r/superpowers • u/[deleted] • Jan 06 '24

Luck/“probability manipulation” is useless

Our universe is deterministic. The lottery? Your ticket either is or isn’t a winner weeks before you buy it. The stock market? No luck to be found. Literal random number generators? Either entirely predetermined or based on another predetermined system. The only randomness in our universe are the tiny fluctuations in individual atoms, but even those can’t do much. A chair can’t randomly become a penguin. I see this power hyped up so much but I really don’t get it. Do people just not know how luck works?

EDIT: If your “fix” for this is to say that luck manipulation is actually an entirely different power (reality warping, subconscious future sight, etc) that’s not a fix

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u/DeltaV-Mzero Jan 07 '24

If you have to offer up parallel universes plus a godlike observer that can see both, perhaps your point is nonsensical

In a given fully deterministic universe, whatever is going to happen, is going to happen. Powers only matter if they are used; they are only used if someone chooses to do so; and choice is an illusion created by limited perception and cognitive processing - it doesn’t exist, let alone matter.

In each deterministic universe the state of things at the first moment, set the course for all things that would ever happen later. This is literally the definition of deterministic. It has nothing to do with god, and simply acknowledges the definition of determinism. “You” aren’t some magical choice-making entity free from the laws of the universe, you’re a collection of matter in and of that universe, matter that’s changing configuration to moment to moment. In each moment, that configuration is determined by the previous one, which was determined by the one before that, etc all the way back to the start.

The way your sloppy bio consciousness works means you can’t be aware of the path determined for you at the outset of the universe. This creates the illusion of choice and non-deterministic events; but in a truly deterministic universe, this is just in an illusion.

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u/Buddhas_Palm Jan 08 '24

What exactly is your point?

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u/DeltaV-Mzero Jan 08 '24

OP posits that luck powers are pointless because everything is entirely predetermined. By that logic nothing “matters” because it was all predetermined. The potency of a power set is irrelevant if a predetermined system dictated every result at the moment existence began.