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

"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?>>

You may think this is unlikely or impossible to happen, because you may see the universe as a collection of "parts" with no innate tendency to vary, but this is not necessarily so and indeed, quantum mechanics seems to indicate that it is not so. The problem is, of course, that it is impossible for you or for anyone to re-run the universe and to collect the data that would empirically show either of us to be right or wrong. But given that I think randomness exists then I would think that the universe is not determined in its future states.

I would venture to say that feelings have always been a part of who we are. Not sure how much they may differ from emotions, but I am just going off random thought here. Anyway, feelings were once described to me as ‘A complex series of chemical reactions.’ I bought it as a good enough explanation as any. However, I believe that there is more to it than that, as they sometimes act independently of thought or stimuli. (I’m also talking about all the senses too.) 

Here is an interesting sideline related to how we feel. I was glancing through a Tony Robbins book some time ago, when a random phrase caught my attention. This is not word for word now, but close.. ‘Most everything that we do, is to change the way that we feel.’ It’s a powerful statement, with a lot of levels to it. I think on it a lot, and here is a possible scenario I extracted from it. Let’s say that I want to take a natural mild sedative. So, if feelings follow thought, then all I have to do is bum myself out a little bit. Boom, I am now in a relaxed state, my breathing is easy and the nerves are gone.

addendum : I should probably say here that’s just me looking through a lens. 

ok. I am going to be a bit shocking here. The guy giving the video knows what he is talking about and is competent at dealing with randomness in his work like (as, with all due humility, I say I am). Despite this, his claim at the start is a little bit wrong.  I will explain why. 

We should think in a Bayesian way about whether a coin is biased. This is the interpretation of probability theory that is the only way to correctly quantify our beliefs about the real world.  It is reasonable to believe that the behaviour of the coin is described by a Bernoulli model (fancy name, very simple model) with some unknown variable p which gives the probability of a head. If we know the coin is fair, p=0.5 with probability 1. If we don't know it is fair, there is some probability of p being something other than 0.5. For example if p=0, the coin always comes up tails. If p=0.55, it comes up heads 55 times out of 100 on average.

There is considerable flexibility in allocating this prior probability distribution, but what matters is that whatever (non-trivial) values you give them to start with, every toss of the coin provides you with information that allows you to revise them according to Bayes rule, the mechanical process by which Bayesian statistics allows you to learn from observations. By non-trivial, I mean you don't allocate all the probability in the same place, eg at 1/2, which would mean you start with certainty about the behaviour and observations cannot affect your belief.

Regardless of what you originally chose as the (non-trivial) probabilities, tossing 4 heads will increase the posterior (i.e. in light of observations) Bayesian probability of the coin being biased towards heads (and/or decrease its probability of being biased towards tails). It it started small, it will still be fairly small, but this very precise reasoning shows that it is entirely reasonable (indeed correct) to have slightly stronger belief that the coin is biased towards heads if you see nothing but a series of heads when you start flipping the coin. It would be incorrect and foolish to think it is definitely biased. It would also be incorrect to be as sure it is fair (except in the case where you were absolutely certain it was fair to start with, so the prior probability is all located at p=0.5 and this cannot change with evidence).

So the real message is don't overreact to small amounts of evidence, but don't ignore it either. If you want to react exactly the right amount, learn Bayesian probability (it's not hard).

addendum : I should probably say here that’s just me looking through a lens. 

u sound kinda apologetic. not sure why. hopefully u don't think u hafta appease/explain2 the gen pop as to how u feel. they have their own issues they're dealing w/. lol !! 

thought-reason follows feeling-emotion. its one a those inherent things. when we were babies we didn't really think (id level). better, event-interpretation-emotion. and yeah, there's a diff btwn F and E. w/ E's it really isn't a conscious thing. F's are. take being optimistic e.g. that's F-based. not E-based. or take excited. that's of course E-based.

anyway, contrary to what some ppl say, E's are pretty random. F's less so. the trick is to try not to let random external events govern ur E's too much. its bad for ur health.

right tuna !....thats why the Evo'ists hafta be careful in what they argue for....lol !

