Humor me, I have no belief in that anything can be random. But I am against ingnorance so…
If you don’t think that there can be randomness, than you must believe that everything is pre-ordained. IE, this comes down to the destiny vs. free will question.
Well, things we tend to think of as random are not really so.
For example:
If I flip a coin a hundred times, I should get (aproximately) 50 heads and 50 tails. However, each flip is not really random, but a function of with how much force and spin I flip the coin each time. It’s not truly random.
Same thing with dice. The result of a toss of a die depends not on randomness, but on the position of the die in my hand, the force and spin with which I throw it, and any obstacles that are in the way. If I could absolutely control those factors with every throw, I would be able to predict every toss. The appearence of randomness only comes about because I can’t control those factors.
Zev Steinhardt
If you take as an assumption that there is randomness, then we live in a non-deterministic universe where there is no controlling power (i.e. God). If there is no one with this power, you could argue there is no rationality behind the design of the universe. Since randomness is part of that design, there is thus no rationality motivating it. So there is no “Why?”
This is rapidly heading into a Great Debate, but…
If the universe were totally deterministic, it would leave a God with nothing to do. He could start the clockwork cosmos off however he wanted, but He would be unable to intervene without breaking the determinism He created. If a God wanted to make a universe in which He could act, it would make more sense to build in some uncertainty. He could then perform miracles by controlling randomness, and still have a Universe that operated true to its design.
I don’t see how having randomness gives us free will. For that matter I don’t see how not having randomness takes away free will but that is not the topic at hand.
However, I do have something relevent to say about the posted question. What do you mean by random? I think that things are random if we cannot predict them. This is sort of if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck it is a duck kind of argument.
Things like the dice are random because there are so many factors affecting the outcome that we cannot know ahead of time what the role will be so we call it random. The role of a die in theory could be calculated ahead of time. If you know the state of all the elements in the system.
There are other things like radio active decay which are thought of a random because there is no theory now to explain how to figure out when an atom will decay. No amount of knowledge about the system will let you get a more accurate idea of when the atom will decay.
Einstein said something like “God does not play dice with the universe” basically in response to your question. He has yet to be proven right on this question. Many things about how the universe works can be explained by assuming things like radio active decay are random.
I don’t know if this is what you are looking for, but if, say, you get a box of paperclips and give it a good shake, it will tend to get all messed up. There is only ‘state’ in which order will prevail and all the clips will be lined up. It’s possible, but not likely at all.
Out of all the possibilities of order, only one will be ‘organized’.
If you’re talking about macro things like flipping coins and rolling dice, then yes, we should be able to figure out what the outcome will be based on all the initial conditions - how much force was put on the coin and where, the air density, etc.
But at an atomic level, things really are random. The current state of the very well tested quantum theory is that when an atom decays seemingly randomly, it really is random, and not just a function of our not knowing enough about its initial conditions.
How did free will come into it? Philosophers long ago took questions like yours, and figured that if we could just know the state of every particle in the universe, then we could predict everything in the future. Even our brains are determinate chemical factories, so there is no such thing as free will. Of course, few liked this idea, so when quantum mechanics came along to show that this determinism doesn’t really exist, the philosophers embraced quantum theory as the savior of free will.
There is much about the universe we don’t know, heck we don’t even know if gravity is ‘quantumised’, they are still searching for the ‘graviton’ or ‘gravity waves’.
So how can you possibly say that we are certain that atomic decay is randomised? How can we be certain that anything is randomised, ever? Even if we did learn everything there is to learn about the universe how would we know that we had learnt everything? Probably the only randomness is outside our universe, which I believe is probably an infinite void of random energy fluctuations. But try and prove that outside the universe it isn’t? Outside the universe any situation is possible, therefore randomness.
Although then we get back to the argument that because we don’t completely understand somthing then we say it’s random.
Perfect Dark
At some point roughly 15 billion years ago, That Which Is, aka the Universe, came into being. It had no prior cause. Heck, it had no “prior”! It just “caused itself”.
A less linear, alternative conceptualization of this was provided by Stephen Hawkings, who visualized the curvature of time at origin in such a way that there was no pinpoint time of origin a la “big bang” but rather a smooth curve. That doesn’t in any way undercut the notion of world without prior cause, though.
Every subsequent deterministic model is (as Alan Watts once pointed out) really a case in which you slice an item temporally into “before” and “after” segments and declare the “before” portion to have “caused” the “after” part, such as saying that the Big Bang “caused” the galaxies of today, or saying (to borrow more directly from Watts) that the front part of a cat entering the room “causes” the back half of the cat that follows.
Causation models do of course have their highly utilitarian purposes and attractiveness as analytical models. (It isn’t practical to study That Which Is as a single phenomenon, so we do subdivide and categorize, and once having done so we find it necessary to speak of cause and effect. The fact that there exists only one ThingEvent, That Which Is, The Big Bang, The Universe, and all other nouns and verbs just conveniences of the categorical mindset, in no way subtracts from the convenience of that convenience. It is just that it is useful and necessary occasionally to step back from it and remember that everything is and always has been One, not a Cause and an Effect causing another effect etc).
If we are talking about the macroscopic world, an argument can be made that randomness is an illusion, and that the reality is that we simply can’t measure the inputs with sufficient accuracy to determine the outcome.
I’ll leave quantum theory to the others. After years of trying, I still can’t put my mind completely around it. Guess I’m a visual guy - things I can’t visualize I can’t fully grasp.
