Can human action be predicted? Very interesting question. Some people say no. Some people say within a range dependant upon factors and blah blah blah. I am not entirely sure. But I will attack it with logic. The first thing I believe is that outside of the randomness machines that living things are most everything can be perfectly predicted. It is a little challenging to do though as it involves having some sort of computer which can take a picture of and map the entirety of the universe from beginning to end while having an exact read on every single particle (whatever the smallest particle ends up being) and then being able to go past the present day and follow the data into the future. Now somewhere inside of that concept is a logic flaw possibly or maybe a hidden universe or maybe a perfect picture of the universe…but the concept of it is there. The potential situation is not beyond total reason.

 

 And if that is the case, that in a certain set of circumstances a computer could in fact predict the future simply by tracking all the movements of electrons then we know that all of the non-living world can be casually accepted as items with a known future…unless they come into contact with a random thing. A random thing would be something that could, entirely unpredictably, change something about itself. Now this goes headlong into our previous belief that all things made of tiny particles could be measured and thus predicted…at least on the surface it does. I think just beyond the level of creation that allowed for the complex molecules of carbohydrates and proteins came a higher order of attributes that arose out of the amazing neural network. Another level of complication. But this level of complication has something a little different in it. It has a fuzzy concept of action and choosing among actions. For instance somewhere something triggers an amoeba to go toward that light spot that looks kinda small and edible. It of course could also go in another direction based upon its analysation of the local space. But something, the mathematical probabilities cause it to go another direction. And maybe that is where randomness in the universe comes from. The fact that we don’t make absolutely the same decision in the exact same situation because of our propensity to go toward generalities but something, out of the potential for there to be lucrative gain, the statistically improbable direction introduces an unknown element into the equation and would seem to break to string of predictability of our computer.

 

That is a big jump though to assume that there is a sort of generalization equation in nature because that allows for the pretty interesting potentials as change moves through the universe. It is also quite the open hole in a system that seems to be pretty tight fisted on knowing exactly where everything is at every second. The only example one can find of true randomness in the universe is Schrodinger’s Cat. This has to do with our observation of the universe changing it. Well…in one sense I disagree on a philosophical level because once we observe something as long as we know how it works we can tell what it was and if we know what it was by what it is we can predict what it will be and having those measurements are just as nice as knowing exactly what something is by looking at it. And secondly, and much more importantly, the universe is made of things smaller that we can write real math about just yet. And because of this, many of the thoughts of quantum mechanics speaking of never really knowing where some of our atomic particles are, will fall by the wayside as we learn the movements of all particles we now understand are simply by products of something on a much finer scale.

 

So are we free ranging creatures in which some kind of mathematical probability allows us to make choices which buck the trend but at a non-constant pace relative to all the other variables and as a result have a potentially limitless future? That is really what this is all about. If there is no fate and no perfectly predictable future then there are no defined limits as there can never be a set of perfectly knowing potentials in an equation. And if that is true then anything is possible as the equation never ends. But then I would guess we would have to factor in change over the universe as eventually the tinder boxes glowing in our universe will eventually burn out.