Reality exists in a very large grey area between random occurence and sure thing.

[tar]

 

Studiot,

So perhaps the relationship between random, chaotic behavior and sure thing is when a sequence, a cause and effect relationship is established because the component constituents are still present for another cycle to occur.  A crystal grows in a certain pattern, a certain shape, because the element is present and binds to its neighbor in a repeated fashion, not random but just the one way that works the best.  Two and two is four every time, it does not randomly add up to 5 every once in a while. Take the geometry of dense packing.   If items of a similar size collect in the same area,  they arrange themselves according to their neighbor.  Gas molecules fill a volume, liquid molecules fill their container and create a level surface, solid balls stack themselves in square and hexagonal patterns.  If you put a penny on the table and surround it with as many pennies as you can, with each of the new pennies touching the first, you cannot get more than six to touch (all pennies laying flat on the table), and when you have six surrounding the center one, all six touch their neighbors in the same equilateral triangle and a hexagonal pattern develops where you can build out around each new penny as if it was the first, so that each has six around it.   Not random.  Always a sure thing.   You can try it, I can try it, it always works the same, reality always fits with itself, it always "works" according to the same principles, the same rules the same laws of physics, and this creates the large grey area between random chaos and the Mandelbrot fractal nature of reality, where a pattern repeats on larger and larger scale, because it fits, because it works, because that is the arrangement that works out in a similar fashion every time, regardless of which penny you place next to which, in whatever random order or speed.

The bridge stands because the concrete and steel have been put together in a manner that satisfies the component molecules' need to arrange themselves any differently. A mountain stands because the component crystal structures are frozen in place, not anxious to change their pattern, their arrangement.  And the Earth keeps falling around the Sun, again and again, and this is a sure thing, not random, because the forces involved have fallen into a pattern, which has no current reason to vary in any random way.

Regards, TAR

Relationships for example are not random, they define themselves.  Many people have a mother and father and grandmother and grandfather and sister and brother and aunt and uncle and second cousin.   As soon as their is a child, there is a father...the relationships develop the same, even if the people involved don't know each other, or live in the same area.  Reality fits together and works out the same to where random occurrence falls into the same patterns because the relationships define a new entity which then also falls into a relationship with other entities on the same scale. 

Edited August 16, 2017 by tar

[studiot]

Good morning tar, and thank you for your response.
You are selling your idea short.

Bridge engineering and indeed engineering in general is a really good example of your idea in action. (I was a bridge engineer for 10 years).

I smiled at the 100 years quote and offered a humerous comment because the bridge has the longest design life of anything made or built by Man, at 120 years.
Of course, this does not mean that every bridge lasts 120 years or that they all fail straight after, many are still going after centuries and even a few after millenia.

Talking of (engineering) design bring me to the modern statistical approach. Limit State Design.

When I learned this, it was stressed that

We do not expect a zero probability of failure, just that we can establish a known and acceptably low probability of failure.

Although the method of probability assessment is quite sophisticated, it is largely derived from empircal data. It cannot be fully theoretically assessesd.

A final comment, the probabilities 0 and 1 are special. They have multiple meanings depending upon circumstance.

What is the probability of a large nuclear bomb destroying New York?

I expect that you and I would agree it is pretty close to a 'sure thing'. That is a probability of 1.

Yet it has never happened, so the only probability we can assign in strict classical statistics is zero.

Edit Re your last paragraph.

Yes matters of definition are not usually probabilistic.

Edited August 16, 2017 by studiot

[tar]

studiot,

And probability of, is a statement that requires there be a probability of not.   To this, the definition of failure of the bridge has to be defined.  If a rail falls over, has the bridge failed.  If a chunk of cements falls off the roof of the tunnel and crushes a car, but a train can still pass above, has the bridge failed?

In my brief, 2 year stint as a software tester, project management was a thing I studied, and risk analysis was one of the components.  Never was quite sure how one was supposed to  figure the nuclear destruction of New York City, into the development plan.

