Theoretically speaking

A central problem in differential calculus is that of initial conditions. Other problems include finding integration techniques for complex equations and estimation procedures for non-integrateable ones, but I’m not talking about those right now.

A common application of ordinary differential equations is predicting the weather. The initial conditions are things like temperature, barometric pressure and location of cold/warm fronts. Meteorologists (with previous legwork done by the indispensable mathematicians) plug these parameters into equations to predict what the weather will be like tomorrow, the next day, 5 days from now. But you’ve probably noticed that they never predict beyond 5 days and this is because we cannot get exact enough measurements of the initial conditions and there is necessary error involved. The error of the prediction increases the farther into the future you go and it becomes to great to be useful.

So, what I’m thinking is that life in the physical sense is essentially predictable. This is theoretical, so bear with me. If we knew all the initial conditions, where all the atoms and sub-atomic particles are originally located, their potential energy, velocities, mass and any other possible property that could be measured, we could predict where they would go and what would happen. If the motion and activity of every such particle could be known then this predictability would possibly give us an accurate look into the future. We would know what leaf would blow in which direction on Sunday at 2:32:45 pm. We would know because there would only be one possible action at each moment in time based on the initial conditions.

If we think of thought as electrical pulses and waves in the brain then it too would fall under this assumption of predictability. If we don’t think of it that way, then this means nothing, so I’m going to suppose we do for a moment. That means decisions of individuals and opinions and feelings would also be predictable and therefore everything has always been set in place, from the beginning of time and everything will happen as it always did.

Not trying to say that choice doesn’t exist, just that it might be predictable. Except for the fact we would never be able to get precisely exact initial conditions for anything, so we can’t actually see into the physical future. Do you follow me? Likely not, I’m not often good at getting my theoretical ponderings across to others.