proceeding, made, or occurring without definite aim, reason, or pattern: the random selection of numbers.
Statistics. of or characterizing a process of selection in which each item of a set has an equal probability of being chosen.
I sometimes wonder if there is randomness at all. When we label something as random, is it only because we are not able to ascertain its causes and behavior? If we could figure out the apparently random behavior we find in quantum mechanics, would it then no longer be random?
It seems people sometimes give a certain power to randomness. A hard determinist might say that randomness doesn’t exist at all and that randomness is only our inability to ascertain cause.
i’ve said most of what I want to say about randomness in the original thread, but as for hard determinists and causes in quantum mechanics, bell’s inequality proved that the EPR paradox proves that local realism and local hidden variables are impossible.
"Local realism is the combination of the principle of locality with the “realistic” assumption that all objects must objectively have their properties already before these properties are observed. "-wikipedia
Hidden variables are what Einstein proposed when he said that “God does not play dice.”
For those who didn’t see the original thread, I do not believe in absolute randomness and I don’t think quantum mechanics is complete. I think understanding these unpredictable events would require a completely different kind of understading of the universe, and it would not necessarily enable us to predict those events, although we might be able to influence them consciously.
It could be that what we perceive as disorder is actually a higher level of order. Randomness comes to our minds when what we are perceiving is beyond our ability to understand.
According to quantum theory it’s impossible to know with certainty at any particular moment both the location and momentum of a particle such as an electron. You can determine one or the other, not both. ie, if the location of an electron is measured, it’s momentum cannot be known with certainty. An event whose outcome is related to both the location and momentum of an electron can therefore not be predicted, by anything.
I have heard that its impossible to mathamatically generate pure randomness - they’re always trying to do it for computers and so on…And I vaguely remember they are always having to re-randomize the “random seed” and so on - almost like predicability tends to drift in
On the other hand empirically in the actual real universe (if it exists!) aren’t we headed for heat death, information death and pure random gass movement via the second law of thermodynamics??
This science stuff is not my area but I like these discussions!
Defined that way, with “randomness” meaning that all outcomes of a probability distribution have equal probabilities, I would say that randomness exists but is relatively rare.
Perhaps a better question (although one being discussed already on other threads) is whether indeterminacy exists.
You are correct. You cannot have a calculation that creates a random number. Computers cannot be random. Algorithms cannot create randomness. I found this fascinating as I have always been fascinated with computers. The only way to get a truly random number on a computer is to hook it up to something that creates seemingly random noise. But is this seemingly random noise only random because we cannot ascertain its causes or behavior? And the thread goes on…
How does it exist? Is there a situation possible where “all outcomes of a probability distribution have equal probabilities”? Yesterday I was thinking about this in terms of “freewill”. How could we ever eliminate ALL variables and influences in a decision? It seems to be a paradox that an event could have perfectly equally distributed probability. Something is always influencing. It seems a hard determinist would have to assert that nothing is ever equally probable. Every single thing is locked in an iron clad causal chain.
If it were possible to know the location and momentum of an electron, (mind you quantum theory is theory) then atomic behavior (at that level) would no longer seem random would it? After this behavior is figured out, there will be some smaller behavior that we can’t figure out. We will call it random until we figure out why it behaves as it does.
The position of a particle and its momentum will come. The knowledge and understanding have been limited by our currently crude methods of measurement. Some day, this limitation will be removed.
if random means unpredictable, maybe that’s true. but i think random carries more connotations than that. it implies the whichness of what it does comes completely from a vacuum. it implies there is no rhyme, reason or impetus to the outcome; it is completely meaningless. like chaos except that even chaos has microscopic causes. i don’t think predictability has the monopoly on meaning. predictability relies on causal determinism, which is considered meaningless by those who question free will. meaning lies elsewhere…
I wish I knew more QM, but I don’t agree with this. Uncertainty is real. Hidden variables have been disproven (bell’s inequality). And because of uncertainty, an electron, by its location being uncertain, can randomly jump from one location to another. It can make it through a barrier it shouldn’t be able to get through. That’s actually one of the fundamental barriers to making microchips smaller than a certain size; electrons would jump to where they’re not supposed to be. It even makes it disproportionately likely for two hydrogen atoms to fuse into a helium atom, by randomly appearing closer to eachother than they otherwise would have been able to get with their their both being positively charged. And not to mention that the uncertainty equation is very simple but works exactly as postulated in all conceivable experimental setups to determine position and velocity, no matter how clever, which can even lead to absurd results that completely defy the intuition. So I’m pretty sure that the data of delta p times delta v just does not exist lower than h/2.
the fascinating thing to me is not that math can’t produce pure randomness, but how algorithms can be so effective in approximating/simulating it.
you know the thought just occurred to me, according to godel there can be propositions that can’t be proven by a system of axioms but that have a clear true/false value. so in a way it’s not math, but in it’s also determined. the system cannot prove that ‘G cannot be proven true’, but jump another level up and it’s obviously true. so add that to your set of axioms, and you have a different system, and maybe you can come up with another question that can’t be proven. then you get the determined answer to that, add it to your axioms, etc. if you can get true and false answers from that then maybe you can, in a sense, mathematically generate pure randomness. i know my idea is probably completely ridiculous… just something that popped into my head.