(such would have put the completion of the project rather far on the back burner)

Regards, TAR

Edited August 16, 2017 by tar

[studiot]

3 hours ago, tar said:

studiot,

And probability of, is a statement that requires there be a probability of not.   To this, the definition of failure of the bridge has to be defined.  If a rail falls over, has the bridge failed.  If a chunk of cements falls off the roof of the tunnel and crushes a car, but a train can still pass above, has the bridge failed?

In my brief, 2 year stint as a software tester, project management was a thing I studied, and risk analysis was one of the components.  Never was quite sure how one was supposed to  figure the nuclear destruction of New York City, into the development plan.

(such would have put the completion of the project rather far on the back burner)

Regards, TAR

Yes, good questions, but Limit State (or any other method) design is a big subject and I didn't elaborate.

Thank your lucky star that bridge engineering is a lot more reliable than software engineering.

LSD defines many limit states, one of which is collapse which is the ultimate failure.
Another important one is called 'serviceability' so a bridge that could still carry a train, but would shake loose car crushing size chunks of concrete would pass the collapse state but fail the serviceability state. There are many more.

In general, building design is controlled by serviceability states, the limit of which will be reached long before the ultimate limit state (of collapse).
For example ceilings and floors will bend unacceptably, long before they will break.

Associated with each limit state are a number of what are termed partial safety factors, which govern the design values assigned to that component.
For example steel manufacture is more tightly controlled and predictable than concrete, so the partial safety factor applied to the strength value of steel is higher than the one for concrete.
Even the actual loads are not exempt, there is a safety factor to be applied in the design in case some fool overloads all the trucks in the train or whatever.

The answer to the NYC nuke is that you need Bayesian statistics for your analysis.
You cannot preprogram this and I doubt even an AI would help.
You need a process similar to Limit State to create the seed data.

[tar]

studiot,

So I imagine the limit state analysis on the nuking of NYC would have to include levels of operation of various statewide and countrywide infrastructure in the aftermath, combined with the critical or non-critical nature of the program you were working on.  But it seems to me that one could just as easily make your plan, assuming there will be no nuke, and play it by ear once something on that scale would actually happen.   Like if there was no internet, your programmers shouldn't be working on an internet based program to keep your copier fleet up and running and economical, they should be working with the civil defense authorities to get the internet back up.  But if the program you were working on was an early warning system for nuclear attack, then the priorities would be different and you probably should have a plan to shift the development to an unaffected, operational, team.

But the nuking of NYC would not be a result of a random chaotic happening, that could not be avoided.  It would be the result of letting somebody that wants to nuke NYC acquire the ability to do so...and such.   Not random.  More along the line of sure thing.  Like if we were to nuke China and Russia and Iran and North Korea on the same afternoon, it would not be a sure thing that tomorrow morning in New Jersey would happen on schedule in the way I expect it to....but to the thread title, the nuking of NYC is not a random thing like the decay of an element.   The failure of a bridge is not due to random occurrences, usually, but due to the steady degrading of the materials that hold it up.  That the materials will decay is a sure thing, and part of reality that can be reliably counted on.

Regards, TAR

And the possibilities before the nuke go off are different than the possibilities after.  It is like talking about whether there is life on another planet and calling people that see UFOs crazy, before there is a space ship on the White House lawn, or after.  After, everybody would instantly accept the existence of life on other planets, and start thinking about what they want, and are we stronger or weaker than they are, and is it in a best interest to fight or make concessions and such.   So the situation dictates the possibilities going forward.  My wife and I are planning to sell our house in NJ and move to Virginia.   What house we live in now does not need to be in a good school district or near employment.   The possibilities are the same, but what house we live in is partially dictated by who has to live in it and what my wife and I plan to do in it and who we plan to host from time to time and such.

