Does randomness exist?

Me too. We'll see if that changes 200 years from now though. If we're all still alive by then, our knowledge of the world should be magnificant.

Whether or not quantum physics means the universe is deterministic or not, I still don't see any room for free will. How can the fact that true randomness exist make free will any more more likely? I suppose only if free will is something arbitrary.But I suspect I'm going way off course here. Sorry.

Sort of, yes. But free will is very much affected by whether or not the world is deterministic, no? I'd say it's fair game to discuss the implications of there not being anything that's random.I would say that technically, we don't have any free will. But that doesn't affect us at all. We still make the decisions we want to, regardless of it being determined since the beginning of time or not.This message has been edited by Drewsky, 04-05-2006 01:11 PM

Determinism depends on the notion that given enough information and the ability to duplicate down to the wavefunction all the way up to the atom...to the molecule.. and then up to a macroscopic scale..then do that with every single event that has ever occured...then compute that with every single event that could occur... then calculate that with every single atom currently in existance... taking in the decay of the radioactive isotopes...nuclear fussion from stars...and every other completely random quantum behavior...then yes you will be able to compute what will happen next.
Unfortunately this is mere fantasy. It is not whether we have enough information, but rather the information itself; ( at a fundalmental level )has elements of randomness. Dr. Einstien died trying to disprove the Uncertainty Principal. Modern Physics has since incorporated the random quirks of nature into science. To quote Dr. Hawking: "God not only plays dice....he somtimes throws them where they can not be seen." *edit spelling.This message has been edited by 1.61803, 04-05-2006 01:43 PM

Drewsky Of course it would cease because you have removed the random element.Randomness is a state wherein complete knowledge of an event is hidden beyond the ability to directly glean information of it. It is not possible to know the intial state of every card unless you look at the deck beforehand. A deck of cards has randomness as a consequence of our lack of knowledge about the absolute position of cards in the deck.There are rules to the randomness though and that is what probabilty theory is all about. We cannot say what card will come up in a given hand but we can say that there is a lesser probability that the card will be a face card.

1.61803, yes, it is alot of variables to take into account. I would never try to argue that copying an entire universe would be practical! Hehe.Now the question from the layman is: how much do these random variables of nature really affect our day-to-day lives? So an electron or an anti-down quark move in seemingly random ways. Does this affect physical causal relations in any meaningful way?In other words, is it possible to accept the concept of randomness at the micro-microscopic scale, but still say that the world is deterministic? Does that work?If it does, then what would I call myself?

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Randomness is a state wherein complete knowledge of an event is hidden beyond the ability to directly glean information of it.

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Exactly, that's my entire point.

Drewsky But you also assume that we can eventually overcome this by better instuments. This is untrue because it is not a matter of the construction of the instrument but a fundamental limit imposed by the structure of the universe.

Thanks for the reply.Think about what would happen if the density of the universe was not zero. Or if Carbon did not have 4 places to accept electrons. Or if there was a difference in the abundance of Hydrogen. You may think that quantum events do not affect the macro world, but just think about what would happen if your fathers spermatozoan that donated 23 of his chromesomes did not have adequate flagellic movement. You would not be here. Or if the electron transport chain in plants did not allow for the conversion of light to glucose? On and on one can see that "Everything counts in large amounts " to quote DepecheMode. Yes...No...
That depends on whether you are a purist or not. How many decimal places out does one take the significant digits? If I told you that I am going to drop a anvil on your foot from a height of 6 feet it will not matter how many times I drop it from that distance. You are going to be hurtn for certain.But if I tell you that I am going to shoot that anvil across the galaxy then even the smallest amount of variance will cause tremendous changes down the line. So determinism exist to some extent for Newtonian physics. But there is mathmatical probabilities that given enough time and enough attempts, that anvil could quantum tunnel a worm hole and end up on the moon.But heres the deal, caos theory teaches that the intial conditions are impossible to duplicate and the butterfly effect compounds variances to such large scale changes that it is always a guess based on probabilities. That goes for weather forecasting too.So yes in my opinion the universe is both random and deterministic. Reality does not like to be pinned down.

