There are in fact no “random” human actions. Leave aside notions of arbitrary genetic makeup which i do not consider to be a human action.
What this entails is that all human actions are pre-meditated (to an extent anyway) whether consciously or unconsciously. What we conceive of as random is just a lack of information on our part in knowing what a person is doing. An example of this would be, suppose you look out the window and someone walks by, you think to yourself, that it is just a random person, walking down what seems to them to be a random street at a random time of day, wearing random clothing. In fact, this person is walking down your street (because it is the only one that leads to the market, unbeknownst to you), at that particular time of day (because once more, unbeknownst to you a sale happens to be going on at this particular time we shall suppose at the market) and is wearing particular clothes (because also unbeknownst to you, they have yet to do laundry). So what seems to be “random” to us is not, and merely seems so, due to a lack of evidence on our part.
I’m sure one might think this would entail that human actions can be predicted, which is true (to an extent), iff (if and only if) certain conditions are met first.
- we would have to be able to “mind read” others and
- we would have to know all the previous events that occurred in a persons life or at least leading up to a particular event we are trying to predict
Even if these requirements were met, it would still come out being a prediction. Granted there are certain predictable things such as, when its snowing out, people will wear jackets (given there are some who would not). Not only though are the requirements difficult and impossible to meet, but after we have them, human beings have the ability to change their minds at a whim. There are then, no “random” human actions, and it is purely a lack of knowledge on our part which gives the facade of being “random”. While this applies to humans and animals, it could also be viable to other natural occurrences such as where lightning decides to strike.
One more thing should be noted though, which is that this also implies that all human actions are a build up of past causal events. for example person P has thought A which leads to action B which causes event C which leads to the occurrence of thought D ect.
The best way to think of it, is to equate it to a card game. Where you or someone else, shuffles the cards and you think you get cards at “random”, however it only appears random, because in reality if you were to watch them you would see where the cards go for example the queen went to the top followed by the ace of diamonds followed by the 2 of clubs ect. It seems random to you because of a lack of knowledge, but were you able to observe where the cards went it wouldn’t be random.