Does randomness exist?

I hear the word "Random" thrown about quite often when people on this forum debate. Things such as:"Evolution works by preserving the most beneficial random mutations..."
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"There's no way humans came about from randomness."When any of you use the word "Random", what are you referring to? Do you believe there are unknown forces working on our physical world? Or do you perhaps believe "random" to be the culmination of simply too many variables acting on something to make easy predictions?Or in other words, "What are all the possible sources of randomness in our world?"

Hi, Drewsky! The definition of one word is interesting although I believe that your question could be answered in about 4 or 5 posts max! Nevertheless, rather than ask Admins for advice on this one, I will promote you to Is It Science?Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.This message has been edited by AdminPhat, 04-03-2006 05:02 AM

Your topic was interesting to me personally, as I am a Christian who believes that God has a definite purpose and order to His methods...yet I am also:
1) A Theistic Evolutionist---in that I believe that the science of biological evolution and a living and personal Jesus Christ are compatible with each other.2) A recovering gambler---who knows and observes all too frequently the cold reality of a random number generator chip in a slot machine and yet stubbornly believes that God will intervene and bless me with a jackpot! (Yes, I have read the gamblers fallacy! I am a victim of egocentrism, as are many fundies!)Upon reading the Wiki article on randomness, I was intrigued between the opposing thought concepts of absolute purpose versus randomness and of how such a dichotomy would be one of the reasons that I never liked books that dealt with secret Bible codes as a clue to meaning!Funny, that! The Wiki article also mentions divination and gambling. Just seeing the word gambling next to the word divination gives me the chills! BTW...the technology in slot machines is based on random number generators. This message has been edited by Phat, 04-03-2006 05:18 AM

Randomness does not exsist on its own , randomness is the property of a system ie evoultion or a slotmachine.. and the system always imposes certain limits on the range of the randomness ,
simple example .. i will randomly pick a card from a normal deck of cards ... first limit is the card i pick must be in a normal dcek .. i cant pick the 17 of spades ..to say that humans can not have come about from randomness is meaningles , because humans are part of many systems which have limited the random choices along the way .. and humans are the product of a set of very specific events ... they are the collection of the results of many random events .. BUT those results of those random events define what a human is.. if you could re run the events and where to get different "random " results you would not get a human , as we know it , you would get some thing else .. so the events may be random but the product is specific to the results ..To me random means you can not tell the out come until the event has occured ( with in the limits of the system ) we might be able to predict possible outcomes , we might be able to calculate the probibilty of the outcomes .. but we can never say what the outcome will be...However the question of randomness does fall within the question of the nature of Time ... time has locked all past events in the results we see , all random events only have one result in the past . ie yesterday i picked 5 cards , 2,3,4,5 of heearts , king of spades .. this cant be changed .....all random events in the future equally WILL only have one result ..is that result locked by the nature of our universe ?? .. we know it will BE locked once we have reached it in TIME .. so is there truly randomness or is the universe following a fixed route through time ?hmm so do i buy a lottery ticket this week ??

"so is there truly randomness or is the universe following a fixed route through time ?"That's what I wonder. When I hear the word being used I feel it sort of implies either a laziness or inability to add up the facts to arrive at a conclusion."What card will come from the deck next?""I don't know. It's random."But if you knew the initial state of every card in the deck and you knew which one was moved where, it would cease to be random, right?I personally believe the universe works similarily. Being a hard-determinist, myself, I believe that if we could somehow copy the state and energy of every atom on earth, and paste them elsewhere in space, we would observe two identical worlds with the weather, people and politics all acting identically to each other. (In that sense, free will is eliminated, isn't it.)Does anyone agree with that?

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Does anyone agree with that?

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Quantum mechanics would seem to argue against this. Observation leads to the collapse of the state function of a system to a particular state, and which state the system collapses to is entirely random.Einstein refused to believe in this inherent randomness ("God does not play dice" and so forth); however, Bell's Theorem gives us, potentially, a way of experimentally determining whether quantum mechanics is inherently random, or whether the results of due to deterministic forces of which we are as yet unfamiliar.As far as I know, the definitive experiment has not yet been performed, but so far the results point to an inherently random universe.Of course, even when Bell's Theorem is finally proven, one will still be able to insist that the universe is deterministic; one will merely have to accept the possibility of faster-that-light communication, which has its own problems.

