I’ve been posting a lot lately, because the comments from the previous posts engage my mind :-). If you haven’t visited the blog in a few days, be sure to check out the previous posts. I’m moving somewhat fast.
Why do we love this idea of randomness? Why are we attached to it?
I was sitting and thinking about this question, and the solution popped into my head. In hindsight, it’s actually pretty obvious, and it’s spelled out very clearly in the movie “The Secret” (which I’ve seen a few times, Joe :-P). The way the solution popped into my head is pretty funny though… I was getting bored with the question of why people love randomness (because I couldn’t answer it), so I decided to start an entirely new and unrelated line of questioning. I asked myself what my most offensive belief was. I answered that karma and cause and effect is a pretty offensive belief. Then the solution to my previous question about randomness hit me.
The reason we love this idea of randomness is because we use it 99% of the time when something bad happens.
One of the biggest problems in all religions is answering the question of: why do bad things happen to good people? This is a very hard question. Small bad things can be reasoned away, but then you see extremely bad things, like child molestation, rape, or natural disasters that kill millions of people… and in religion, people are forced to ask themselves: if God is a good God, then why would he allow this to happen? Big problem for religion.
What do we do? I believe that while we all have our own religious beliefs, and we all will answer why bad things happen to good people differently - I believe that in our hearts, most of us will rely on this idea of randomness. Some of the really bad things in this world don’t have a good explanation, no matter how much faith we have. So at some point, in our conscious or subconscious mind, we latch onto the idea that sometimes random shit happens.
But now look at what we’ve done. We’ve attached the idea that randomness exists to the most emotionally charged experiences we can think of. That means we really need this idea of randomness. If randomness were to leave the picture, then we would have to deal with all these highly emotional issues again. Our subconscious mind does not want this.
For example, when I was a little kid, my aunt died from cancer. I think she was in her 30’s. I must have been 8 years old, and at such a young age, I had to deal with this extremely emotional situation. I barely understand death as it is, and now my aunt is gone. I ask my parents why she died, but they can’t give a solid explanation. Maybe I hear that it was “her time”, and that “God decided to take her”. Those are great ideas… but what sinks into the subconscious mind? What is the belief I form in my heart?
Probably that random shit happens. Now I’m 24, and I’m challenging this belief. Which means I have to re-live my aunt’s death, and try to make sense of it again. I also have to re-live everything else where I’ve used randomness as the explanation. Talk about exhausting!
I think we all latch onto this idea of randomness because we’ve all had bad experiences. No one lives a perfect life. Everyone has family members who have died, or friends, or teachers. My 6th grade teacher died when I was 13 years old - he was a volunteer firefighter, and was responding to a call, and a tree fell on his car with him in it. How do I explain that to myself? It seems the only way I can live in peace is to use this idea of randomness.
If you don’t like my theories on randomness, or even if you do, I submit to you an exercise: ask yourself, “What would it mean, emotionally, if randomness didn’t exist?” - you can start by finishing this sentence: “If randomness didn’t exist, then _______”. Don’t give a one sentence answer either :-P. Chances are that blank should be a few pages long. (No need to post your response in the comments :-P).
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:32 am
Okay, I was going to type a long post last night but I deleted it by accident. So here goes a quick summary. The thing about all these ideas is that they are not unique. I don’t see how anyone has gone through even 2 months of a subject matter such as the paranormal without further questioning life. The thing is no one ever seems to understand them until someone comes along and puts it into current terms that immediately make sense to them. But yet, these ideas others have, they too got ideas from other sources. Some of this stuff people talk about now adays have been thought about since back in the time of Egyptians. Then on to religions, and even alchemy. They all recycled these ideas time and time again. So in reality, what is stopping you, yourself, from finding this information on your own? You surely are not going to experience what Peebs, or anyone else here would be experience just by reading what they type. You have to experience it in your own personal manner, in ways and events that are going to mean most to you. The only way I can see you reading this blog and considering that you are experiencing that moment is if you have it ingrained in your brain that the internet is life, and the only facts in life are what’s on the internet. There are always times you need to think about things more, but at the same time there are times when you can overthink things.
