Is Randomness Real or Just Complex Predictability?

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John Baez would answer the OP with 'yes.' His argument (the Bayesian interpretation) can be found here: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bayes.html

Personally, I believe the opposite since an empirical description of the universe need no notion of 'pure randomness.' All of it is statistical.
 
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wuliheron said:
I'd add that merely defining something as a "singularity" does not mean ipso facto that it is not supernatural. Thus far there is absolutely no proof whatsoever that infinity exists in nature much less singularities and, personally, I can't imagine how one might go about proving their existence.

Singularities are not a big deal, they just occur in certain mathematical models. If we describe the world by mathematics then we should accept singularities, and that what comes out the other side can not be causally related to what preceded it.

Of course, you may not believe mathematics can describe the world, but that's up to you.
 
Pythagorean said:
But I agree, infinite doesn't seem to exist in nature.



Einstein disagrees with you:

"Only two things are infinite - the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
 
unusualname said:
Singularities are not a big deal, they just occur in certain mathematical models.


They are not?? Quantum gravity is a piece of cake for you?


If we describe the world by mathematics then we should accept singularities, and that what comes out the other side can not be causally related to what preceded it.


What is it that 'comes out the other side'? And what is "the other side"?

If you were alluding to the term 'Hawking radiation', it's still just a hypothesis/guess.
 
GeorgCantor said:
They are not?? Quantum gravity is a piece of cake for you?

No, of course not, we haven't worked out how to deal with singularities yet, what I mean is their occurrence is natural in our mathematical models, there's nothing "supernatural" in explaining their occurrence
What is it that 'comes out the other side'? And what is "the other side"?

If you were alluding to the term 'Hawking radiation', it's still just a hypothesis/guess.

What comes out the other side is a new event unrelated mathematically to anything that preceded it, hence it's random.

I have no idea how to explain the possible selection mechanism this "new event" will undertake, other than to say it is "random". Something I do believe is that human consciousness allows for influencing the "selection" of certain quantum events, which allows us free-will, but I don't want to sound like a crank by expounding any further, thanks.
 
SMERSH said:
Is such a B type universe even possible and logically coherent? Perhaps Einstein had a point when he difficulty with such a universe when he said "God does not play dice"... this idea seems to lead to total chaos.

This is why I would take a different approach (the Peircean approach) postulating that reality is fundamentally free, but self-organises through the development of global constraints.

So anything could happen (there is this essential spontaneity where things can happen without cause). But then all this free action must lead to some kind of interaction. One kind of random fluctuation will have an impact on all the others. And out of this mutual interaction must arise some global state. This global state will then have a downwards causal effect - it will act as a constraining context, actively limiting the free fluctuations.

So reality is both fundamentally free (spontaneous) and yet this in turn must produce self-organising constraints that in fact fundamentally limit the expression of this freedom.

Sounds like QM and decoherence to me. And it gives us back what we can recognise as both the random and determined - local limited fluctuations and globally classical organisation.
 
unusualname said:
No, of course not, we haven't worked out how to deal with singularities yet, what I mean is their occurrence is natural in our mathematical models, there's nothing "supernatural" in explaining their occurrence.



Right now i believe there are at least 1000 gifted phd's and Nobel Prize winners working day and night to remove this most 'natural' occurrence in the mathematics.




What comes out the other side is a new event unrelated mathematically to anything that preceded it, hence it's random.



There is no other side. Hollywood movies suck.
 
Pythagorean said:
Well, I agree with you in the ideal case, but I think "singularities" in physics are already taken to be ideals. So a real singularity will just involve really big numbers (i.e. a large amount of mass in a small amount of space). Not necissarily an inifinite amount of mass existing in 0 space.

But I agree, infinite doesn't seem to exist in nature.

In either case, what occurs is that the laws of nature as we know them break down. You could argue that some other laws may still apply, but that is entirely speculative and still doesn't mean that those laws actually apply in our universe. Thus, at the very least, we can still say it is supernatural within the context that it does not follow the laws of nature in our universe.

unusualname said:
Singularities are not a big deal, they just occur in certain mathematical models. If we describe the world by mathematics then we should accept singularities, and that what comes out the other side can not be causally related to what preceded it.

Of course, you may not believe mathematics can describe the world, but that's up to you.

The issue isn't just whether the world can be described by mathematics, but exactly what mathematics describe the world and which don't. That infinity is a useful concept goes without saying, but the question remains as to whether or not it represents reality.
 
GeorgCantor said:
Right now i believe there are at least 1000 gifted phd's and Nobel Prize winners working day and night to remove this most 'natural' occurrence in the mathematics.

I think that's not quite accurate, what people are trying to do is accommodate singularities in their models.

Perhaps we really should embrace them since they give us a mechanism for random in QM, and the appealing argument that, since our consciousness might actually be a quantum system, we then (uniquely in the universe) can influence the selection mechanism

wuliheron said:
The issue isn't just whether the world can be described by mathematics, but exactly what mathematics describe the world and which don't. That infinity is a useful concept goes without saying, but the question remains as to whether or not it represents reality.

