Quote Originally Posted by JKDS View Post
Take any action or decision or thought you had today. If you were aware enough, [...]. When reading what I'm saying now, you're response is already predetermined [...].

And when you look at it like that, and expand that to its logical conclusion, you reach an understanding that the entire universe is just one giant rube goldberg machine. That everyone is stuck in a formidable never ending chain of dominos falling down one by one, with every single event occuring as the direct result of all the others before it on a massive scale.
How can the macroscopic world be deterministic, when the microscopic world is dominated by uncertainty? The reason the macroscopic world seems deterministic is due to the averaging of random events over extremely large numbers. It's simply regression to the mean. The motions of any single individual particle are unable to be known, so only on some time and length scales can it even appear that there is certainty in any outcome.

E.g. a baseball hurtles toward home plate at 100 mph. What is the velocity of a particle in the baseball? It is still largely unknown. I could throw a bunch of math up here and, taking into account the temperature of the ball (which is far more relevant than the 100 mph), I could show you that the particle speeds are far greater than 100mph, but that some of them are moving forward and some of them are moving backward, and some to the side. It is the average motions that seem to be 100 mph, but none of the individual motions necessarily reflect that.

Furthermore, there is only certainty within the error bars of uncertainty, even on the macroscopic scale. When you measure something, you are limited by the uncertainty presented by your measuring device. This is above and beyond any intrinsic uncertainty associated with position/momentum, or other quantum phenomena.

E.g. A baseball is hurtling toward home plate. Someone uses a measuring device and reports the ball is moving 100.0 mph. Their device can not determine if the speed is 100.01 mph or 99.99 mph, due to physical restrictions in cost and time to acquire a more accurate measurement. Maybe they have a more accurate measuring device. Maybe they can tell you the ball was moving at 100.000 miles per hour. They've limited the uncertainty, but they can never eliminate it.

Special reiteration that this uncertainty based on the limitations of the measuring method is independent of the quantum uncertainties.