Thread: I would like to apologize plus I have questions some of you might answer.

I think this is an interesting question, and given that it's posted in the R/S forum, I'm really unsure of how you approached trying to answer it. My take on it comes from years of psychology and anthropology research that has proved time and time again that how a human develops is mostly dependent on nurture, and NOT nature.

You could argue that there are strong enough correlations between nurture and personality development that if you raise two healthy children (with no obvious randomizers, like one of them being blidn) the EXACT same way, their personalities will be extremely similar. That being said, if you let them out at age 10, when they're still learning and growing, the different environment will make it so their choices will differ. But, the seed everything comes from will probably be similar.

So to answer your question, observing a baby till age 10 is not enough to be able to predict things, because as chaos takes over while there is plenty of developing to be done, things will get randomized.

Thank you for your Answer. your answer was exactly what I was looking for.

The idea is called Causal Determinism, and yes.

Originally Posted by Replicon

So to answer your question, observing a baby till age 10 is not enough to be able to predict things, because as chaos takes over while there is plenty of developing to be done, things will get randomized.

I disagree. Observing the baby is never enough to predict anything. Observing the baby, along with everything in the baby's universe, however, will yield different results.

Assuming that randomness does not exist, then we can predict the future, and all future actions of human beings, from one moment in time. All we need to know is the position of every piece of matter in the universe and the forces acting on them at one particular instant, and after that chains of cause and effect should extend predictably into the future.

Chaos is not randomness, it is merely infinitely complex causality, and, as such, is theoretically predictable.

Causal determinism has many interesting implications - for example, obviously humans would have no free will. With no free will, moral responsibility cannot exist.

Ah, so we're not only talking about "observing a baby till age 10" but rather "observing the entire universe", which are two completely different things.

I appreciate both of your answers. Your slightly different points of view will give me somthing to think over.