Sua
I understand your point, Zev, and agree that the introduction of human intervention reduces true randomness.
But I’m curious – let’s remove human intervention by picturing a rock at the top of a hill. Due to erosion, or what-have-you, the support underneath the rock gives way, and the rock tumbles down the hill. Does it not roll in a random fashion? Is not the result when it comes to rest (“heads or tails” for want of a better term) random?
I’m not trying to trap you or be contentious. I’m genuinely curious, and since I don’t have any education on such a science or philosophy, I’d like to know what you think of the above as an example of a random occurance.
The fact that a human is flipping the coin in Zev’s example is irrelevant - if you constructed a coin-flipping machine, the force, hold, etc., would all have the same effect on the result.
As for your rock on the hill, if we could figure out the precise weight of the rock and the exact topography, countors, firmness, angle, etc., of the hill, I think we could predict precisely where it would come to rest. The thing is that we don’t have the ability to make these precise measurements, and I think chaos theory holds that we will never have the ability (you would need measurements precise to a near-infinite number of significant digits).
I am talking semi-educatedly on chaos theory – it’s been a LONG time since I’ve done any reading on it. Please correct if I am wrong.
Sua
“contours”
Why is order posible ? It seems like a much tougher thing to achieve than randomness.
It isn’t ‘tougher’, order exists all around us. Everything is ordered, but that depends on what you think of ordered… ie Chaos theory. If we have all the knowledge in the world including were every single particle etc exists and how they work and interact and decay etc. Then it would be possible to calculate the future. Peoples destiny, there would be no appearance of randomness. As is the human race is not advanced enough to attempt a small scale version.
There is no real randomness in the universe. Everything is ‘scientific’, ie. if we were to reset everything in the universe to a point in the past then it would progress exactly the same way it previously did up until this point. But because we are part of the universe there is no reason why we aren’t being ‘reset’ by another race into the future or past?
This is like ‘destiny’ except we currently have no way of determining it so it doesn’t really matter to us. It ‘appears’ like we are in control BUT really unless we are influenced by something outside the universe then we will react to certain things in a certain way no matter what we do. If we pretend to be random and do something out of the ordinary, we aren’t really because we are doing it because that is the way your brain is organised down to the celluar and molecular and atomic level, IT IS POSSIBLE TO PREDICTED HOW SOMEONE IS GOING TO BE “RANDOM”.
But don’t stress, your still in control. Right?
PerfectDark
cough
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
cough
There’s randomness at the quantum level. It isn’t possible to measure things to the nth degree. You can’t say for certain where a particle is, but you can accurately state the probability that it will be in a certain area. This is because by measuring, you are intervening in the system. You can’t measure anything without intervention. The smaller the thing that you’re trying to measure, the harder it is to measure it.
Scientific does not necessarily equal deterministic.
PerfectDark:
You seem to have missed the central point of chaos theory, or at least the implications of the intersection of chaos theory and the Heisenberg principle –
a) “Chaos” in the sense of the theory of the same name is a term used to represent “sensitive dependence on initial conditions”. The famous exemplary case was the computer weather model of Ed Lorenz. He was trying to understand what factors would need to be understood and measured in order to accurately predict the weather, and he set up a simple mathematical model. At one point, he wanted to re-run a sequence and typed in as the starting values the values as they had existed just prior to the pattern he wanted to recreate. The computer then proceeded to NOT create the same pattern because of the difference between the 3-point precision decimal figure he had obtained from the printout and the 6-point precision decimal figure that the computer had actually been holding in its circuitry during ongoing computations. He likened the difference between the two sets of figures to the fluctuation that would be introduced were a butterfly to happen by, beating its wings, somewhere in the midst of the weather pattern.
b) Nevertheless, I can imagine you saying “Well, yeah, but you aren’t saying it isn’t a deterministic model, you’re just saying that the necessary initial measurements would have to have a precision beyond what we are able to obtain in real life.” But implicit in that type of statement is the notion that “Well, gee, given a quantum leap or two in our ability to measure things, that would no longer be an issue” or at least “Never mind in real life, just let’s say, hypothetically, that we somehow have the measurements. If we had them we would be able to predict the future.” Well, real life will never go beyond a certain point in its approach of the hypothetical because the act of measuring affects what is measured, meaning that the accuracy with which the smallest particular phenomena can be measured is limited by the “graininess” of the particles employed in the performance of the measure. The second problem, which presumably would even wreck the hypothetical model, is the “pi problem”: the necessity of entering a rational value into an expression in order to obtain a prediction means that every irrational value can only be approximated. To illustrate, if you had to know the volume of a sphere EXACTLY rather than to a certain finite degree of accuracy, you could not calculate it with the standard formula even if I gave you the absolutely EXACT radius of the sphere. So if there is any extreme sensitivity to an initial condition the exact measurement of which is an irrational number (and there is no reason or valid excuse for assuming the predominance of rational number values amongst these measurements) you still could not generate a deterministic prediction.
So you can’t get the measurements you need and you couldn’t use them if you had them.
You’re right, but you didnt explain your answer Mr. yax.
When randomness occurs, the randomness becomes constant & thus cannot be random anymore. constant(randomness)
So handy, what you’re saying is: at some point X, randomness occurs. But it immediately wipes itself out, because from that point X onward, it is constantly there. And when it’s constantly there, it can’t be random.
Not saying that this would be my line of reasoning (far from it, actually), but am I interpreting this correctly?