Meaning that you can flip a coin a hundred times and it will always come up heads, or tails and once in a great while might come up an land on its edge, but it will never come up the Queen of Hearts, for that you need a deck of cards, (or a coin with a Queen of Hearts as the head,)   Reality provides a starting point, from which events can occur.  Life on Earth developed to fit the Earth.   Life on the surface breaths oxygen and is carbon based.  Life at the bottom of the sea near a volcanic vent is sulphur based.   The possibilities are somewhat framed by what already is established.

Regards, TAR

Edited August 16, 2017 by tar

[cladking]

On ‎8‎/‎15‎/‎2017 at 9:38 AM, tar said:

cladking,

what I want to be correct about is that reality is a large grey area between random occurrence and reliable repeating sure things

which so far seems to be an unchallenged, unremarkable, agreed to claim

Regards, TAR

So if so many things are possible within that random cubic meter of matter, why does the railway bridge stay a railway bridge for 100 years?

 

Your perception of reality is a grey area.  Reality itself is what is and is forever unfolding in entirely unpredictable ways. 

You can estimate the odds of the sun coming up tomorrow and still it either will or it won't depending on events that will (or will not) occur in the future. 

A bridge is usually designed to last but this doesn't mean any will.  We can estimate the odds of events or understand processes well enough to design a bridge but its fate is always out of our hands and always unpredictable.  If such things were predictable there wouldn't be cars that go into the river or get trapped beneath them.  Even Galloping Gerty had a car on it and anyone could see its days were numbered. 

[tar]

cladking,

But it does not unfold in entirely unpredictable ways.  It unfolds within the error bands. Most of the time within two or three standard deviations.   Once in a while you get the black swan event, but after all it is still a swan.   It is not a grocktoid.

Regards, TAR

During our last deep recession it looked like stocks would fall to zero...  except they got so low people could not help but buy them, 60 dollar banks at 5 dollars and such.   The world, reality is something like game theory.   People always make their best move.   Reality always does the thing that fits, that works that responds to all the inputs.  Water always runs downhill and such.  There are sure things all over the place.  Sure the chaos in the stream of water at the top of the water slide can cause harmonic motions left and right that by the time the rider gets down the course he is thrown out of a course designed to never have a rider thrown out, but most riders...nearly all riders stay in the chute.  In the grey area between random occurrence and sure thing, where we spend all our time.

Edited August 16, 2017 by tar

[studiot]

Tar, you seem to be remarkably argumentative towards someone who not only agrees with your basic original premise but is trying to offer support (examples) towards it.

In a nutshell your original premise identified zero probability, a probability of 1 and a 'large grey area' being all the numbers between.

 

The nuke example refers to the difficulties with probabilities of zero and one.

The Limit State example refers to the grey area.

 

Perhaps I did not put a big enough gap between them, as you seem determined to link them.

Edited August 16, 2017 by studiot

[tar]

studiot.

Don't mean to be argumentative. Just want to make sure that nobody is leaning all the way to accident, since I think the universe is a lot more dependable than that would allow.

Regards, TAR

[cladking]

6 hours ago, tar said:

cladking,

But it does not unfold in entirely unpredictable ways.  It unfolds within the error bands. Most of the time within two or three standard deviations.   Once in a while you get the black swan event, but after all it is still a swan.   It is not a grocktoid.

 

If your predictions are coming true then it's not because you are prescient or smart; it's because you're predicting easy things.  Try predicting the shape of a cloud on the nearest earth-like planet in 2051. 

Reality unfolds in exactly one way that has nothing to do with "error bands".  It does what it does against all odds. 

[tar]

12 hours ago, cladking said:

If your predictions are coming true then it's not because you are prescient or smart; it's because you're predicting easy things.  Try predicting the shape of a cloud on the nearest earth-like planet in 2051. 

