I Am The Greatest - I Am God

Is it possible for an electronic device to produce truly random numbers? No, it isn't.

Why? Because random does not exist. Everything is deterministic. Random is just a name we give to things that seem to happen arbitrarily, but that really isn't the case.

Unfortunately, We just don't have a good enough understanding of the universe to prove this. Something like that might be quite far off. Though, I believe in less than 500 years Homo sapiens will have been long obsolete.

>>29
Depends on the variety of determinism.  If you mean nomological determinism -- every event in time unfolds according to the circumstance at that time and the laws of nature -- then you're right.  Short of positing divine intervention, you can't disprove it.  If you mean strongly predictive determinism -- as in we could in principle predict all future states of the universe from the perfect current knowledge of the current state -- then you're wrong, period.  The premise is invalid.  Perfect knowledge doesn't exist:  see Heisenberg.  Some prediction problems require calculations as complex as the entire physical universe.  Fuck it, even given axioms, there are statements completely consistent with those axioms that nevertheless cannot be proved or predicted to exist from those axioms.  See Goedel.

There are properties of the universe that directly affect the future states of it that are not just unknown, but absolutely unknowable.  Absolute prediction is impossible.  Probability distributions on future states are the only 'true' description, regardless of the fact that only one will be realized.

Bayes is vindicated by physics.