Elroch, how about you just answer his question directly and sincerely instead of all that glibbery? its a perfectly suitable question for a casual thread such as this one.
i'll answer for him. 'Cuz im a sanctimonious gnome ?'
Does True Randomness Actually Exist? ( ^&*#^%$&#% )
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wut would happen if stuff wuznt random ? or better, wut would happen if stuff truly wuz ?
iow's how u see some things depends on ur belief (def ?) of s/t (e/t ?) being random (or not).
the real question is is can consciousness alter nature's so-called random state ?
(dbl-slit experiment ?)
this is getting fun !!
honestly? I couldn't care less about dbl slit right now. let it be fun! ; )
Uke8 wrote:
Elroch wrote:
Yes. randomness is about what is (not) known, and quantum randomness is about the absolute limits on what can be known about a system.
We have problems accepting that there is no absolute reality, just one which is inherently uncertain.
you are not very clear... i'm guessing you mean that reality is inherently uncertain to us as humans? the real question im puzzled about is if reality itself is uncertain, not our knowledge about it.
Based on our normal intuition we would be much more comfortable with the idea that there is some definite truth and the randomness is merely the incompleteness of our knowledge of it, but that is not the case.
Same thing... what is the case than? our inability to gain knowledge about it, or you mean that there's actually no definite true to reality.
here we go, the true order of things #104 follows #101. in crayons!
pink floyd- "haha, charade you are"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLBtckWqbNE
however... what really sux about this... I'm actually upset at myself for responding to this charade instead of being a better man. phoo!
Thee_Ghostess_Lola wrote:
the real question is is can consciousness alter nature's so-called random state ?
(dbl-slit experiment ?)
this is getting fun !!
maybe... if that same consciousness is entangled with the double slit. ...just kidding 
Sillver1 wrote:
Food of the future or food for thought?
I stumble upon a small startup company out of california that is reviving an old nasa idea. they want to scrub co2 from the air, feed it to a specialized bacteria, and then make protein as well as oils out of it. sound nasty at first but is really just very similar to beer production.
they didnt say when, where, or if they will start production but it looks very promising. meanwhile all they seem to do is registering patents.
I wonder if it makes financial sense. and if so why the big boys dont jump on such an opportunity.
the speaker in this clip is the founder and ceo.
there's a Finnish company that does the same thing and aim to be on the market within several years.
https://solarfoods.fi/about-us/#roadmap
@Uke It took me a while, but I see that (bird) you were talking about. So basically, it gets interesting when the image is not supposed to be there in the first place. If an artist were to honestly and truly paint a somewhat complex work, with contrasting colors, shadows and such.. Then there is a likelihood that unintentional ‘randoms’ will appear in their work.?
Of course, some artists like to infuse their work with a (suspicion). The Mona Lisa comes to mind. I wonder what the depth of humor really is. Here’s one for you, at the gym tonight as I was hitting the showers.. I actually found myself looking at the damn tiles for random images! lol. Big square green and black tiles that stick out of the wall, crazy. https://youtu.be/Ot6pSrKT1oc
@Silver You guys were just talking about a company and this popped into my head for some reason.. I dig on these guys..
But yeah anyway, Spiritual Eyes is about some of the things I’ve experienced. I haven’t done much writing since my ‘Poetic Oscillation’ years. Figured it was about time with this latest. I wrote some meaningful poems in that time. Must have, because I was offered a publishing for one of them. An interesting way to strike a chord in other people, but really.. : ) https://youtu.be/x1WQR8Ti1vk
Uke8 wrote:
statistically If you throw a dice 12 million times it will fall 2m times on each # right? so how exactly is this random? wouldn't you expect a random spread?
and if random is just an illusion, does it mean that every game of chess is already determined before it even start? consulting with google was surly not a random decision, lol. here are my finding:
1.Math and the art of describing randomness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1dKvoa2ITw
2.When I’m bored I text a random number “I hid the body… now what”
3.I was talking to my friends and they said a random topic about cats and I’m like “Water you talking about”
4.Randomness is a reflection of our ignorance about the thing being observed
rather than something inherent to it.
I'm confused!>>
Well, statistics and randomness aren't quite the same thing. However, there are some people .... we can call them "determinists" .... who believe that the entire universe is like a piece of clockwork and if we had the knowhow the entire future of the universe could be predicted from its present state. These people tend to believe that free will and randomness are both illusions. They might also believe things like free will being a necessary illusion to keep us happy because otherwise we would see no point to being alive, Another fallacy is the "chronology in reverse" idea, which roughly goes something like this: if we could imagine that everything has a cause, and all causes have causes and so forth, then this stream of causality proves that this and only this outcome could be reached, and so on forever.