Reality unfolds in exactly one way that has nothing to do with "error bands".  It does what it does against all odds. 

cladking,  

If a thing is easy to predict, then I would put that thing, still in the grey area, but toward the sure thing end of the spectrum.  If its hard to predict then you don't have enough information, or the thing has plenty of random aspects to it that are not controllable or repeatable in the exact same manner.  I like using the shape of a wisp of smoke in a nearly still room, instead of the cloud on a distant planet, because you can't see the cloud developing on the distant planet, while you can watch the wisp of smoke curl and stretch in the air. Just making a puff of air in the direction of the wisp causes some activity in the motion of the air, that is noticeable in the pattern and shape the wisp takes.  

Take the tree, falling in the woods, in terms of whether it makes a sound or not, if there is no one there to hear it.   Does the planet where you need to know the shape of the cloud, before it forms, have any inhabitants?   Is it important to know what shape and pattern every wisp of smoke has taken in the history of the world, what all the patterns were a minute ago, now and in a minute? Next year?    I am not sure, for point of focus consciousnesses such as us, that such prescience is at all helpful.   Not even possible actually, given the speed of light, and the number of brain cells we have, and the way our senses work, an7d we compare the world we see with the world we saw before, to  recognize a change.

Reality unfolds in exactly one way, but that is only in retrospect.  What comes next is what the universe is currently engaged in arranging.  The future has an unlimited number of ways to unfold, but that means exactly that the universe does not have only one way to unfold.  It does not unfold against all odds, but in the sense that there are too many permutations that branch off each   permutation to forecast which of many possible patterns the place will take,  but at each permutation possibilities are added and possibilities are subtracted.  But water will run down hill every time you pour it on a slanted board.  Predictable because there are plenty of things the universe does every time the same arrangement happens.  Repeating stuff.  From the orbit of electrons, to the orbit of the Earth. 

Regards, TAR

I threw out (recycled) a stack of yellow pad papers I had that had a brief note about every call I took on a third level technical hotline for 6 or seven years of my life. 

I used to say, on particularly stressful days, that in 100 years nobody will know or care, what happened here today.  Wisps of smoke, the shape of each mean something when they are happening, but keeping a record of the place is not required in order for the place to do the next thing it is going to do.  History never repeats itself exactly, but it often rhymes. 

Edited August 17, 2017 by tar

[studiot]

43 minutes ago, tar said:

cladking,  

If a thing is easy to predict, then I would put that thing, still in the grey area, but toward the sure thing end of the spectrum.  If its hard to predict then you don't have enough information, or the thing has plenty of random aspects to it that are not controllable or repeatable in the exact same manner.  I like using the shape of a wisp of smoke in a nearly still room, instead of the cloud on a distant planet, because you can't see the cloud developing on the distant planet, while you can watch the wisp of smoke curl and stretch in the air. Just making a puff of air in the direction of the wisp causes some activity in the motion of the air, that is noticeable in the pattern and shape the wisp takes.  

Take the tree, falling in the woods, in terms of whether it makes a sound or not, if there is no one there to hear it.   Does the planet where you need to know the shape of the cloud, before it forms, have any inhabitants?   Is it important to know what shape and pattern every wisp of smoke has taken in the history of the world, what all the patterns were a minute ago, now and in a minute? Next year?    I am not sure, for point of focus consciousnesses such as us, that such prescience is at all helpful.   Not even possible actually, given the speed of light, and the number of brain cells we have, and the way our senses work, an7d we compare the world we see with the world we saw before, to  recognize a change.

Reality unfolds in exactly one way, but that is only in retrospect.  What comes next is what the universe is currently engaged in arranging.  The future has an unlimited number of ways to unfold, but that means exactly that the universe does not have only one way to unfold.  It does not unfold against all odds, but in the sense that there are too many permutations that branch off each   permutation to forecast which of many possible patterns the place will take,  but at each permutation possibilities are added and possibilities are subtracted.  But water will run down hill every time you pour it on a slanted board.  Predictable because there are plenty of things the universe does every time the same arrangement happens.  Repeating stuff.  From the orbit of electrons, to the orbit of the Earth. 

