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The thought of a fixed system being a solid object in space-time seems beyond me. It makes sense in the terms you put it, but I've never heard it put as such before. How can a system be proven to be deterministic, though? I mean, we call certain artificial systems deterministic because if we let them run forever they'll never run any different, supposedly. But we can't let it run forever. How do we know that it will never change?

Jumping down a bit... If a non-deterministic system follows a logic that we can't understand, then there's always hope that we'll crack the code, so to speak. But for the time being, there doesn't seem to be much of a difference. I'm not sure if there's a practical difference, though. I can't foresee how approaching one of these systems with one bias or the other (random vs. deterministic but not understood) would influence how we interpret the data we collect from it. I can't imagine that it would not, though. These things are much more subjective than we realize.