BAM! Text Wall!

@ Bizzaro i think you misiterpreted what i posted. I know if you everything about the dice you could acturately predict the outcome but that is because isnt a perfect random situation. My point was assuming there is perfect random situations the demon couldnt predict beyond that point acurately without knowing the outcome of the situation which assuming it is a perfect random situation nothing could know what the outcome was until it actually happens. Now whether or not there is such a thing as a perfect random situation is left to be debated but i thought we agreed earlier that there was.

@ Nate I am just going to point this out before Bizzaro does. First 1 isnt actauly a prime number. Sceond there is more going on in the situation you described besides figuring out the pattern because there is more to the pattern specificly the thought process of the creator which by definition the demon would know so it in fact could predict the rest of the pattern.

 

C'mon Nate, even you don't believe that. Our bodies are barely able to handle breast implants, let alone something like leg extensions.

Considering that nothing works very well for curing cancer... I think that's a legitimate treatment option.
Think what you will, but I could get the same results testing whether or not straight telling people they're going to die and seeing how many people that saves. A thousand times, it wouldn't benefit them at all. Then, once, by sheer coincidence, the patients would get better. It doesn't prove that telling patients they're going to die helps cancer.

I could contend that, but I just realized we're going remarkably off-topic. The ultimate point is that believing something doesn't make it true. Case in point, during American colonization, Christian priests told Indians that if they converted, they would be invincible to bullets. The Indians took that a little too literally, and proceeded to charge American troops like lemmings. After further study, they realized that they were not, despite firmly believing that they would be, invincible to bullets. Heck, it used to be common knowledge that the best way to cure any illness was to slap some leeches onto your thigh.
That didn't make it true. You can't just build reality on a whim, it doesn't make sense.

Sure. It's also possible that my computer will sprout legs, jump up onto my kitchen table and start tap-dancing while beeping out an impromptu techno version of Fergie's "My Humps". I will concede only that it is impossible to prove a negative. I can't firmly prove that people can't fly. But I also can't prove that my computer won't do that. It's just so logically ridiculous, such a ludicrous idea, so incomprehensibly stupid to think that my computer could do that that society regards it as impossible. And, lo and behold, it's not dancing.

Noone. But nobody's debating about other universes. By definition, our universes would have to stay apart in order to remain separate universes. The moment they're together, the Demon knows everything about them both. So he wouldn't need to know anything about other universes, because they couldn't possibly affect anything in this one. And if they did, he would automatically gain the knowledge required to figure it out.

Working under the idea that we didn't understand the third dimension very well (which I disagree with), this still wouldn't really apply. When we were describing it as flat, we claimed that you could fall off the edge of the world. We were describing it in three-dimensions when we only knew two very well. Now, we're describing it in three dimensions when we know all three. We're saying, in the first three dimensions, the world is a sphere. When we get to the fourth dimension, we won't be proving ourselves wrong, we'll just be adding to the idea. It's a sphere, and oh, it does this.

-LordKerwyn-
No, definitely. If a perfectly random situation were to arise, then the Laplace's Demon would have no choice but to wait until it played out. Fortunately for him, there's no such thing as a perfectly random situation. ;D

Oh, and guys, Laplace's Demon is a hypothetical construct. Noone is implying that he could exist, neither I nor Pierre-Simon Laplace. He's just there to prove the point of determinism and causality.

 

My point was that there are completely random situations for 3dimensional beings since either position or speed of a object are unknown to us. That means that the Demon can´t exist as a 3 dimensional being. Yet he could exist as a 4 dimensional one since in that case his point of view could deduce speed and position at the same time since time is just another size for him.

The Demon is a model, practiciable we are looking for the answer for total causality-is there ANY random element in our universe? Right now there is. Actually everything is affected by this. It might be just the molecular level, but since anything we consider material consists of Molecules or Atoms they are affected by this small chance.

That is why the old Demon is abandoned, it can not be used in a discussion in it´s old form. To know both position and speed you´d need to be able too look at them without affecting them, something that is impossible for us (right now).

If we want to use the concept of the Demon we need to consider it "above" us or outside of "the system". Under that conditions our theoretical Demon would know our past present and per definition our future.
If he still wouldn´t know our future he would simply be a alien, not knowing the future disqualifies it as Laplaces Demon.

To remind everyone: If our Future were to be set in stone we would not have a Free will, every decision we make is predetermined. The Demon is a slave of his own future...


Summary time: The 3dimensional Demon has been proven wrong and as such is a invalid model for this discussion. It acted as a model for the theory of the total deterministic universe, wich currently is considered wrong. The Demon could only exist if he were not a being of our reality and could observe our world without altering it.

 

well, yes we have gotten off topic quite a bit...

basically, to sum the discussion up - your main point is that we cannot even choose our desires

and while you are right that a negative cannot be proven... the inverse is also true - you can't prove a positive either. You can say that your computer is not going to sprout legs and start dancing. But really, that wouldn't be that hard to design a computer that would do that. So you can't prove that your computer is merely a computer. No more than you can prove to me that you exist. All you can do is offer reasoning or logic - no such thing as absolute proof

the only absolute proof we have is internal - each one of us knows that we ourselves exist... other than that, nothing

and so your claim that desires are not instigated within us, can't be proven... just as my claim that we can control them cannot be proven - and this is even more true than simply being less than absolute - the claims aren't testable... we have no way to create a control group of people without past or present stimuli, and see if they think and act

I feel I better tactfully agree to disagree before this discussion gets lost in side-points concerning the nature of the universe, god, dimensions, etc, etc, etc... the topic really is an all-incompasing one however...

 

Going off Unentschieden's post.

Something i find interesting is the only way for Laplace's Demon to exist is if it could exist outside our reality and just observe us. Becoming in effect a god like observer which is what many religions believe even if in only some round about way. Also wouldn't the demon just observing us still change the outcome because how can something observe something else without affecting it? And even if it could the demon still couldn't predict its own future because our world couldn't effect it if it cant effect our world. Meaning the only thing that could know that demons future would something that is Laplace's Demon to Laplace's Demon. But there would still be the fact that the new demon still couldn't know its own future so in order to know it you another higher up Laplace's Demon and when the require another Laplace's Demon to know its future and this cycle just keeps on going. The only way i could forsee a cycle like that ending is if there was nothing that could have an accurate prediction of the entire future.