Regards, TAR

I threw out a stack of yellow pad papers I had that had a brief note about every call I took on a third level technical hotline for 6 or seven years of my life. 

I used to say, on particularly stressful days, that in 100 years nobody will know or care, what happened here today.  Wisps of smoke, the shape of each mean something when they are happening, but keeping a record of the place is not required in order for the place to do the next thing it is going to do.  History never repeats itself exactly, but it often rhymes. 

I like the way you have hardened up on facts, I was getting worried this thread was getting wishy-washy, handy-wavy rather than logical.

 

and yet

 

and yet if your board is made of suitable paper, water will run uphill in/on it.
This is a direct consequence of statistics and is amenable to statistical mathematical theory.

and yet the theory of evolution is a direct counterexample to Cladking's "against all odds", if indeed one was needed because that is a logically self defeating statement since as you have already points out, all odds must include the odds of something not happening as well as happening.

I say again I agree that your grey area is enormous and that most things happen for statistical reasons in this grey area.
And further that much of that statistics is amenable to proper mathematical analysis and quantification.

Take for instance chemical activity, which is going on all the time in the world around us.
Its scientific analysis based on two aspects of mahtematics.
Firstly the deterministic laws of macro-thermodynamics tell us if such and such a reaction can happen.
But the statistical laws of reaction kinetics (which are based on the chance meeting of the relevant molecules) tell us how fast it will happen.

 

So once again, don't sell your idea short.

[tar]

studiot, 

you are right again, the water will sometimes run up the board, if capillary action is a possibility or if the board is being spun around on carnival ride or with a stiff wind blowing to force the water uphill...so not a sure thing, but still to the sure thing end of the spectrum, with the things that could make it not a sure thing, sure things themselves

pure random possibility, that acts like magic, like the possibility of Alexander the Great's Army marching out of your left breast pocket, need not have a probability assigned, because it is impossible.  Not improbable.  Impossible.  The army is dead and buried and your pocket too small.

Reality relies on itself to do the next thing.  That is, you need the current arrangement to evolve/modify/morph/move into the next arrangement.  A particle has to make the trip between A and B at less than or at the speed of light.  It cannot blink out of existence over there, and pop back into existence over here.  Once it has made the trip, its path between A and B cannot be longer than the distance light could have traveled the path.   That cuts down the possible arrangements that the universe can take in the next 10 minutes for instance.  A groknoid looking at cladking's cloud on planet Distant can not draw us a picture and fax it over, and have us know the shape in the next 10 minutes.

Regards,  TAR

well wait, there is information storage and transport and cloud engineering possible, so it is possible that the groknoid could have designed a cloud shape three years ago, sent us a fax and informed us that he would be creating the cloud today

[cladking]

22 hours ago, tar said:

The future has an unlimited number of ways to unfold, but that means exactly that the universe does not have only one way to unfold.  It does not unfold against all odds, but in the sense that there are too many permutations that branch off each   permutation to forecast which of many possible patterns the place will take,  but at each permutation possibilities are added and possibilities are subtracted. 

This is where you're running off the track. 

The future doesn't unfold and is always indeterminant and unknown.  The present unfolds based on events that occurred in the past.  There's no such thing as "infinity" in the real world but if there were it couldn't hold a candle to the real improbability of what actually exists.  A new kind of scientific notation would have to be invented just to describe the odds against what is. Rather than 10 to a power, perhaps 10 to a power to a power(...). 

You'd need 4.2 x 10 ^ 807,000 monkeys and typewriters to get War and Peace.  Imagine how much less likely it would be to get the Library of Congress or a human to write any book in the first place!!!  Reality is far more complex than the Library of Congress and has been going on for a very long time. 

