Randomness is not a thing.
Its a word which refers to the absence of some particular thing, that is, order.
Everything acts according to its nature. A things particular nature, is a things particular order. The way it operates. There is a logical reason for the way things operate. Things fall because of gravity. Animals move because they have muscles and energy and instincts etc.
It is not random that animals grow. Nature causes it according to its order.
Nothing happens randomly.
You don’t see animals pop into existence.
Or buildings crumble without a reason.
Everything that happens is logical.
Even when we have an “illogical” thought, some definite cause and effect process caused that thought to emerge.
Chaos, or “randomness” is merely what we experience when we don’t see the connections between things.
Something may appear to happen without any reason, but if we had more consciousness, and could see all the properties of something, and how it relates to other things, we would see the order, the connection, the cause, the nature of it all.
We have always potentially existed.
We were “destined” to come into existence.
Destiny is simply the inevitable nature of reality. Reality must act according to its nature.
Reality always had whatever nature it has. The type of nature which produces life.
Quantum physics does have many random elements its true, this discovery either changes the whole way we veiw the world, is complete bollocks and theres some cosmic entity having a laugh at us. Or the most likely senario imo which is that we dont realy know enough about quantum physics yet and so it appears random, when its probobly ordered in a way we cant fathom yet.
I still belive that everything in the universe must be ordered. Chaos is the enemy of logic
Absolutely possible but not very proboble considering we only have past experience to go on and as that goes everything has an ordered cause and effect. When we hit snookerballs together its entirely possible that they will float up into the air, but its more likely that they wont, as they never have before
True, but something alot of randomness supporters argue for is that they very well could, we just haven’t experienced it yet. Of course, these very same people don’t doubt the existence of the balls due their solid form and unquestionable existence in time and space. The very same is true for the forces which give order to this amazing universe; just because we don’t see/hear it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist and our absence of understanding doesnt null it.
From what I can gather, randomness does exist to the degree of pi and quantum physics but it could very well simply be a pattern too great for our understanding at the time being. Pure randomness would make my subject and future job impossible. What exists on the nano scale, and on the universal scale, is another world entirely in relation to the world on the scale we perceive.
Randomness, at least, does not exist for practical purposes. Of course, assuming that, then we must also assume that since the absence of life has no awareness, and there is no such thing as a random event, life could not emerge from it; believing that, one must also believe in god.
do you mean like if you have a random number generator and it just happens to generate successive values of the fibonacci series for 11 eons, and therefore it’s overwhelmingly likely that in the next microsecond order as we know it will cease to exist?
or do you mean that order has been obtained accidentally but in a way that the pocket of order is has not yet run through its course?
I don’t know a lot about quantum physics, but I know that the ‘randomness’ in quantum physics conforms to a gaussian curve, or bell curve. I.e., the likeliness of finding a particle in a given position (per heisenberg uncertainty) is distributed according to a gaussian curve/bell curve. I also know that bell curves come up in any system where many variables determine the outcome of something. for example, IQ is distributed according to a bell curve, and they’ve allegedly found ~100 genes so far that influence IQ. so is it so far a jump to say that a quantum event is actually the outcome of countless factors?
i know that bell’s inequality disproves the theory of local hidden variables, but that doesn’t exclude the influence of non-local variables. (also, perhaps variables in the past and future, and non-corporeal variables)
Rhino - probablity applies only when all the alternatives are known to exist, and are known - are enumerable, that is. Probability doesn’t apply to this particular speculation. There is no way to reckon the probability of it - this does not mean that there is a low probabilty of it - it means that we can’t reckon the probability at all.
Inhahe - I mean the second case. That causes and effects may have occurred only since, say, the Big Bang, and that this paradigm describes only the universe as we know it, and only the part that we know. That it is a temporary and local condition that allows for causes and effects. And that this condition may cease some time in the future, and/or may not obtain in parts of the universe that we don’t know. And that this condition - or the Big bang itself, if you like, was an accident.
I don’t call upon quantum physics because it studies supposed phenomena that we cannot observe.
I disagree, everything that we have observed so far follows an ordered path, for something to then break that chain seems highly improbable. Infact to say otherwise its pure unsupported speculation. In science we can only draw predictions from observable data. That data always follows cause and effect, there is no reason to think that this would have been different in the past
I dont know enough about genetic mutation to begin.
I did not mean to argue, only that it makes no sense to me that a random event would cause everything when everything else is so ordered. It would appear from experience that random events do not even exist, that there is a pattern to everything. I just think it unlikely that it would have started any other way. Im not saying Im right your wrong. Just that I dont understand your view point. You say that probabilitly does not apply when there is nothing to compare it too, I get that, however I think when talking about an event we can compare it to every other event that has happened since cant we? In which case its the most improboble thing I can think of as the evidence is vastly in favor of everything having an ordered course.
Like I said I’m not trying to argue just trying to understand
Rhino - random events may not exist at present. That doesn’t mean that they never did, nor that they could not. There is nothing necessarily precluding that an event could, in the future, cause all future events to happen randomly.
I am saying that probability is a technique that humans use, but that can be used only when you know all the possible outcomes. When you flip a coin, it is known aforehand that there are only two possible outcomes.
Let me ask you this - let’s say I flip a coin 99 times. Each time it comes up “heads”. What is the probability that the next flip will produce “heads”?
This is an easy question, but I ask it because it is not clear to me that you do know what I am talking about.
My overall point, lest it be lost, is that there is nothing very different between the concepts of causation and randomness. Each is the result of a human analysis. Or there is a God. Take your pick.
It is often believed that, if causation obtains, that everything can be traced back to a single cause. But what if there are concurrent chains of causation? If everything can be traced back to 4,672 causes? What if, instead of an ever-increasing set of causes, there is an ever-decreasing set of causes? Until we get down to one cause? Can an infinite (logical) regress, which is, conceptually, and infinite progression really stop at one? Why does an infinite regress have to stop at one? Zero is a number.
Yes, I am trying to fuck with your head. That’s what the question of randomness and causation, brought to its “logical” conclusion, is designed to do.
If we flip a coin do we know all possible outcomes? You said yourself that just because something has happened one way before that does not mean that it cannot happen differently in the future, or the past. If we flip that coin we have only past observed experience to go on, the coin may land on its edge, or it may lay suspended in the air, or even open a rift in the space time continum. However we would expect this not to happen, we have seen no evidence for these things and so are deemed as being unlikely at best, its likely that we would say that its actually impossible, even though this may not be the case. We can only go on what we have seen, knowing all possibilities is in my eyes impossible, so we have to go on what we do know.
Flip the coin again and it would be a 50/50 chance excluding all abstract possibilities as explained above
I agree that it is nieve to say that causation ends in one. We do not know the truth, there is simply not enough data to support that notion. If it does not end in one however, it does not mean that randomness would exist simply that our current understanding of the system that governs us would be changed in that way, but it would still be an ordered system.
My problem with the idea of randomness is that all evidence points the other way, yes we dont know enough to say that this is cirtain, but we can only make predictions on what data we have, just like with anything else that we try to understand, we will never know anything for cirtain, but we can form more likely outcomes based on evidence obtained from past experience.