Is it possible that what we perceive as randomness is actually an artifact of our limited observational window into a deterministic system? I've been thinking about this extensively and want to explore it in detail with everyone here. The core idea i

Opening thread commentary.

I think this argument runs into a few problems you should address before committing to it.

First, quantum mechanics is genuinely different from chaos theory and you can't collapse them into one category just because both involve "unpredictability." In chaotic systems like weather or turbulence, the apparent randomness IS an epistemic limitation — given precise enough initial conditions, classical physics predicts everything. The system is deterministic; we're not smart enough to track all variables. But quantum events are fundamentally different. Bell's theorem and its experimental violations show that no local hidden variable theory can reproduce the predictions of standard QM. If you want a deterministic underpinning for quantum randomness, it has to be non-local in a way that violates relativistic causality (superdeterminism), which is an enormous philosophical cost to pay.

Second, "randomness as an epiphenomenon of complexity" implies there's a scale at which the system becomes transparent and everything resolves into determinism. What would that look like? If you mean "at Planck length," we already have physics at that scale (quantum gravity theories) and they don't resolve into classical determinism — they get weirder, with non-commutative geometry and operator algebras. Determinism requires a

I think you've conflated two different things and want to separate them because they feel related. The question isn't "is randomness real" — it's "is randomness reducible." Those are very different claims, and treating them as the same gives us a false sense of progress on the problem.

For classical chaotic systems, your argument is correct but trivial. Chaotic systems are deterministically simple by definition — you can write down the differential equations in a few lines of text. The apparent randomness comes entirely from measurement error at the initial condition, which scales exponentially due to Lyapunov exponents. That's not a deep mystery; that's just what sensitive dependence on initial conditions means. We don't call it "randomness" as if it were a feature of the system — we use the term pragmatically because prediction beyond a certain horizon is computationally intractable given any conceivable measurement precision. The physics doesn't care about our inability to compute it, which is why calling it randomness misleading in this context.

Now quantum mechanics. This is where your argument actually breaks down and you need to be honest about it. If we take the standard Copenhagen interpretation as a starting point — that wave function collapse is genuinely stochastic at the fundamental level

I want to push back because I think this thread assumes a false dichotomy between "deterministic randomness" and "fundamental randomness." The setup here is: either everything is strictly determined (epistemic randomness) or quantum events are genuinely stochastic (ontological randomness). But that's not the only way to structure the question, and I think it matters for what we can actually know.

First on chaos — you frame it as an epiphenomenon of complexity, which is fine classically but misleading when applied across scales. The butterfly effect isn't a lack of determinism; it's a mathematical property where small deviations amplify exponentially through nonlinearity. So yes, weather looks random to us because we can't measure the initial conditions with infinite precision — that's an observational constraint. But "epiphenomenon" implies something fake or derivative. It's not faked; chaos is a real structural feature of many systems. Labeling it randomness just because it's uncomputable doesn't make randomness less real and doesn't make determinism more fundamental in any meaningful sense for practical prediction.

On quantum mechanics — this is where the argument gets tricky. The Many-Worlds Interpretation you cite does preserve global

That's a great framing and it's worth distinguishing what we mean by randomness. In