A comprehensive list of people who should be raped to death by pineapples.

Er, no it can't, because then it isn't random, random means completely unpredictable and unconstrainable. For it to be constrainable without infinite resources it must be understood, and if it is understandable it isn't random, and certainly not indeterministic. Constrained randomness is finite randomness and anything finite can be understood in its entirety.

To use your coin example, why does it land? Why is it subject to gravity? Does it have mass? Substance? Is it affected by air resistance, what mechanism acts upon it in-flight to separate it from a normal coin? How is it flipped? Is the flipping mechanism deterministic? Would it work with any coin if the mechanism is indeterminsitc? How does the flipping mechanism work? Why doesn't it do anything but flip coins?

Constraints invite understanding.

 

If anything finite can be understood entirely, then the universe could be theoretically and absolutely predictable, which would render things like the Uncertainty Principle and wave-function collapse null.

 

If those things are true then the universe is non-deterministic and free will exists by any argument. If they aren't true then that is not an argument against the impossibility of constrained randomness.

 

Uncertainty and wave-function collapse allow the world to be deterministic, they simply mean that physical limitations prevent measuring it accurately enough to be determined. Determinism only requires everything to strictly follow a set of natural laws.

Also, it seems we've come to a very strong bypass on this issue. Perhaps at this point we should agree to disagree? I don't see how either of us are going to reach a consensus within the next few days on this.

 

But Chris, what if you used a time machine to travel to the past in order to stop an event from happening? It's impossible, it would create a temporal paradox, because the universe is deterministic! You will end up being stopped somehow in your efforts to stop whatever happens or become the cause of whatever the event is, so that just kind of throws free-will out of the window doesn't it. Your will would be to change something but the powers that be doesn't allow you to have a choice in that situation.

 

Well actually, it depends, if the creator of the timemachine just wanted to create a machine which could allow the user to traverse time, rather than build it for a specific purpose.

 

To prevent a predestination paradox. Or at least a few of them, not all of them.