If you are non-spiritual then I think you will have to accept that mathematics can fully describe the universe and if singularities are predicted then singularities are what we have.
 
unusualname said:
If you are non-spiritual then I think you will have to accept that mathematics can fully describe the universe and if singularities are predicted then singularities are what we have.

No, it is quite easy to merely take the pragmatic stance without having to invoke spirituality much less any unsubtantiated metaphysical beliefs in mathematics. For me it is a moot point whether or not either one is true. What matters is merely whether they are useful.
 
wuliheron said:
No, it is quite easy to merely take the pragmatic stance without having to invoke spirituality much less any unsubtantiated metaphysical beliefs in mathematics. For me it is a moot point whether or not either one is true. What matters is merely whether they are useful.

well, at some stage you have to explain free-will, I've done it with a possible mathematical model, how do you explain it?
 
unusualname said:
well, at some stage you have to explain free-will, I've done it with a possible mathematical model, how do you explain it?

I wasn't aware that freewill demanded explanation.

Again, what matters is if the concept is useful and everything else takes a backseat to that simple fact of life. Thus it becomes possible to view everything in relative terms: language, quanta, freewill, or whatever without contradiction and, in the end, it is nature who plays the role of ultimate arbiter as to what is useful.
 
wuliheron said:
I wasn't aware that freewill demanded explanation.

Again, what matters is if the concept is useful and everything else takes a backseat to that simple fact of life. Thus it becomes possible to view everything in relative terms: language, quanta, freewill, or whatever without contradiction and, in the end, it is nature who plays the role of ultimate arbiter as to what is useful.

It certainly does demand an explanation, which boils down to, how random events might exist and how we might be able to influence them.

Well, singularities explain how they might exist, and then the fact that if we actually are a (quantum) system in which the random events occur we might be able to "choose" them. ie That's what we are - a product of evolution which allows us to choose what happens to this post-singularity event after a Planck-scale black-hole collapses.

You can argue that all particles have "free-will" with this explanation but they, boringly, just do it "randomly", we have a complex emergent system out of which our desires etc arise.
 
unusualname said:
It certainly does demand an explanation, which boils down to, how random events might exist and how we might be able to influence them.

Why does freewill demand explanation? I see no compelling reason to explain freewill anymore than I might feel compelled to find out why my TV remote died. I might spend a million dollars isolating the cause, or I can simply buy a new one. Either way the end result is the same: I buy a new remote and move on.
 
wuliheron said:
Why does freewill demand explanation? I see no compelling reason to explain freewill anymore than I might feel compelled to find out why my TV remote died. I might spend a million dollars isolating the cause, or I can simply buy a new one. Either way the end result is the same: I buy a new remote and move on.

It depends how concerned you are with understanding the human condition.

I believe mathematics can fully describe us, but that doesn't have to imply determinism. Not only have you got the possibility of the causal chain going through a singularity you also have the possibility that there are transitions from lower dimensions to higher dimensions in the dynamics of microscopic phenomena. At the boundary where the higher dimensions become available you have new degrees of freedom which need not have any causal mechanism which depends on the preceding lower dimensional event.

This is the philosophy section so I guess it's ok to hand-wave like this, I obviously haven't got a detailed scientific model, but with the current state of affairs in Physics all sorts of exotic models look possible :smile:

Statistical physics can explain the large scale determinism of the universe even if the microscopic particles are behaving randomly, a single particle has no mechanism to invoke "free-will" and "choose" its behaviour, but if you actually are the particle or a more complex system consisting of many particles then it seems reasonable that you might be able to influence the random selection of events.

In any case, if random doesn't exist then we have super-determinism, and that implies that everything is pretty pointless.

We don't know if random exists, but I rather hope it does, and it can be fully consistent with a mathematical model of the universe without invoking the "supernatural"
 
unusualname said:
It depends how concerned you are with understanding the human condition.

Then it is not freewill that demands explanation but, instead, merely some people that demand an explanation for personal reasons.

unusualname said:
In any case, if random doesn't exist then we have super-determinism, and that implies that everything is pretty pointless.

We don't know if random exists, but I rather hope it does, and it can be fully consistent with a mathematical model of the universe without invoking the "supernatural"

Another possibility is that the issue is simply beyond human comprehension or, at least, beyond science or does not follow the principle of the excluded middle in any classical sense. Using nature to study nature is one thing, while using nature to establish the ultimate "nature-of-nature" is another and any results obtained are suspect.
 
wuliheron said:
Another possibility is that the issue is simply beyond human comprehension or, at least, beyond science or does not follow the principle of the excluded middle in any classical sense. Using nature to study nature is one thing, while using nature to establish the ultimate "nature-of-nature" is another and any results obtained are suspect.

It is not beyond human comprehension any more than understanding why one event can determine another, we simply allow that also, there are events that aren't determined because the mathematical model doesn't allow for them to be determined by what preceded.
 
wuliheron has very slippery discussion style.

Instead of responding to any single comment in this thread, people should take a look at earlier posts and try to see if the discussions seems to have any direction in it.
 
jostpuur said:
wuliheron has very slippery discussion style.

Instead of responding to any single comment in this thread, people should take a look at earlier posts and try to see if the discussions seems to have any direction in it.


Slippery or merely supportive of your views?