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

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.

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.

-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.

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.

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….

And now it just seems so obvious that randomness doesn’t exist.

Thanks,
- hotfoot982

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*