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

Not wanting to be pedantic, but uh... You can interpret the first sentence in two ways, one of which contradicts the latter sentence.

" But we're agreed that the T.R. we're discussing is an ideal which is (hypothetically) real. "

beautiful! so TR is obviously an open question, and the case is closed. lol

Isaac Asimov, a Professor of BioChemistry at Boston University, was one of our great Thinkers. 

Want to broaden your horizons? - read his short stories. Ideas way ahead of their time.

(2)<<<nondeterminists claim that TR is real. kindof like a black box phenomena in causality, that allows generation of truly random properties>>>
Ah well. I'm a non-determinst. The "black box" is actually the hidden means for determinism .... the hidden variables. Randomness itself is intrinsic to all matter in the universe at a fundamental level, so that randomness is tied up inextricably with everything. By their very nature, matter and other things are random.

i didnt know that black box is associated with D arguments about hidden variables. i think of it as an abstract way to say TR generator in the fundamental level without getting in the trouble of talking about wave collapse and such funny things : )

No Silver ... try as you must, your case against Elroch is not closed. I could post his response. It's already been determined - but that would be inappropriate. 

You're in a losing battle over a point that's been lost lost to both of you anyhoo.

what is the thread even about? 

"No sorry, they're the ones who are asses "

i just like to sit on the fence and enjoy both worlds 

You might care to read the OP's post and at least that coupled with the title of the thread should give you some insight?

yee !...i have s/o to hang out w/.

Whose two sentences? Which two? I was a science fiction addict in the early 1960s as a schoolboy. The genre went downhill about 1970 when no-one knew the difference between science fiction and the new fantasy rubbish with weird animals and too many badly drawn characters with unpronounceable names, so I stopped reading it. However, Asimov was a decent, obviously American Jewish writer with a good aptitude for plots and ideas but his execution was pedestrian. However, the first part of the trilogy was well-written. As I recall, it concerned a man called Hari Seldon who was concerned about the way things had gone (things weren't like they had been in the old days!) and he wanted to find out why. Apparently, the intelligence services could predict everything that happened. They had algorithms on supercomputers that could analyse all the world's data and what would happen in the future.

Bear in mind I read it once and this is a 50-year old memory.

Asimov's best stuff was the real science articles he wrote. THEY were really good.

A black box is a concept commonly used in engineering where the actual science is irrelevant to the data it produces. A black box is therefore a metaphor for any process which is hidden or which may as well be hidden for the purposes of the exercise. Obviously "hidden variables" would be hidden if they existed and therefore the black box analogy fits them perfectly.

Even though there's zero evidence for "hidden variables". People think it's a neat idea and so they admire its perfect symmetry and attractive curves. But in fact, the REALLY "neat" idea is the universe as it is, with randomness intrinsically part of it. The poor dears can't get their heads round that..... it's way too neat for them.

And once again, "wave collapse" is associated with probability, as can be observed by looking at the results of Young's two slits experiment. Probability is a very different thing from randomness.

Probability is the macro. Randomness is the micro and the exact positioning of "hits" is more like the falling of snowflakes. There's no more reason to associate wave collapse with randomness than associating a snowstorm with it, and this demonstrates that the people who go for all this junk about determinism are mostly concerned with looking clever because they are seen to understand QM. If they WERE clever they'd realise they are wrong.

IMO - Asimov's Short Stories was his best fictional work. Totally original ideas, many brought to the cinema.

Asimov - such a prolific writer of the English language. It really does make me flabbergasted that some people in the first world haven't at least heard of him. :/ This fellow was a polymath; he had a plethora of guides on various subjects, be it chemistry, biology, physics, mathematics, ecology, geology, the Bible, Shakespeare, astronomy, genetics or Gilbert and Sullivan. His trilogy can't be summed up in a mere sentence or an essay dedicated to life-long analysis of his work.

"Earth is room enough" was a wonderful collection.

One of the defining features of the early 60s science fiction genre was its simplicity of writing .... almost minimalistic in some cases. Art Deco was making a bit of a comeback at the time. Asimov was an excellent writer but imo he would have been better if he wrote less, but his stories are characterised by a slight air of impatience, as if, once he's worked out the plot, he can't wait to get it on paper and start on another, so he wasn't my favourite writer.

For anyone interested in the really minimalistic aspects of early 60s sci-fi, I would recommend Clifford Simak's, "Way Station" for a start. I thought, at the age of about 12, that it was a beautifully constructed story and I've never forgotten the experience of reading it. This is 56 years later.

The writer with the most words in print is L. Ron Hubbard. Robert Silverberg was writing 1 million words a month for many years. They had bills to pay. Some of the ideas were frivolous to be sure, but the good SF stuff was really good. 

"If they WERE clever they'd realise they are wrong."

lol, you crack me up..
look opti, im happy that you recognize TR to be a hypothetical phenomena. that's all that really matter for this topic. lets leave the TR-wave collapse and TR-causality relationships for now.