[tar]

cladking,

I think Studiot is correct in admonishing me to not argue against someone backing up my point, so I would like to carefully parse the aspects of what you say, not to argue against your conclusions but to make distinctions within your logic, of points that I take mild exception to, in terms of how you make sub conclusions, or perhaps I would like to make distinctions to turn the discourse in the direction of finding the things that make something likely, instead of proving how unlikely a thing is to become the thing accidently.

What I mean is the argument for random accidental coming together of quarks, into the library of congress would take the power of powers of powers of 100 zeros to arrive at the odds. So pure accident does not work, unless you posit a zillion universes to turn out a zillion different ways, and you are back at the beginning.  So, the question is then, so if there is a plan, then who made the plan, who decided on what the cosmological constant was going to be.  The answer to some is God, but then who planned for such a powerful being to be, does God have a creator or what.  Was God always, so is it not the same to consider that existence was always....that is, the point that inflated into our universe was a point where?  A point when?  A point of what nature and capability, what constituents, what possibilities?  Was the universe contained within the point, like our pattern is contained within the egg and sperm in chains of DNA and such?  Or were there just 1s and 0s that started arranging themselves into various patterns, and what were the 1s made of and what were the zeros made of?

The answer, to my mind, and to the thread title is that reality is in that large grey area between what considering the universe dumb would dictate, and considering the universe smart would dictate. And in an interesting twist of logic, I have determined that whatever I personally am capable of the universe has to be capable of, and more.  This fact does not require there be a God, but it requires we be very much of and in the universe, in the sense that what we do is what the universe is capable of doing. 

Thus in logic and probability, I need not explain every step, every book in the library of congress in terms of how often quarks would come accidently together to form the patterns of ink and sheets of paper,  I can start with some monks copying a text in the basement of a monastery and the odds slim down nicely.

So I totally agree that the present unfolds based on what happened in the past, but the likelihood of the universe being what it is is not uncalculably small...it is actually quite likely that the Sun will rise tomorrow in the East.  We don't have to start from the big bang each time we calculate the next moment.  We can start from this moment.

Regards, TAR

Edited August 18, 2017 by tar

[Delta1212]

On 8/15/2017 at 5:19 AM, Lord Antares said:

Exactly,  but my point is, randomness is an arbitrary term, given as a statistical probability measure for what we don't know. If we did know, nothing would be random to us, hence the nature of the universe cannot be random. Things CANNOT be unpredictable in a technical way (except for arguably QM, but will not go into that), because if they could, the laws of physics couldn't exist and the sole purpose of laws (to standardize and always measure a predictable result) would be defeated. Therefore, reality is not random. Do you agree?

Saying that things cannot be unpredictable in a technical way except for QM because then the laws of physics couldn't exist is kind of a self-contradiction. "According to the laws of physics, nothing is random, except for absolutely everything on the most fundamental level."

[tar]

a thought just crossed my mind, a question I had about reality suddenly resurfaced so I think it somehow pertinent, or at least interesting to think about

Isn't it interesting that "this moment" is the same moment for all of us.  That we all have the same now, give or take a moment (2 or 3 seconds.) 

THAT can't be an accident.

Edited August 18, 2017 by tar

[Lord Antares]

1 hour ago, Delta1212 said:

Saying that things cannot be unpredictable in a technical way except for QM because then the laws of physics couldn't exist is kind of a self-contradiction. "According to the laws of physics, nothing is random, except for absolutely everything on the most fundamental level."

1) It's isn't contradictory. If everything is always in line with the laws of physics on a macro-scale, then anything happening on a macro-scale will not be random. Also,

2) I said ''arguably QM'' because I don't believe QM is random, although most people do. I don't think QM is random, just like anything else. However, I can make no claims.

[Delta1212]

3 minutes ago, Lord Antares said:

1) It's isn't contradictory. If everything is always in line with the laws of physics on a macro-scale, then anything happening on a macro-scale will not be random. Also,

2) I said ''arguably QM'' because I don't believe QM is random, although most people do. I don't think QM is random, just like anything else. However, I can make no claims.