Of course they have no empirical evidence for any of this and what's more, it isn't a logical outcome of the idea of causality, which only holds that some things are connected by cause and effect. It's a belief they hold .... a bit like a religious belief, in fact, and they believe their belief to be based on logic.
I think that not only genuine randomness but also free will exist.
Elroch wrote:
Yes. randomness is about what is (not) known, and quantum randomness is about the absolute limits on what can be known about a system.>>>
Some people argue that quantum randomness doesn't exist and is actually determined by a deeper or more fundamental causality. They might call it "hidden variables". Of course, this is just an assumption or even a belief. Yes many people are insecure without an assumption of an over-riding certainty of some kind.
We have problems accepting that there is no absolute reality, just one which is inherently uncertain.
But you're presenting that itself as an absolute reality. It's important to differentiate the universe itself from our thinking about the universe, which necessarily contrasts the idea of certainty with the idea of uncertainty.
Based on our normal intuition we would be much more comfortable with the idea that there is some definite truth and the randomness is merely the incompleteness of our knowledge of it, but that is not the case.
I think we are in agreement, although you characterise "our normal intuition" as one which is uncomfortable with randomness. I don't think this is the case, although the "Western, Scientific Mind" naturally searches for explicable patterns which can be causally linked to other patterns, thus forming a web of causality that we see as part of or the basis of reality. But other types of mind are happier with randomness.
"wut would happen if stuff wuznt random ? or better, wut would happen if stuff truly wuz ?
iow's how u see some things depends on ur belief (def ?) of s/t (e/t ?) being random (or not)."
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now that im in a different state of mind 
Very much so. for example freewill is often explained by randomness,
determinism is out the door if true random exist.
I even heard people say that evolution depends on it, personally i dont think so.
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"the real question is can consciousness alter nature's so-called random state ?
(dbl-slit experiment ?)"
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thats a tricky question because we dont know much about consciousness itself.
I think that for a particle to collapse from a superposition state it needs to interact with something else that is physical. im very amateurish when it comes to qm and dont want to be misguiding.
Maybe Elroch can answer that better.
want a fun thought? theres a prominent biologist that believe consciousness itself projects the universe and it dosnt really exist. but he's not taken very seriously in his peers.
he named it biocentrism
@Silver You guys were just talking about a company and this popped into my head for some reason.. I dig on these guys..
But yeah anyway, Spiritual Eyes is about some of the things I’ve experienced. I haven’t done much writing since my ‘Poetic Oscillation’ years. Figured it was about time with this latest. I wrote some meaningful poems in that time. Must have, because I was offered a publishing for one of them. An interesting way to strike a chord in other people, but really.. : ) https://youtu.be/x1WQR8Ti1vk
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I just looked at it briefly, but first thing came to mind was how would you deal with problems like crime, or corruption, or invasions. dont misunderstand me, utopia sound really nice, but can it actually work? and its not just strangers, how about domestic violence? or abuse if its physical or mental... im not saying is a bad idea, just not sure how will it work in reality. do they address these issues?
Anyhow the results of these Bell experiments individually are just 1s and 0s, but our predictive knowledge, based on quantum mechanics is of the form of probabilities. As you probably know the experiments show that there is no local hidden variable explanation of quantum mechanics. To put it another way, there is randomness unless causality itself is broken.
Note that without causality, any sort of conspiracy to produce experimental results is possible. All that you need is an agent outside of space and time that makes sure that the results are those that are implied by quantum mechanics in order to fool us that there is real randomness.
Since this and analogous examples mean that all of our knowledge of the Universe is based on causality being true, all physicists accept that that causality is correct and there is irreducible randomness in quantum behaviour - information that is a part of the entangled state but not localised and influences observations in a way which cannot be explained by information propagated in a causal way, or directly observable.
Mathematically there is an interesting intuitive idea here. Deterministic information is real numbers and bits (the 0/1 values of a polarisation observation say), while quantum states are inherently of a different form, using complex numbers and matrices. It is the irreversible process of a quantum state leading to an observations in many different ways that leads to the weird behaviour.
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When you write 'Randomness', do you mean true Randomness or the lack of information for an agent?
I see one place that you emphasize 'Real randomness' is that different than the others you wrote about?
Dec 3, 2019
0
#136
Randomness from the point of view of an agent can be defined as having incomplete information. It is about the strongest state of belief that can be justified. But don't let your intuition fool you that having incomplete information means it is possible to have complete information. As a simple example, consider the position of a certain particle floating freely in space at 1 second in the future to be the thing of interest. It is NEVER possible for any agent to have enough information to know this. If this is in a large vacuum, the uncertainty becomes greater as the amount of time in the future increases.