You make good sense.

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How many decimal places out does one take the significant digits?

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I was hoping to avoid this sort of thing. You are right, there is no black-or-white answer. It's a friggen' golden mean. Hehe.Well now the question is: "If these small events do indeed happen "randomly", and they do have a noticeable effect on our physical world, could a theologist logically argue that this is some 'divine force' guiding events our world?"What could you use to argue against that?(It's a naive question, I know.)

Random seems to confuse people, and there is good information already in this thread. I'd like to discuss your latter sentence:

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Or do you perhaps believe "random" to be the culmination of simply too many variables acting on something to make easy predictions?

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Personally? I think the world we live in is more subtle than that. I've seen the discussions of determinism etc, and I used to hold the opinion that we are simply unaware of some variable which gives the appearance of randomness. As time went by I dropped that, it looked like that wasn't the case after all.Let's just explore it for a second though, let's say that there are initial starting (redundant?) variables which are hidden from us. Essentially the word random can still be used in its true meaning. Any system where the variables are hidden from us (I don't want to get pseudoscientific here, but let's just say they interact from the direction of a different dimension or somthing, thus we cannot measure them until after the event), is inherently unpredictable and thus can be defined as randomly influenced.However, we don't need to even think such advanced thoughts. We can just look to chaos to help answer our randomness puzzle. In a chaotic system, an outcome is highly sensitive to initial conditions. Even if we assume the universe is deterministic, when we start off with a system which we have not perfectly modelled the specific outcome has the characteristics of randomness.Now, given that1. We are fairly sure the universe is not deterministic.2. We have not modelled the entire universe (at least the entire universe which is able to interact with us) perfectly.3. There may be some parts of reality which are not directly detectable but which have some poorly understood interactive qualities with the parts of reality that we can detect (actually some physicists might take exception to this...it might not be poorly understood I simply don't know, corrections welcome etc).We can conclude that randomness does indeed exist as far as we are concerned.

Well, running counter to what most are saying here, I would be very careful with this statement.The universe is deterministic, in that final conditions follow from initial conditions. Quantum Mechanics is purely deterministic: the Schrodinger Equation evolves the wavefunction from some initial state to some final state.Now our "observations" of the wavefunction are observer-dependent and introduce a sense of randomness in what is called "collapse of the wavefunction". But this has no effect whatsoever on determinism in the universe. Predicting the location of an electron is probablistic because there is no such "thing" as an electron. There is an electron field upon which the electron wave function evolves... deterministically.If this makes no sense it's becasue I'm falling asleep while typing...

Correct me if I'm wrong... but as I see it, whether we could ever account for all the "variables" for starting conditions is irrelevant. Wouldn't we have to know the exact state of every single atom in the entire universe since every atom is affected by other atoms? It seems to me that to perfectly model any event in the universe you would need a computer as complex (or even more complex) than the universe itself.

SCREEEEeeeeeeCCCCHHHHH!!..Once and for all There is a element of complete and total randomness ingrained into the fundalmental elements of existance. Get that ? it is not "if" It is a scientific fact proven mathmatically and experimentally by Dr. Neils Bohr and Dr. Werner Heisenberg. Well a theologist could argue there are pink elephants under your bed. But logically? No; it is a circular argument that the forces of nature are of a divine source. Saint Thomas Aquinas 'the angelic doctor'
over 400 years ago made some rather very logical arguments of the divinity of our existance and God. Unfortunately he only had access to Aristotilian phylosophy and books that were the cutting edge at that time. Dualism and Metaphyiscs has no place in Science and Science is silent on matters of faith and spirituality as it should be.

The wavefunction propagates in a determinsitic fashion. And Schrodingers equations can probably predict out to a million decimal places the probabilty wave. but even so it is still based on a probability, and by definition not 100 percent deterministic. Is this correct?