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"Religion is the best business to be in. It's the only one where the customers blame themselves for product failure."
-- Ellis Weiner (quoted on the NAiG message board)

Initial conditions can never be duplicated. The wave function evolves in a deterministic fashion. Dr. Schrodingers equations can predict close enough. But It is still a prediction based on probabilities. Like it or not my determinstic friend its a crap shoot. *edit spelling.This message has been edited by 1.61803, 04-04-2006 05:29 PM

I don't. We don't even have to get that complicated. When you boil water, the molecules take "random walks", (or when you excite electrons) the path has a component of randomness so that identical initial conditions will not result in the molecules being in the same places after boiling.You can use computer simulations to set the initial conditions and then 'watch' the molecules jump around randomly after simulating heating.I'd guess its the same for the weather but I don't know.

"so far the results point to an inherently random universe."And what about what I said here:"[believing in randomness] sort of implies either a laziness or inability to add up the facts to arrive at a conclusion."To a layman, a random number created by a computer program really is random. A programmer knows the inner workings of the system, and they know better. I'm really becoming certain that "random" is simply analogous to "we don't know enough about it yet". And the more we learn, the more Randomness' territory is encroached on.(scary, unintentional analogy: In some of these posts, replace all references to "randomness" with the word "religion".)[edit] but that's off topic, let's not go there.This message has been edited by Drewsky, 04-04-2006 05:54 PM

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the molecules take "random walks", (or when you excite electrons) the path has a component of randomness so that identical initial conditions will not result in the molecules being in the same places after boiling.

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But you see, you don't really know this is true. Like I said in the OP, what are you referring to when you say "random". The electrons move about crazily, I agree, but it's in response to something else in the physical world, no?

Sorry; I thought you would have read the article to which I linked.Consider two possibilities:(1) The randomness that comes from quantum mechanics are a fundamental feature of the world.(2) There are deterministic processes ("hidden variables") of which we are not aware, and it is our ignorance of these processes that make quantum mechanics seem random.Bell's theorem gives different predictions of certain experiments depending on which of (1) and (2) are correct. If (1) is correct, and the universe is fundamentally random, then Bell's theorem predicts that these experiments will produce one result.If (2) is correct and the universe is fundamentally deterministic, then these experiments will give a different result.So, by performing these experiments and observing the result, we can see which of (1) or (2) is correct.These experiments have been performed, and the results have been observed. The results show that (1) is correct. The universe is not deterministic.Of course, one is always free to point out that our present understanding of the laws of physics are not complete, and that when a more complete understanding of the laws of nature is achieved then determinism will be preserved. However, it is also possible that every step in our march toward a complete understanding of the laws of physics will show that the universe is inherently random.Hoping that someday the laws of physics will allow a deterministic universe is like hoping that someday the laws of physics will allow faster-that-light travel. Nice for a science fiction story, but our understanding of the universe is not well served by insisting on what we want to be true.

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"Religion is the best business to be in. It's the only one where the customers blame themselves for product failure."
-- Ellis Weiner (quoted on the NAiG message board)

Sorry, I should have at least skimmed over it, but your summary gets your point across. Thank you.I concede that I haven't completely committed to determinism just yet, but I have a hard time convincing myself that there might be some things about the world which cannot ever be understood.I cannot shake my belief that everything is caused by something else. It just makes more sense to believe it.

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Sorry, I should have at least skimmed over it....

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I also apologize -- I realize that I sounded a bit harsh. My posting style is a bit terse at times.-

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I cannot shake my belief that everything is caused by something else. It just makes more sense to believe it.

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Heh. A problem that has been a part of science ever since Galileo and Kepler demonstrated that the earth does move about the sun. The real universe seems intent on violating our "common sense". Of course, once you realize that you had to learn "common sense", you realize that there is no reason why the universe should be the way you thought it was. I have been able to internalize a lot of counter-intuitve ideas by merely asking myself, "well, why not? Why shouldn't this be true?"

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"Religion is the best business to be in. It's the only one where the customers blame themselves for product failure."
-- Ellis Weiner (quoted on the NAiG message board)

No, we cannot detect any thing that determines, or predicts, the angle or magnitude of the vector that represents the path that the electron will take next. We call it 'random'. Just because we can't detect it doesn't mean its not there but we can show that initial conditions do not yield the same results. So, WRT the OP, if you copied and pasted the planet, the both of them would not be identical after some time.

Well, you asked a question. I have to say yes - I do agree with you on the whole hard determinism thing. But its more of a warm squishy feeling than anything based on foundations of steel.