Comment by apsurd

You're correct. I only have a very casual understanding of these things. For the non-linear thing, I just mean that for any advanced system there are say trillions of parameters, like cellular systems, and even if you mapped them in you couldn't be sure what the output would be.

    > And I'm not sure what you understand what non-computable means. It means that the computation will not halt in a finite amount of time for a general input. For a particular input, it may indeed halt in a finite amount of time.

Sounds familiar, the "halting problem"? I suppose I'm too loosely tying concepts together. Particular vs general input is same as simple vs complex input above, given a complex enough input, the compute involved approaches boundless/infinite.

In practice, yes, as I understand it, modern science is all about stochastic approximations and for all intents and purposes it's quite reliable.

I probably should stop using "non-linear" terminology. I really just mean that it's not 1:1. You mention how systems can be deterministic and I looked it up and yes wave function collapse specifically says:

    > The observable acts as a linear function on the states of the system

We can compute the possible states, but not the exact state. We can't predict the future.

Thanks for the reply, this is much more interesting to me as it approaches philosophy, so admittedly I too loosely throw words-that-mean-things around.