- Which is why our particular self-awarenesses are not cause and effect traceable -- and whose current existences are, therefore, as subject to calculations re chance as is winning the lottery.
Why not use standard big bang theory? That was many orders of magnitude more chancy than any lottery.
According to standard big bang theory, our 'specific' self-awarenesses are not cause and effect traceable because the brains that produce them are not cause and effect traceable.
According to SBB theory, the first elementary particles began to form at t = 0 + 10
-43 seconds, in the midst of an incomprehensibly chaotic quantum stew. That kind of chaos was true randomness, as only the quantum realm can do it. This entire universe randomly emerged from that wild and crazy quantum crap shoot. Literally any possible configuration of the universe could have emerged from that. All but one of which would not have included your specific brain.
Try cause-and-effect tracing your brain through that.
One of the random particles that eventually factored into your brain's formation might have gotten the crap knocked out of it by another random particle, sending it careening off in a direction inconsistent with your brain's formation. That's all it might have taken to erase any possibility of your brain, and maybe even the galaxy it was formed in. And it's actually far worse for the determinists than that. All of the quantum interactions that had a hand in your brain's eventual formation had to happen pretty much the way they did.
Don't even bother trying to calculate the odds that were stacked against your specific brain when that clock started ticking. Something like ten to the power of eighty, factorial. Something like that.
And that was just the tip of the randomness iceberg. Quantum interactions have been happening ever since. One of which might have been a cosmic ray randomly emerging from the sun and striking someone who would have killed one of your ancestors, had he not died of cancer caused by the cosmic ray. Or your ancestor who forgot to go on an errand because of a cosmic ray. An errand from which she would not have returned. Just a couple of an uncountable number of possibilities.
Yeah. Not really like a lottery. Lottery odds pale to laughable insignificance compared to the quantum shuffle.
And it's not even necessary to go that far to flummox the determinists. The fact is, probability applies to a fully deterministic universe the same as an indeterministic one. That's because probability is about incomplete knowledge, not randomness. Randomness just happens to be one of the causes of incomplete knowledge.