Actually, pseudorandomness suffices for evolution.

(Pseudorandomness is generated by a deterministic process that produces outputs that for almost all purposes behave as it they were random. The Mersenne Twister algorithm for generating random numbers is a significant example, used for providing random data for computer programs, including those that successfully use evolutionary algorithms. There the random numbers are used to do things like select which mutations occur).

Are you guys and gals all evolutionists? You know it doesn't make sense.

In my opinion, the chances that, say, the human being emerged from inert matter due to a process of random evolution are vanishingly small, and yet I'm an atheist. 

So instead propose the existence of something infinitely complex without any explanation and it is easy to explain the emergence of finite complexity without hard work. No knowledge or expertise is needed to do this, which is surely a great advantage! The downside is that no useful understanding is gained, no capability for predicting anything. Or to put it simply, no progress.

Instead scientists respect Occam's razor and accept that hard work is necessary to explain the phenomena in our Universe - especially the most complex ones including life itself - and that this hard work on the details of how life works is necessary to gain useful understanding of the sort that dominates medical science.

First, i want to emphasize that the reason for my question was to understand you correctly, not to criticize you.

now, personally I like the idea of quantum fields..  and it say that each particle have its own field and as a whole they form the underlayment for all matter throughout the universe.
now i hate to sound like a crockpot, but try to keep an open mind...  what if life itself or even consciousness has their own fields?

basically what im saying is that our knowledge about the world seem closer to zero than it is  for being complete. way closer.

I dont have the time to keep yapping about it now, here's an introduction to Q fields... (can skip to 19: to get to the essence of it)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNVQfWC_evg

"anyway, contrary to what some ppl say, E's are pretty random. F's less so. the trick is to try not to let random external events govern ur E's too much. its bad for ur health."

lol. generally speaking its just as bad for the health of the people we interact with

'Actually, pseudorandomness suffices for evolution.'

I was thinking about this once and reached the same conclusion. mindless evolution is fine even with determinism and does not imply a certain outcome. although it does open the door for that.

@ Ghostess.. Not so much apologetic as to a disclaimer. : )

Yes, true randomness exists

But the only case where true randomness lies is quantum mechanics.

Basically the state of a tiny tiny particle will always change randomly.

lol.. beautiful mouth birdie, not bad on short notice.

Yeah!

I'm pretty sure, speaking for myself, that life came from rocks. That is, the hypothesis that life was formed in microscopic rock cracks seems to work and there's no better hypothesis.  So although some evolutionists maintain that although life evolves, the coming into being of life itself definitely was not an evolutionary process, I think they're probably wrong to assume that.

You mentioned knowledge and hard work but generally speaking, although we need that to fill in the gaps, and of course, most of knowledge is gaps rather than brilliant, intuitive leaps, those are necessary simply to provide direction for science.

Anyway, no-one has full knowledge of anything worth while and hard work is always overly extolled as a virtue. Without knowing otherwise, I think that a process of silicon-based reflux reactions might lead to a process where the silicon is gradually replaced by carbon and life as we know it begins. Then begins the hard work, to determine how a simplified form of carbon-based life can lead to the complexity of hedgehogs and humans. Obviously, we have to assume it did because it's no use saying something like "life came here on a spaceship". It's just that I don't believe it could have or would have, unless there is a great more to physics that is assumed at the moment. Although randomness exists, I have no great faith in its supposedly leading to complex life-forms via random mutation and survival of the fittest. There has to be something else and I tend to think that scientists who assume there doesn't need to be haven't really grasped the enormity of their suppositions.

I'm pretty sure, speaking for myself, that life came from rocks. 

an absolute howler !!.....woohoo !!!!

Anyway, no-one has full knowledge of anything worth while and hard work is always overly extolled as a virtue.

so true. as its usually borne outta the greedy & obsessed person.

There has to be something else and I tend to think that scientists who assume there doesn't need to be haven't really grasped the enormity of their suppositions.

u mean like elroch ?....lol !!