Does True Randomness Actually Exist? ( ^&*#^%$&#% )

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Avatar of Optimissed

 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.>>>

The entire field is full of experiments that have been badly constructed and wrongly interpreted, leading to evidence both positive and negative, although most these days seem to be tilted towards "proving" no effect whilst those say in the very early 1970s seemed to genuinely show that effects existed. Of course, that's before everything was logged online. But forgetting human experiences and experiments, there are enough examples of effects that can only realistically be explained as telepathy in animals to make one realise that what we have now is an intellectual industry devoted to demonstrating logical positivism, and that in the face of newer experiments that are just starting to come through. These things occur in waves or trends. I suspect we'll see a new type of experimentation. But to set up a really well done experiment would cost millions of pounds and at best it could only demonstrate things that can be explained as statistical freaks.

Avatar of Sillver1
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. 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.

I'm very aware that experiments prove that agents can never access complete information, but im not aware of any experiment that show that the information do not exist regardless to agents.
do you understand what i mean by that?

It is the experiments that violate Bell's inequality that prove that there is no possibility of recovering determinism - the randomness is absolute.

absolutely inaccessible for an agent? or just absolutely random regardless of any agents?

 

Avatar of KingAxelson

@ Silver I’ve never been to one of their seminars where they would address issues like that. It would certainly not be overlooked, that’s for sure, they want this to work. Also, I don’t think it has anything to do with a ‘utopian’ mindset. They want to build sustainable floating cities in international waters. Right now it’s more of a think tank in motion, and much more than a pipe dream.

https://www.seasteading.org/

Avatar of DavidNorman435
False
Avatar of Optimissed

Our conceptions of existing things are in thought. Existing things just are.

Avatar of Uke8
KingAxelson wrote:

@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..

https://www.seasteading.org/ 

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

 

yes, of course. you can find shapes everywhere. however, i like to find it in natural patterns, like the tiles in your gym. lol. it can be stains, cracks, shadows, whatever. not a big deal, just a habit. the best is when they just pop at you without intentionally looking.  there is one that was circulated lately on the internet, it looks like an eagle carrying a monkey's head yet its really just a fish it is carrying. will try to post it later, however i should really concentrate on my project before i leave town. this randomness becoming to be time consuming : )

Avatar of Uke8
Optimissed wrote:
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.

 

to my understanding everything is connected by cause and effect. tell you what, i've already been there few pages ago, so i'll just copy/paste. its the most simplistic scenario i can think of if you want to share your thoughts.

imagine a universe with no life, no agents what so ever, just matter alone (thats to say that we are not doing an experiment in a lab. its all natural and stripped to matter and laws of physics alone.)
now take just a single particle in a single moment. any state, anywhere, it doesnt matter. all that matter is what it is doing in the next moment (we are not a classic observers that interact with the particle, remember we dont exist so we surely have no influence, this is just hypothetical)
now hypothetically again... say you could move time back to the same moment (so to say that all the other particles in the universe as well as condition and preconditions are absolutely identical to the first scenario)

do you think that this particle may behave differently then the first time? (everything before this moment is absolutely identical. so causality is identical)

Avatar of Elroch
Sillver1 wrote:
Elroch wrote:

I'm very aware that experiments prove that agents can never access complete information, but im not aware of any experiment that show that the information do not exist regardless to agents.
do you understand what i mean by that?

The part of the information in a quantum state which no agent can have access to is the absolutely random part. It's random to everything. It does exist - if it didn't there would not be absolute randomness.

(Note that the term "absolute randomness" is not standard, but I have made the meaning clear, and these things are almost always left implicit in discussions).

It is the experiments that violate Bell's inequality that prove that there is no possibility of recovering determinism - the randomness is absolute.

absolutely inaccessible for an agent? or just absolutely random regardless of any agents?

By agents, I am referring again in a slightly non-standard way to all possible physical information, Incidentally, I think the only thing that matters about what information is accessible to different agents is their relationship to any significant events (which fall into three categories - past, future and space-like). The simplest example is where to one agent some event is not in the past (imagine someone watching a coin about to be flipped) and to another it is in the past. Only the latter has access to the value of the coin flip. So agents to whom the flip is in the future or space-like, the value is random.

This might be better expressed with quantum measurements of spin or polarisation, which have two values like a coin flip.

 

 

Avatar of Optimissed
Uke8 wrote:
Optimissed wrote:
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.

 

to my understanding everything is connected by cause and effect. tell you what, i've already been there few pages ago, so i'll just copy/paste. its the most simplistic scenario i can think of if you want to share your thoughts.

imagine a universe with no life, no agents what so ever, just matter alone (thats to say that we are not doing an experiment in a lab. its all natural and stripped to matter and laws of physics alone.)
now take just a single particle in a single moment. any state, anywhere, it doesnt matter. all that matter is what it is doing in the next moment (we are not a classic observers that interact with the particle, remember we dont exist so we surely have no influence, this is just hypothetical)
now hypothetically again... say you could move time back to the same moment (so to say that all the other particles in the universe as well as condition and preconditions are absolutely identical to the first scenario)

do you think that this particle may behave differently then the first time? (everything before this moment is absolutely identical. so causality is identical)>>

You've hit the nail right on the head. Indeed, that's exactly what we're discussing. I'm saying that there is no reason that everything should be the same. That's also what Elroch is saying and he's a physicist. Being a physicist doesn't automatically mean that people are right about everything related to physics. In a way, this is a bigger concept than physics but it's also hard to pin down, hard to find evidence either way. Elroch is saying that things will be different each time. My son is also a physicist but that doesn't mean he's right when he says he doesn't owe me £5 or that he's better looking than I was when I was his age, which of course are the really important things.

