the initial positions of causal events can lead to wildly different outcomes later on, and they're so small that we can't know about them. But that's not really randomness then, is it?
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What chaos theory describes are scenarios or simulations where the only way to find out what the scenario will look like at step n of the timeline is to go through and compute steps 1, 2, 3...n. There's no shortcut like there is with simple mathematical equations (i.e. with n=2x, you can see that x=100 means n=200 without having to do the math one hundred times; in 'chaotic' problems there's no shorter way to find n when x=100 than to do just that, do the math one hundred times) . So in that way, they're pretty much random. (compare to "these computerized dice are so advanced, nobody will know what number will come up until they're rolled" - nobody will know what n equals when x=100 in the chaos equation until you get there)
As far as the initial small variables being unknowable, that's not necessarily true. You can come up with a computer simulation with completely known variables at the start that's still chaotic - it has to do with how those variables depend on each other in the equation(s) at hand.
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