Randomness, Diversity & Quantum Mechanics

[PanAtheist]

Reality is extremely diverse, and so it would make a lot of sense to me if randomness is a fundamental part of reality.

And so randomness built in to reality with quantum mechanics doesn't seem weird to me, it seems exactly right.
(And if randomness isn't an essential part of reality - it begs the question as to how did this wonderful diversity happen?)

Of course, I know almost F*** ALL about quantum mechanics (practically all I "know" is the impression I got in reading Feynman's QED).

However, I think this comment here of mine is a valid point, and I wanted to share it.
(Also I'd really welcome Choobus's view on the matter, if he cares to share.)

[Sternwallow]

Randomness in reality is easy to spot and doesn't need QM to demonstrate it. Just look at the night sky and try to write a formula for the positions of the visible stars. Random. Trace the edge of a cloud, check out the cracks in the mud of a dried lakebed, the grains and crystals in a slab of granite. Randomness is central to all of reality. The cosmic order that theists tout as the design of a creator with a great gronking plan is just the tiniest minority while chaos-driven systems are the norm. It is hard to name a collection of things, easily visible and otherwise that is not mostly random. Distribution of craters on the Moon, cracks in the ice of Europa, the patter of raindrops, locations of individual bees in a swarm.....

So, I would not worry about randomness being a component of reality, it has worked fine so far. There is just no universal intervening plan, that's all.

[Choobus]

Sternwallow wrote

Randomness in reality is easy to spot and doesn't need QM to demonstrate it. Just look at the night sky and try to write a formula for the positions of the visible stars. Random.

Not really. Everything you see in the night sky is a consequence of a previous distribution of matter, which was itself due to a different prior distribution and so on. This goes all the way back to the big bang, where quantum randomness probably did play an important part in determining what those subsequent energy and matter distributions would be like. (OF course it's much more complicated than that, but you get the idea). The things you describe are not truly random.

[Sternwallow]

Choobus wrote

Not really. Everything you see in the night sky is a consequence of a previous distribution of matter, which was itself due to a different prior distribution and so on. This goes all the way back to the big bang, where quantum randomness probably did play an important part in determining what those subsequent energy and matter distributions would be like. (OF course it's much more complicated than that, but you get the idea). The things you describe are not truly random.

If you start with a truly random pattern, say the universe when it was the size of a B-B, and then apply a succession of transformations that do not impose order, being symmetrical in all 3-dimensions, would you not find true random distributions in the system in successive times? Only local subsystems with energy imbalances would seem to be able to self order.

Certainly no supernatural ordering influence is needed for any of the observed features of reality in the presence of so much (you may wish to insert "apparent") randomness.

[Choobus]

if your transformations do not impose order then the randomness would be the same as that of the initial system

[Sternwallow]

Choobus, old guru and debunker of the W.A.G.,

I think that it has been proven mathematically that the decimal expansion of Pi is a random sequence of digits. I know that it does pass all of the statistical test for randomness so, for this post let's say it is truly random (or we could find some other source of truly random digits if you insist).

Now, if I flip a 10-sided coin and get N then select every N-th digit from our source, the result will still be random and have all of the properties of randomness. Again I flip and the result is M so I select every M-th digit from the new series and again the result is random in every way detectable. Let's do this exercise once a second for 13.7x10^9 years. Will we not still have a truly random sequence or will some order-generating rule have crept in?

[Choobus]

you have to distinguish between apparant randomness because you don't have all the facts, and honest to god intrinsic randomness.

[Sternwallow]

Choobus wrote

you have to distinguish between apparant randomness because you don't have all the facts, and honest to god intrinsic randomness.

Am I wrong (shudder) that the early universe was chaotic at the truly random chaotic level? What facts might I be missing?

As you know, much of my refutation of a designed universe is the fact that a plan preceding the chaos stage would not and could not survive passage through it.

[Choobus]

No, I think the early universe was random (and hence still is overall), but I ascribe it to quantum mechanics in the big bang. Be careful though, Chaos and randomness are quite different (cf strange attractors). Different people often mean different things by "random" though.

[WITHTEETH]

What part of the universe is random, is it the subatomic particles that pop in and out of our sight? How they move, crash and collide into each other? I definitely believe in a random universe. What better to bring order then random compatibility tests by crashes and colliding particles?