May 23rd, 2007 at 1:47 pm
You finnaly started me thinking now about what if randomness does not exist AT ALL. The implications would be huge, there would be some much going on in the background. No need to say anything further about it however, I’m going to let this incubate for a while.
May 23rd, 2007 at 4:22 pm
TANSTAARE: There ain’t no such thing as a random event.
Universal causality is the only logical explanation for life, in my opinion.
But what about parallel universes in membrane theory? If randomness doesn’t exist then are they all the same!?
May 23rd, 2007 at 6:44 pm
True, complete, mathematical randomness is not possible. For any variable to be truly random there would be an exact likelihood of all outcomes thus no single outcome would arise. When an outcome arises, it is because that outcome was more likely of an outcome than the rest. Even by the smallest, most minuscule value, there was a bias that tipped the scale be it physical circumstances or mental influence.
“Random” is a semantic discrepancy that is used more often than it should.
May 23rd, 2007 at 9:24 pm
The problem with saying that accidental things happen due to randomness is not neccisarily a good thing. There are very few accidents out there and randomness has nothing to do with it. In the real world, I personally think that using randomness to describe why a person dies is horribly ignorant. Death from cancer? That means a person died because their cells made a mistake or maybe there was an external cause like radiation. Death from a drunk driver? Driver was drinking cause they either like to or are addicted, then made a mistake with the placement of his hands or where the other cars were and crashed. Sadly, a lot of thing in life can be described like this.
As for religious views on randomness and god, it’s based on different ideals. First of all the bible (Catholicism) probably wasn’t as much as a religion as it was a guide on how things came to be and why they work the way they do. So it was an old version of a science text book with somebody slipping their ideals in it. On top of adding the name of something omniscient and all powerful could give the writer’s some power. Since the writer’s were probably the just the normal Joe Schmoe, some problem’s were obviously not fixed. One of those being randomness.
Randomness doesn’t exist in the bible, it was either it happened because you were evil or you are good. That’s kind of hard to say because people die saving others. So to say it was random a random thing, would probably be very bad at the time the bible was created. This was because people were told that they had a reason for living. This dispelling of randomness probably stemed from fear. Fear of death and forever lossing consciousness could stop a lot of people from being hero’s.
Over all I think that randomness in the real world doesn’t exist. There’s a reason for everything that happens, it just doesn’t reach the realm of God’s and immortal beings watching over us. As for randomness in games, I would like to refer you my old post in Part 2.
May 23rd, 2007 at 9:50 pm
I personally am conflicting with this right now, starting when you made the first post about randomness. It still has to sink in
To NeoPsychic:
I’m going to play devil’s advocate, because if I don’t this idea will eat at me. You say that nothing is random, and give examples like dying from cancer. If an external cause such as radiation caused the cancer, why didn’t it cause it in the person next to them instead?
The UV ray that started it hit that specific person just right, and started a chain reaction which spread the cancer around their body? Why wouldn’t the UV ray half a second later come and start the cancer in the next person? It is tempting to answer “randomness”, but I think that after reading these posts, and the comments as well, that it doesn’t exist :-). I’ll have to see if I can’t convince myself.
From Sothilde:
“You finnaly started me thinking now about what if randomness does not exist AT ALL. The implications would be huge, there would be some much going on in the background. No need to say anything further about it however, I’m going to let this incubate for a while.”
You basically wrapped up my post in a nutshell. *Ponders about randomness some more*
May 23rd, 2007 at 10:27 pm
Nice post once again.
I think you have cleared things up.
And now it just seems so obvious that randomness doesn’t exist.
Thanks,
- hotfoot982
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:51 pm
I think you have a misprint. You said “Why do bad things happen to good people” The real fact of it all is that there are no good people either way. The real question simply has to be “Why do bad things happen,” but I don’t believe in karma anyways.
