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What's the Schrödinger's cat equivalent in your profession/main activity? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 days ago by Merlu@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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Needless to say i'm talking about the oversimplified and misleading version of the Schrödinger's cat paradigm, where he is both dead and alive until you watch it.

I don't have a job but i follow theater courses at an academy. And my improvisation is both funny and awful until i show it to others.

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[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 2 points 2 days ago

Without getting philosophical, I'm going to say human behavior is non-deterministic. Because a human is using a computer you cannot reason about what may be running when. That's why I say it's non-deterministic. You can make an argument that a non real time computer not connected to the Internet could be considered fully deterministic, but it's really just a distraction. That's why I tried to make it clear I wasn't talking about "magical 'truly' random" things.

I'm not trying to get overly technical or philosophical lol. For example, PRNGs are deterministic, but it's sufficiently random that we treat it as random without worrying about whether it's "actually random." (But yes, there can be bugs where they actually are behaving too predictably and they actually aren't random. This is why I'm trying to keep the topic simple without getting lost in the details.)