@xadrez_ptWhen someone says something behaves randomly, sometimes it's just a well-made approximation. A sizeable container of particles contains sufficient complexity to discourage us from extracting meaningful information from discarding the assumption of randomness, so it was just assumed. It's not just 8th graders.
@blunderman1Thanks for the post. = )
1) I'm not really sure how the quantumness observation thing works (hence the blahblahness), but I believe I've seen it touted as a possible argument for free will. It's probably also a subject of debate in itself.
2) It seems that you think of responsibility (for an event) as playing a part in causing it. However, that would heavily distort the intuition of responsibility, since in a deterministic universe, practically every atom of the initial state (constrained by the light cone, doesn't change argument) would have played a part in causing the event. So it's not just me who's responsible for this post. African swallows are responsible for this post as well.
You *could* define responsibility this way, but I don't believe this is a very convincing way to do it.
3RA) I... don't quite understand your 2nd paragraph. But I'm guessing that you're questioning the existence of absolute responsibility.
I guess that it's almost forced to accept the existence of subjective responsibility -- you might think I am responsible for this post, even if the universe is deterministic, and that stems from your interpretation of responsibility. I don't see any reasonable objections to that, but that is why I believe it makes sense to talk about an "absolute" (moral) responsibility (if it exists).
Note)
People have talked about this before. One of the key phrases I remember is 'deep responsibility'.
Veering off track)
(Yes I don't buy compatibilism either)
If we have free will, then we can cause things to happen. But if we could not predict what we caused, do we have (moral) responsibility for those consequences? If I unwittingly leant on a secret switch that caused an explosion, would I be morally responsible for it, even though I had a choice in the matter.
...And then going full throttle)
Suppose we had 10 people in a room. Each person chooses, with full knowledge of earlier actions and consequences of actions, an integer from 0 to 100. If the sum is greater than 100, then Bad Things (TM) happen. Naturally, the first person to decide chooses the number 100. Technically, Bad Things do not have to happen based on this choice, but does it make sense to blame only the next person who chose a number greater than 0 for the Bad Things, when the first person was "responsible for most of the damage"?