What We Call Randomness

I'm reading Dan Dennett's book Freedom Evolves. I'm about 120 pages in, and it's absolutely wonderful. Anyone who likes Dennett will like the book, and anyone who's read his other stuff will find it enriching, as it helps to tie the ideas together.

I've considered what it means to be "random." In acknowledging, as I often have (as a determinist, or at least I think I am) that the outcome of a situation is dictated by the conditions leading up to it, I've been forced to reconsider a definition of the term "random." After all, it'd be silly to throw away perfectly good word.

The point, though, is that I think I've found a way to change my understanding of the adjective without changing the nouns that it speaks for.

When we engage in a "random" coin flip, we are not engaging in randomness in that conventional sense, as the result of the coin flip is predetermined by the nature of physics, the forces exerted by the thumb that does the flipping, gravity, air resistance and any number of other things.

What we are actually doing is availing our decision to forces outside of our mind. What we are doing is taking that internal mechanism, that thought process that leads to decisions, and circumventing it by making the decision contingent, not on our past experience or our current inclinations, but on the laws of physics and the forces on a coin.

Randomness becomes an expression of sacrificing control. When you consider this, you may acknowledge that this is already something that you thought about randomness, that this was already the definition.

Random means, literally, an occurrence without aim.

That is what we need to redefine randomness as. Occurrence without intention, not "occurrence without cause," which is the present definition.

Occurrence without cause is not possible. Occurrence without intention makes sense.

God's Dice

To those who have been reading, thanks. I'm sorry about my two week haiatus, in case you got bored, but anyway, back to work.

I don't know if there is a God (I don't think that anyone really knows), and I certainly don't know if God plays dice. If S/He/It does, then S/He/It always knows what's coming.

Rolling dice is, and has been for a while, a metaphor for a thing that human beings like to call "chance."

You have to understand that I put "chance" in quotation marks to make a point, because it isn't how we think about something being random. Randomness (like in a game of dice or cards), is not random in the way that we think about it. Randomness (or the concept of it) is the understanding that human beings are simply not smart enough to calculate the complex cause and effect relationship that a dice goes through when it is tossed on a street corner, the effect being the number that comes up.

I'll simplify it for a second, to break it down. (honestly, it's too hard for me to think about it if I get into to much detail, and it's way to hard to read)

Let's say that a dice bounces 6 times: three times in your hand, three times on the surface.

S = shake (or bounce in hand)
B = bounce on the surface
O = Outcome

S1 + S2 + S3 + B1 + B2 + B3 = O

So the sum of the events adds up to the result that is the outcome (O).

What get's complicated it that there are millions of little events. Each of the shakes isn't really a cause, it's an effect. I'll throw it in a math formula again, so that it makes more sense:

B = a x f x r

or

B = afr

Where

a = angle of the surface

f = the force which the dice makes contact

r = rotation of the dice

What I'm trying to say, to get straight to the point, is that all "chance" is, all the things that we think of as "random," are just our way of removing the frustration that we, as human beings, are incapable of picking apart the intricacies of the event. So we make are best guess based on the data we can understand.

Everything that happens is an effect, it has causes that can be defined, isolated and understood. Whether the human mind is always able to do that is another issue, after all, we do have a limited capacity for thought (we're not omnipotent).