16. Digital determinism

The Lord God is subtle, but malicious he is not.

— Albert Einstein

What most people imagine is that something random, unexpected, or a consequence of free will can happen. In DM, the whole universe has spent its whole history arranging for whatever is going to happen in each and every cell. No digit can just change; everything, everywhere at every time, past present and future, has operated, does operate and will operate in perfect lockstep to cause the state of every cell to be what it is. The present is no more a consequence of the past than it is a con­sequence of the future. A location is no more the immediate consequence of its local neighborhood than it is a consequence of very distant points in space-time. Consider a given event: if we have partially determined #2 certain states in its past and arrange that in its future certain other states will be determined, those states that will be de­termined in the future will have an effect on the event! These concepts take some getting used to because they are so foreign to our experience; they are very counter intuitive. But wonder of wonders, this very property of DM can allow for mechanistic models of the mysterious events of QM; certainly including the paradoxical statistical correlations between separated events like those in the 1935 EPR gedanken experiment.

The only way that an event can be completely determined from the past would be if we could determine every digit in that event's nearby past information cone. This might be only a few bits. However, to determine those bits, we would have to consider each of them as events and determine each of those events through controlling each of the bits in those event's nearby past information cone. In short, the past can only be totally determined for an event if the total state of all of space-time is determined. We cannot totally determine the past but we can partially determine the past. In addition, we can, through purpose­ful activity, partially determine the future of an event. That future can definitely have what must be seen as a causal effect on the present!

#2 By "determined" we mean that we have made exper­imental arrangements to guarantee that a given event will happen.