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:59 pm
Well, I just graduated high school, and being young, naiive, and filled with free time, I think I’ll have a stab at this randomness thing. You can tell me I’m wrong afterwards
So, the topic is randomness. Does it exist? Does it not exist? Where do we fit in the world?
The first thing that comes to mind, is my opinion of why God is necessary. If there is no God, we are forced to conclude that all there is to life is what we see. Perhaps I should rephrase. For the sake of argument, we will refer to God as anything which science can’t explain, probably metaphysical, and in my head at least somewhat Christian. But that’s just me.
Anyways, without God, all there is is the known. What we know is the physics and chemistry of the universe. Physics and chemistry are not random. As such, we are simply complex physical and chemical reactions. We were predestined from the beginning of time, simply because the laws of chemistry and physics dictated that the reactions would occur and we would come into existence. This is somewhat depressing, because according to that theory, the idea that I am writing down these thoughts is simply the product of a long long chain of reactions. You will read this, and things will happen, all because of a predetermined and completely natural reaction.
The quandary of this is that we would like to believe that we have souls or free will. If free will doesn’t exist then we are just reactions. If we are reactions, then life doesn’t mean anything. If life doesn’t mean anything, well… that sucks.
So we hope and pray that life is not a reaction and that there is somehow a free will in the universe. Is this free will random?
This just occurred to me, and probably contains holes. Let us consider Christianity. We are created in God’s own image. God is previously defined as something metaphysical. We assume that we have free will. If we have free will, then by definition, all things metaphysical have free will. This is a hard concept to grasp, because we are taught by science that the world is cold and lifeless, and that we are all the sums of simple reactions. What a cold world, no?
Some days I have a hard time accepting a metaphysical world, because society and schools keep telling me that everything can be explained away with simple math. I don’t know how people can sleep at night with that idea in their head though. Because with that definition, they are the simple sum of a math problem. We are nothing then. But intuition tells us that we are something, we feel that we have choice in the world. We feel we can change things.
So, we assume that we have some small amount of free will, even an infinitesimal amount. Consider the butterfly effect. Small changes in a system will inevitably change it drastically. Every small act of free will, every tiny bit of influence from the metaphysical, changes the universe.
Then, we are not the sum of a simple physical/ chemical reaction. We are the sum of a physical/ chemical reaction influenced by millions and millions of instances of free will. Free will to change the world. And then we have a solution to our problem. We are no longer mindless reactions. We are no longer predestined and predetermined. There is meaning to life again.
As for the people dying thing, and bad things happening, in one model, you aren’t real anyways, and in the other, well if you believe in sin, we are damned to hell already anyways. You are living on borrowed time.
But what if sin is free will? I mean, in the biblical sense, sin occurred when Eve ate the apple against God’s wishes. God being the metaphysical and the physical, everything really, sin is when products of God choose to act as God and exhibit free will, or the ability to change to world.
This is probably long enough, and it probably just sounds like rambling, but maybe it will get some cogs turning in people’s minds….
May 26th, 2007 at 9:27 pm
I believe you should ‘build up’ your intent. Here, lotteries are hosted roughly once a month. If you really want to proof it, try to state your intent of winning a few times each day
May 28th, 2007 at 10:40 am
You can definitely get the appearance of randomness from complexity, even in a deterministic (non-random) world. The movement of the planets, for example, seems deterministic - but scientists have shown that if you look forward millions of years, their orbits are nothing like they are today. AFAIK this is part of chaos theory.
Even non-random complexity is difficult to think about, though. Computer scientists are still trying to figure out ways to compute some problems fast enough to tackle large versions (millions of points) in fewer than thousands of years, using our current models of computers.
