Quote Originally Posted by Coelho
Well... all i can say is that our minds are far more powerful than we acknowledge... have you ever thought about the amount of calculations that should be needed to throw, lets say, a knife and its tip enter nicely the target? Remember that we have to consider the movement of the knife, its rotation around itself, the air fricction, the gravity pull, and so... if we would put into a computer, im sure it would be a long calculation... and yet, the knife-throwers who works in circus does it without even think... and they throw the knives with such precision that sometimes they put a woman in the target, and she never is hurt.
Ok, maybe its not a very good example, but im sure you get the idea.
It's not the same. Knife-throwing is a skill. Through trial and error, you learn the right hand movements, the right wrist movements to get it where you want it to go. You don't actually sit down and think about the air friction and the acceleration due to gravity and so forth. Predicting earthquakes is a lot more complicated. A simple robot could probably throw a knife onto a target, if it was properly programmed or if it could experiment a little bit with trial and error. It could not analyze the geological movements of each part of each tectonic plate everywhere on the planet, and the movement of all the magma in the mantle. There is not enough computing power in a human brain, or even in our most powerful supercomputers, to perform those calculations. Just look at how accurate our weather predicting supercomputers are. Those things are capable of doing waaaaaaaaaaaay more calculations than your brain, yet they can't do a very good job of predicting the weather more than a week or so in advance.
And if you are determinist, why does you think previsions are so impossible?
Because according to Einsteinian relativity, information cannot travel faster than the speed of light, i.e. backwards in time. You can make reasonable predictions about the future if you know enough about the current universe and if you have the ability to calculate how things will change in the future. In principle, you could predict an earthquake, and even predict the reactions everybody would have to the earthquake. You'd just need a really powerful computer and really good observational tools for figuring out where all the particles are at one particular moment in time.