Is there anything truly random?

[chiro]

An ordered system in the context of a particular language may have minimum entropy and in that case, the system under that description is fully deterministic within that descriptive capacity.

Just because you can't get something in the descriptive capacity you want doesn't mean that it doesn't have minimum entropy under another descriptive capacity that is purely deterministic.

If you can't get things in terms of exponents and elementary functions, then this does not imply that you can't get a minimum entropy description under some other descriptive capacity, and unfortunately that is what a lot of people do.

What you are saying is ridiculous.

 

[wuliheron]

Then you are merely splitting semantic hairs insisting anything can be defined as "deterministic" which is absurd.

 

[marty1]

It seems to be better to separate process from state when talking about ordered vs random. A random process can result in an ordered state. This is not a deterministic process, however, there could be certain states that are stable enough to survive long enough to have consequences. Combinations of state that can have consequences (cause events?) are themselves processes.

Contrary to popular believe there are many identical snowflakes. The process creating them is not deterministic, but is limited in its degrees of freedom enough that the path of crystal formation can be followed more than once by chance alone. Each establishment of an ordered state at each "tick" of the clock limits future possibilities as the current state is used as "input" to the process generating the subsequent "output" state.

 

[chiro]

On that note, one may also want to consider the phenomenon in biology known as convergence:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution

 

[marty1]

The definition of "random" should include some measure of the influence that the pre-existing state has on any subsequent change in state. A choice made under no influence is indeterministic at one end of the scale. The degree of influence is measured in both space and time. Maximimum influence, maximum determinism, is the light cone into the past.

 

[wuliheron]

It seems to be better to separate process from state when talking about ordered vs random.

Which violates quantum Indeterminacy and would make all of quantum mechanics utterly useless. A recent experiment involving weak measurements that compensate for the observer effect without collapsing the wavefunction has confirmed the Ozawa formulation of the HUP. If confirmed by other experiments it would elevate Indeterminacy to the status of a physical law (if that isn't a contradiction!) Similarly, there is an effort underway to see if it is possible to prove whether Indeterminacy applies to causality itself.