Choobus wrote

you have to distinguish between apparant randomness because you don't have all the facts, and honest to god intrinsic randomness.

AW, SHIT! Now Xans is going to post all over the place that Choobus used the word "god" and thus is a believer!
:wall: What's next? Einstein quotes?!?

I think Choobus nailed it, Stern. All of those things you mentioned are truly illusions of randomness. Just like the shuffle button on your iPod isn't really random. In reality it is complex algorithm designed to give the illusion of what we think of as random.

[Sternwallow]

bryantee wrote

I think Choobus nailed it, Stern. All of those things you mentioned are truly illusions of randomness. Just like the shuffle button on your iPod isn't really random. In reality it is complex algorithm designed to give the illusion of what we think of as random.

I am well aware of the "pseudo-random" functions used in computing, they are very useful and efficient when true randomness is not necessary. Some of them are amazingly simple. When, in a computer simulation I ran, true randomness was required, we hooked a sensor to a radioactive source and used the decay events (quantum randomness) as a driver (we also recorded the sequence so that we could reproduce the process exactly to compare test runs).

I contend that the distribution of galaxies is a deterministic outcome of natural symmetrical processes acting on the original truly random universe. As the masses of particles coalesced to make the stars in those galaxies, they maintained their randomness within the bounds of the attractive forces so that clouds of stars and dust and stuff appear rather than something that looks like a tinker-toy model.

Clouds of particles, atoms and dust, mostly hydrogen, attracted into stars, again random within constraints imposed by gravity and the other three forces.

Eventually we get to the mud cracks whose pattern is derived from the randomness of the water molecules, the dirt molecules and the air molecules under the random photons of sunshine all of which derive their randomness from the original universe. I gloss over the bits of randomness, like nuclear decay, that occur in scatterred locales around the universe.

Unlike the iPod and PC, there is no algorithm at work planning the mud cracks. They form where and as they will.

I suspect that one reason people are so resistant to the notion that there might be no plan whatsoever (until humans came along anyway) is that it is so difficult for people to create or detect effective randomness themselves. Just try to write down a random sequence of digits. Be careful not to include too many instances of any one of the digits. Be careful to include an occasional set of five duplicates. Be sure to include a few runs of varying lengths and don't over or under use any one digit......remember a few reverse runs.......

You will find that your carefully generated "random" sequence fails just about every statistical test there is for randomness no matter how careful you were.

When I need a short "random" sequence, I use 8 5 4 1 7 6 3 2. If I need it to be all ten digits I use 8 5 4 9 1 7 6 3 2 0. Virtual cookie offered for identifying the generating rule.
:)

I can't tell if we're on the same page. At the core of the cosmos is there a random quantum component that drives everything? Very possibly. But for all purposes we can say that all actions are the result of previous actions, and those actions are the result of actions before them. The chain goes on in each direction until we reach some kind of singular.

Your example of the mud cracks can have the same principle applied to it. The manner in which the the dirt, water and air molecules arrived in their situation can be attributed to some predictable actions. The photons that left that star were behaving just as everything else in the universe does, it abides by the laws of nature. Given all the factors, there is only one possible way for it to act; in essence it is constrained to one path. I don't think it's necessary to explain how the dirt, water and air molecules and photons arrived where they did, but it is suffice to say that they did so for deterministic reasons, not direct randomness.

Addressing the randomly generated number sequence, you must remember that the brain is a machine, just like any other, that exists in the universe and must abide by the same laws as an xbox or pendulum, albeit a very complex machine. If we know the construction of the machine and how it operates, we can theoretically determine the result of any input through the machine, or in this case stimuli through the senses. Of course the results may vary each time a process is repeated for seemingly no reason, there certainly is an explanations, a measurable deviance in the factors affecting it. The same can be said how thought process works. Though the brain is probably too complex to predict an outcome, we can rest assure that it operates like any other machine: a continuum of events that yield a new event which in turns yields another.

Sorry for my rambling, it's probably confusing but I had a lot to say.

[a different tim]

Sternwallow wrote

I contend that the distribution of galaxies is a deterministic outcome of natural symmetrical processes acting on the original truly random universe.

As I understand it it's the other way round - the distribution of galaxies is the result of a natural random process (QM) acting on the original symmetrical universe.