The reason this is so is that there is uncertainty in the position and uncertainty in the velocity. You need to have perfect knowledge of BOTH to know where the particle will be at a certain time in the future. But Heisenburg says that you can't be precise about both. The more precisely you know one thing, the less precise your knowledge of the other. There is a fairly happy medium where both are a bit imprecise that minimises future uncertainty about the position, but this is always at least some minimum amount (that can easily be calculated for a given particle and given time interval).
The strong characteristic of quantum randomness (say about the position of a particle at some time) is that it applies to all of agents who are in the causal past of some point in space-time.
It is the experiments that violate Bell's inequality that prove that there is no possibility of recovering determinism - the randomness is absolute.
Thee_Ghostess_Lola wrote:
the real question is is can consciousness alter nature's so-called random state ?
(dbl-slit experiment ?)
this is getting fun !!>>
Hi ms Lola.
The "consciousness" explanation of Young's experiment (the double slit one) can't be correct although I've forgotten the details of how I worked it out that it's impossible, but in any case it's a result of a misunderstanding of the word "observation",
In physics, "observation" means "interaction", with a particle or an entity. So the wave, upon being "observed", "chooses" one of the slits, OR an effect happens that we interpret as that. In order that we can see what happens, obviously there's some kind of interaction with light or whatever.
In quantum physics a lot of weird stuff happens, often involving things changing, apparently coming into being or disappearing. The old Newtonian idea that things cannot be created or destroyed doesn't really work at the quantum level.
Having said all that, I actually do believe that thought interacts with "reality" and can alter physical things. After all, thought is reality too. People like Einstein got all upset about what they called "spooky action at a distance" regarding weird quantum effects like entanglement. Einstein didn't like it at all, which caused him to reject quantum physics entirely, at least until it was shown that he was being a bit silly, and then he started to accept it. Old Einstein was never one to get left behind, at least for more than twenty years. He was a determinist and hence rather limited by that. But I suppose that things like telepathy and clairvoyance are just weird manifestations of forms of "action at a distance". I'm completely ambivalent about logical positivism, where everything fits neatly into little boxes, and "unknown weird stuff" which I accept although many "scientists" don't, because they get all confused over different types of evidence, most probably. Some people call my cognitive state "cognitive dissonance" but it's just intelligence really, and the ability not to need to be certain about everything, which is no more than a symptom of intellectual insecurity.
Elroch wrote:
Randomness from the point of view of an agent can be defined as having incomplete information. It is about the strongest state of belief that can be justified.>>
Yes, in the sense that certainty can be justified regarding anything. However, people, including scientists, make guesses.
But don't let your intuition fool you that having incomplete information means it is possible to have complete information. As a simple example, consider the position of a certain particle floating freely in space at 1 second in the future to be the thing of interest. It is NEVER possible for any agent to have enough information to know this. If this is in a large vacuum, the uncertainty becomes greater as the amount of time in the future increases.
Yes
The reason this is so is that there is uncertainty in the position and uncertainty in the velocity. You need to have perfect knowledge of BOTH to know where the particle will be at a certain time in the future. But Heisenburg says that you can't be precise about both. The more precisely you know one thing, the less precise your knowledge of the other. There is a fairly happy medium where both are a bit imprecise that minimises future uncertainty about the position, but this is always at least some minimum amount (that can easily be calculated for a given particle and given time interval).
The strong characteristic of quantum randomness (say about the position of a particle at some time) is that it applies to all of agents who are in the causal past of some point in space-time.
So you are saying that everything has an inherent, random quality? Pls verify as your last sentence is slightly opaque. Or slightly translucent. But definitely difficult.
It is the experiments that violate Bell's inequality that prove that there is no possibility of recovering determinism - the randomness is absolute.
I'm quite glad about that. I had no idea but it's what I imagined it must be, through a sort of "first principles" one day when I thought I was thinking exceptionally clearly.
Dec 3, 2019
0
#139
Optimissed wrote:
So you are saying that everything has an inherent, random quality? Pls verify as your last sentence is slightly opaque. Or slightly translucent. But definitely difficult.
It does. Quantum mechanics applies to all the constituents of our Universe, and this is what leads to large scale behaviour where the randomness is not obvious. Bell's experiments show that there is no local hidden variable explanation of the world (that would be necessary to replace quantum mechanics by a deterministic theory).
Regarding the previous post, I used to believe that there was some telepathy, but I have become more skeptical. It is easy to fool yourself using poor reasoning from anecdotal evidence. The experimental evidence is often consistent with no effect, and cheats and errors have been detected in a lot of experiments that do appear to provide evidence, so it is best to be slow to believe any that do.
emotions always win over rationality
just like what happens when a irresistable force meetsa immovable object....the immovable object ends up moving.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOEE-kR-Txg