Avatar of Drakonopian

He(the author of the forum)asked me to delete the random fish.sad.png

Avatar of Elroch

Statistics consists of the practical methods used to analyse random processes in the real world, including both their deterministic and random parts (and the theoretical mathematics used to justify those methods). Probability theory is essentially a branch of pure mathematics based on certain sets of axioms, which has key applications in statistics.

It is a very interesting fact that the single mathematical theory has two quite distinct interpretation (i.e. "real world meanings") or applications - Bayesian statistics and Frequentist statistics. The meaning of the basic concept of a probability in the two interpretations is entirely distinct, even though both have the same purpose of modelling randomness.

Avatar of Optimissed

what more is there to be said?

Avatar of the_chess_zebra

If you want proof that true randomness exists, play a game of chess with me before I've had a cup of coffee in the morning... grin.png

Avatar of Sillver1
KingAxelson wrote:

@ Silver I’ve never been to one of their seminars where they would address issues like that. It would certainly not be overlooked, that’s for sure, they want this to work. Also, I don’t think it has anything to do with a ‘utopian’ mindset. They want to build sustainable floating cities in international waters. Right now it’s more of a think tank in motion, and much more than a pipe dream.

https://www.seasteading.org/

Their about me page had something about moral imperatives, thats where i got the impression of utopia. i dont really know. its only the impression i got from few minutes into their page.
in any case, all that futuristic stuff is way cool and im happy you introduced me to their concept.

Avatar of Sillver1
Elroch wrote:
Sillver1 wrote:
Elroch wrote:

I'm very aware that experiments prove that agents can never access complete information, but im not aware of any experiment that show that the information do not exist regardless to agents.
do you understand what i mean by that?

The part of the information in a quantum state which no agent can have access to is the absolutely random part. It's random to everything. It does exist - if it didn't there would not be absolute randomness.

(Note that the term "absolute randomness" is not standard, but I have made the meaning clear, and these things are almost always left implicit in discussions).

It is the experiments that violate Bell's inequality that prove that there is no possibility of recovering determinism - the randomness is absolute.

absolutely inaccessible for an agent? or just absolutely random regardless of any agents?

By agents, I am referring again in a slightly non-standard way to all possible physical information, Incidentally, I think the only thing that matters about what information is accessible to different agents is their relationship to any significant events (which fall into three categories - past, future and space-like). The simplest example is where to one agent some event is not in the past (imagine someone watching a coin about to be flipped) and to another it is in the past. Only the latter has access to the value of the coin flip. So agents to whom the flip is in the future or space-like, the value is random.

This might be better expressed with quantum measurements of spin or polarisation, which have two values like a coin flip.

 

 

That's much better! now i can finally take your opinion for face value without worrying about semantics and misunderstandings. you do believe that true random exit.
to be better understood... i dont use the terms 'opinion' and 'belief' to hint that you are wrong, I just use it to say that maybe youre not correct, if thats makes sense. subjectivity is always prone to errors and that one is just too enormous for me to overlook. i rather stay objective.

is that the main stream understanding within the physicists community?

Avatar of Sillver1
Optimissed wrote:
Uke8 wrote:
Optimissed wrote:
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.

 

to my understanding everything is connected by cause and effect. tell you what, i've already been there few pages ago, so i'll just copy/paste. its the most simplistic scenario i can think of if you want to share your thoughts.

imagine a universe with no life, no agents what so ever, just matter alone (thats to say that we are not doing an experiment in a lab. its all natural and stripped to matter and laws of physics alone.)
now take just a single particle in a single moment. any state, anywhere, it doesnt matter. all that matter is what it is doing in the next moment (we are not a classic observers that interact with the particle, remember we dont exist so we surely have no influence, this is just hypothetical)
now hypothetically again... say you could move time back to the same moment (so to say that all the other particles in the universe as well as condition and preconditions are absolutely identical to the first scenario)

do you think that this particle may behave differently then the first time? (everything before this moment is absolutely identical. so causality is identical)>>

You've hit the nail right on the head. Indeed, that's exactly what we're discussing. I'm saying that there is no reason that everything should be the same. That's also what Elroch is saying and he's a physicist. Being a physicist doesn't automatically mean that people are right about everything related to physics. In a way, this is a bigger concept than physics but it's also hard to pin down, hard to find evidence either way. Elroch is saying that things will be different each time. My son is also a physicist but that doesn't mean he's right when he says he doesn't owe me £5 or that he's better looking than I was when I was his age, which of course are the really important things.

"I'm saying that there is no reason that everything should be the same"

will you elaborate please? are you saying that the particle in question will behave differently if you repeat the same scenario over and over? i.e. behaving absolutely randomly?

Avatar of Thee_Ghostess_Lola

this is sure a good thread !

yes, true randomness exists, because everything that exists began in thought. (tuna)

luv this one. thx !!....does anyone here think our our feelings did too ?

Avatar of Elroch

True randomness exists because Ghostess is here!

Avatar of Drakonopian

Avatar of Drakonopian

Real random.