Regarding all my talk about meta-rationality and other epistemologically-related arcana the other day, something I wanted to point out is that when scientists prattle on about how the universe is deterministic, they are not only wrong but provably wrong.

Quantum mechanics demonstrates firmly that certain things are fundamentally unknown and unknowable. There’s no hidden variable. (Read about John Stewart Bell and Bell’s Theorem and later experiments related to this for more info.) This means that the universe is definitely not fully deterministic in the sense that most scientists mean. This is not speculation, or an opinion. This indeterminacy is built in, and don’t be confused by physicists et al. telling you that Schrödinger equation is deterministic. This is a prevarication, an elision of the truth, because even though Schrödinger’s equation is deterministic (it absolutely is), what they don’t tell you because it bothers them (and, really, everyone) is that the wave function collapse is completely non-deterministic and the end observational state is only one of a “selection” of probabilities that can be calculated (by the again, completely deterministic) Schrödinger equation.

I don’t really understand why physicists and STEM types have to lie about this, but they do. Probably because when you realize there is some base level of indeterminism built into the very structure of the universe, it makes the underpinnings of much of science a great deal shakier.

If you don’t buy all this, just look how some scientists have proposed the absurd superdeterminism in an attempt to preserve determinism.