June 1st, 2007 at 7:02 pm
I am so full of ideas on this one, that I don’t know where to start. I agree even more now that randomness doesn’t exist. It is all because of something that triggers and event that causes the other event. I am personally Christian, and I don’t believe that randomness crashes Christianity. If we consider the fact that we are born with a purpose, and that randomness doesn’t exist, that doesn’t change we were born with a purpose. Even if we weren’t born with a purpose, we still came to being because of an event. We consider random what is affected by the tiniest of details, like wrong copying of DNA or the weight of a coin and the air pressure.Those aren’t random. Those are pretty real. Bringing in the idea of bad things happening to good people. Here are my religious standings: I am a Christian. I believe in God and Jesus, but not with everything in the bible. I don’t agree that God created woman by placing a man’s rib in a pile of mud. I do believe that there is an unknown force. We all agree, there is a force. Sometimes strong, sometimes not as strong. That force is like energy. I believe that force took the form of a god. I believe things are made real by people who believe in them. The more you believe in a god, the more you believe in this mysterious force, the more force you’re adding to the force :P. I think this force was there since the beginning of time (don’t ask me when. I get sucked into a void trying to conceive something without a beginning). I am not saying the force is God. I do find it though, that if you think of the force’s shape like most people do, it has the most power. The more power it has, the more real it is. I believe the world is balanced. It must be. Everything is balanced. Death by Life, poverty by wealth, beginning by end. If the balance were destroyed, the extreme would take over. If all “good people and animals” were to live forever, then the world would be chaotic. that is why there is death. I don’t know if it was meant to be that way, but it certainly does maintain the balance. The fact that people are overpopulating is slowly being balanced by space exploration and advances in technology that will eventually lead us to moving away from the Earth. The force, in Christianity, is divided into two. Heaven and Hell. They balance each other. One can’t exist without the other. Hell has one side of the force, balancing Heaven, which does the opposite of everything Hell does, but balances the world as well. I know this is confusing, because it is my conscious stream of thoughts, but bear with me. Getting back to the randomness issue, I being a Christian and believing that God doesn’t save his people (at least not in life), believe that God (aka form of the force) has had his influence on the Earth, and doesn’t majorly change it. He didn’t create the Earth. The force just stood there, besides the world, watching, maybe not watching, just being there, somehow observing. Let me outline this from the beginning:
-There is a force. This force does not have a completely direct way of influencing things, but it does in some way.
-Everything is balanced.
-Nothing is random. Everything is caused by something else.
Lastly, I want to see people’s responses to a blog as well written as this one, but supporting the opposing views. It would be really interesting.
BTW, to Dorg4: You’re bad at being devil’s advocate. Everything, even the radiation not giving the other person cancer, is determined by circumstances.
That is, if you consider science a reality. All the posts in the blog and comments are made according o the belief that science is true. After all, it is one big theory.
Lol.
June 5th, 2007 at 12:16 am
I was a part of PsiPog for a long time (my previous name was “FrenchHorn” in the chat, etc.). This is the first I’m contributing here, but I hope to be an active contributor in the future, assuming that you do not mind comments expressing opinions that are respectfully quite different from yours.
First, I feel like I have to respond to some of the things that have been commented already.
Genkai: You speak of “universal causality”. However, from a quantum mechanical perspective of physics, “universal causality” (typically termed “determinism”) is impossible. Read up on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and some of the other aspects of quantum mechanics that lend a certain “fuzziness” or uncertainty - randomness, essentially - to the subatomic structure of the universe.
ErikJDurwoodII: Your statement that “true… randomness is impossible… for any variable to be truly random there would be an exact likelihood of all outcomes thus no single outcome would arise.” This is a non sequitur. When a random event occurs a single time, then a single resolution of the random event must occur (duh). At that time, the output of the random system becomes known; however, this doesn’t mean that the output that was given was favored in any way.
Take flipping a coin. Forget for now any imperfections in the coin which would cause it to favor one side (we could use a really random example like radio white noise or the cosmic microwave background radiation, but let’s stick with the familiar example of a coin and assume that it is as random as those other two). It’s pretty well established that any given coin has a 50% chance of landing on each side - go flip one several thousand times, plot the results, and see for yourself - the results will indicate that the heads value is roughly equal to the tails value; some variance is statistically expected and accepted, and statistics has ways of calculating the percent chance of a certain amount of variance.
