Randomness, Chaos Theory, and the Return to the Dark Ages
Firstly randomness. Randomness is the core of a lot of our beliefs as a culture including Darwin’s theory of evolution which relies on the process of random mutation over countless years and countless numbers of organisms to create, through natural selection, the life and diversity that we see.
However, I challenge that. I believe that randomness is a scapegoat — it is something that cannot be studied. As soon as you include the word ‘random’ in some scientific theory, you are including chaos in your lovely, ordered theory. And chaos, spreads. Order and chaos are fundamentally opposed. I initially want to challenge the underlying assumption that randomness is the default and I believe that this can be seen through some simple thought experiments.
Take a common example of randomness — or should I say apparent randomness. Take a game like Monopoly: if I take two dice and roll them, I will get a random number between 1 and 12. We can measure the probability of rolling any particular number and find I am most likely to roll a 7, because there are more ways of forming a 7 from 2 six sided dice.
Now, this is helpful when we are trying to simplify things, when playing games such as Monopoly of Settlers of Catan, and we use that simplification to create something that appears to be similar to the world we know, where things happen all the time that appear to be random. But is it really random? Well, take the dice — I would argue that there is nothing random, nothing unpredictable about the way dice are rolled. If you roll two dice, physics can predict exactly how they will land, 100% accurately if we are provided with all the data. So in a simulation, randomness is simply not there. If you simulate all the forces acting on the dice then there is no randomness, you will be able to predict exactly what will happen based on a flick of the finger, the distance when you drop them, the hardness of the surface, the air resistance, the gravity — everything is very complex, but not truly random. Everything can be measured, and if it could be measured fully, it could also be predicted, and therefore it’s not random.
So in fact, rolling dice is perceived to be random only because of our imperfect ability as humans to make the dice fall how we want. A robot might be different — with moderately high success rate, a robot could be designed to roll dice intentionally. And in Star Wars, Jedi can roll dice how they want, which defies randomness.
I studied computer science, and discovered an interesting caveat in programming — there is no such thing as a random number generator. The random number generators we use in software are in fact seeded, using a list of numbers which we shuffle up as much as we can, but ultimately they are not truly random. To make it truly random, we would need some kind of analogue, organic input, as a digital system is a great example of where there is no randomness, only high complexity.
It’s fascinating if you look up Chaos theory. The first thing that strikes me is the description of Chaos theory as the apparent randomness of systems, so even in the definition, chaos theory admits it is about apparent randomness. Whether there is true randomness remains a mystery.
What does this mean for science and the world? The use of theories such as Darwins theory evolution which use randomness to explain hugely complex systems and to simplify those systems down to something which explains relatively neatly an observable phenomena, such as evolution. To attribute this, even in part, to randomness, is in fact very similar to something atheists love to accuse religious people of doing. They say it’s a cop out when religious people say about something like creation: “God did it, and that‘s good enough for me”. They argue you should look at the science, and while no-one understands it all, you should try to understand, and not just say “God did it.”
However, maybe these atheists are actually being rather hypocritical in this. When Darwin talks about random mutation over unimaginably huge numbers of years and mutations, he puts the seemingly designed nature of life down to randomness. However, as soon as you add randomness into the equation, the ability to study that theory fails. By definition it is random, and while probabilities can get us so far, you can predict almost anything will happen using probabilities. You cannot predict, with the scientific method using randomness.
General cultural acceptance of randomness being the default, is going to take us as a society back into the dark ages before science was ‘invented’, back to a society that believes the world is founded on chaos, we are pawns at the whim of the ‘gods’. There is no point in creating formulas, because it’s unpredictable, and impossible to understand.
A failed harvest is attributed to angering the sun god, or a war in the heavens! This may be a simplification, but the overriding belief of pre-scientific age was the world is chaotic, and there is no order. Abrahamic traditions that tell of an ordered creation are the exception, not the rule. The underlying belief in an ordered universe ultimately birthed science, and while the established church, with all its corruption, didn’t particularly like early scientists like Galileo, expelling them from the church only to pardon them hundreds of years later…. But the fact is science would not have developed, peoples minds would not have been able to consider the validity of the scientific method without the underlying belief that there is order, and therefore a point to trying to measure things and understand how they work today and in the past, to predict how they will work in the future, using the laws that govern the world, which is only possible if we believe in a world where there is no true randomness.
8 Jan 2020: Thanks for all the interest in my thoughts here. I did not expect so much interest when I originally published this. Please note this is an opinion piece, my stream of consciousness transcribed (literally) and I am not an expert on these topics, but I am interested in learning more. Thanks to those who have endeavoured to correct my use and understanding of terminology. No doubt there are things I have wrong, but my hope is you have found my thoughts interesting and perhaps sharpening your own thoughts and drive to learn more.