By saying that a truly random event could not resolve because it would have equal probabilities of each outcome being given, you are saying that, when I flip a coin, it will land on neither heads nor tails, because there is an equal chance of each - presumably you would have the coin vanish into thin air.
Nevertheless, let us be scientists. Among your assertions you give a very testable statement - “When an outcome arises, it is because that outcome was more likely of an outcome than the rest.” This can be tested quite easily. Simply flip a coin (or conduct some other random event with equal likelihoods for each result - roll a die, flick a spinner, etc) a large number times. If your statement is true, then the results will be skewed toward one side - and when the experiment is repeated several times, the results will be skewed each time.
Regardless, I don’t think you intended to word that statement the way you did; as you stated that true randomness doesn’t exist, words like “likely” lose their meaning, since they are rooted in the idea of randomness.
…whew, that tired me out. Maybe I’ll comment directly on your blogs tomorrow. As you may have been able to guess, I respectfully but firmly agree with a good majority of what you’ve said in your blogs, and assuming that you welcome comments that express opposing views to your blog posts in a manner much like you present your views in the blog, I will continue to comment presenting my reactions.
June 5th, 2007 at 11:01 pm
fruo: I could have gone further with that, but I had to write the idea down, so I could look at it and tear it apart in my head. I hope everyone here doesn’t mind me using this board like that…
Felix: I see what you’re saying here, I hope. But if you don’t mind if I comment with an example of my own… In many programming languages on computers, there is a function that generates a random decimal number from 0 to 1. This is “random”, but it is based on a seed, as I’ve said before in other comments. This seed which is based off of random info the computer can gather, such as the current time, time since reboot, et cetera, determines the result. Now, the result is a “random” number from 0 to 1, anyone can see that, and it is statistically acceptable (evenly distributed, et cetera…) but that doesn’t make it random, because it is based off of a seed.
With the coin flip, your seed is the power you flip the coin with, the air pressure that day, wind, speed that the coin is flipping, trajectory, et cetera. If all these conditions were PERFECTLY replicated, the same exact result would happen. The result is not random, because you are providing the power to flick it. Maybe one time you flick it slightly softer and the coin lands on tails, maybe the wind picks it up and it lands on heads. Maybe nothing happens and it lands on the side
.
But my point is that even though it is distributed according to statistics, and the results normally fall about 50% heads, 50% tails, does NOT mean the results are random, because each flick of the coin, a new “seed” was used.
I look forward to a reply.
June 6th, 2007 at 4:35 pm
Felix: Perhaps I did word my statement poorly. What I am referring to is not practical randomness (flipping a coin) but complete and total, no extra variables, randomness. Flipping a coin will statistically show a 50/50 chance as time goes by, that’s fine. But there are also many conditions that affect the overall chance. When I say that “For any variable to be truly random there would be an exact likelihood of all outcomes thus no single outcome would arise.” I am referring to the raw imaginary conditions of a single variable, having never derived an outcome, all by itself, with nothing to affect its result with an exact, perfect 50/50 chance of one outcome or the other. From a logical standpoint it does not seem one outcome could arise when there is an equal chance of both. Not without some external influence and at that point, it wouldn’t be TRUE randomness.
Flipping a coin is “practically random” but since the coin is affected by its environment, it can never be completely random. You can’t “forget” the fact that coins have imperfections and the flipping and the environment have influences as well. I can’t get my mind around any physical minted coin being truly “fair” down to the last molecule.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin_flipping#physics_of_coin_flipping
I could continue to flip a coin for the rest of my life and as I continue to flip the accuracy of the statistics show the historical chance getting nearer and nearer to 50% but will never, down to the smallest decimal, be exactly 50% for a future toss due to external influences. (Read: Chernoff bound) As per the “Gambler’s Fallacy” every time a coin is flipped there is “chance” set by the conditions and the coin itself.
But I’m splitting hairs.
I suppose at this point it’s safe to say that we should not confuse randomness with chaos. Degrees of “Fuzziness” and uncertainty are the conditions we work from, randomness is objective and what may appear random to some, my not be to others.
- Erik