Things are only really roughly non-random on a macro-scale, because we're dealing with fairly low precision.

Like flipping a coin a billion times. The exact number of heads and tails that you get is going to be different each time you do a billion flips, but if you can only detect whether it's within 10% of a 50/50 split, it will seem like you get the exact same, highly predictable, result every time.

[Lord Antares]

21 minutes ago, Delta1212 said:

Like flipping a coin a billion times. The exact number of heads and tails that you get is going to be different each time you do a billion flips,

Obviously it is going to be different and there is nothing random about it but I'm not talking about that. I'm talking if you flip the coin a billion times in EXACTLY the same way, it will always land predictably. The only reason a coin flip is ''random'' is because we don't know the variables of forces with which the coin was flipped.

[Delta1212]

11 minutes ago, Lord Antares said:

Obviously it is going to be different and there is nothing random about it but I'm not talking about that. I'm talking if you flip the coin a billion times in EXACTLY the same way, it will always land predictably. The only reason a coin flip is ''random'' is because we don't know the variables of forces with which the coin was flipped.

You are missing the point of the analogy. Things appear deterministic on a macro scale because of the law of large numbers and the fact that our measurements are rarely all that precise in comparison to the quantum scale. They don't switch over from being random to actually being deterministic. Only approximately deterministic to a degree such that we can't easily tell the difference.

[Lord Antares]

17 minutes ago, Delta1212 said:

You are missing the point of the analogy. Things appear deterministic on a macro scale because of the law of large numbers and the fact that our measurements are rarely all that precise in comparison to the quantum scale. They don't switch over from being random to actually being deterministic. Only approximately deterministic to a degree such that we can't easily tell the difference.

I understand what you are telling me, but that wasn't my point either. My point is that the assumption is made that QM is random because we cannot find a way to predict it. This doesn't conclusively mean that there actually is no method to its behaviour. I believe it would be in line with what we know about probability to assume that QM is deterministic because the contrary would imply unpredictable behaviour without proper cause. Obviously, this is just my opinion; it might be wrong. But I do believe it would be irresponsible to assume with a great degree of confidence that QM behaviour is truly random.

[Delta1212]

When I was in middle school or early high school, I don't remember which, I spent a lot of time thinking about determinism. Very big advocate of the clockwork universe idea, although I don't know if I'd encountered that specific analogy yet or not. I hadn't really been exposed to quantum physics yet at this point beyond knowing that it was a thing that existed. I'd heard of, for example, the Many Worlds interpretation, but I didn't really understand what the results and predictions that it was an interpretation of were. Anyway...

I was at summer camp when I was toying with a particular thought experiment of firing an .arrow at a target. And if you set everything back up exactly the way that it was when you first fired it, down to the very atoms of the arrow and yourself and the surrounding environment, the arrow would hit very precisely the exact same spot it had the first time. And this seemed very obvious to me and was something that I had taken for granted. Then the thought occurred to me "What if that isn't true?" What if you reset everything back exactly the way it was and run it forward and the outcome isn't precisely identical to the way things transpired the first time around? It's not an experiment you can ever actually run, so what's to say what the outcome would actually be?

That little thought was mind-blowing to me at the time, and I think prepped me pretty well for the ideas contained in QM when I really started digging into them a few years later.

1 minute ago, Lord Antares said:

I understand what you are telling me, but that wasn't my point either. My point is that the assumption is made that QM is random because we cannot find a way to predict it. This doesn't conclusively mean that there actually is no method to its behaviour. I believe it would be in line with what we know about probability to assume that QM is deterministic because the contrary would imply unpredictable behaviour without proper cause. Obviously, this is just my opinion; it might be wrong. But I do believe it would be irresponsible to assume with a great degree of confidence that QM behaviour is truly random.

Why do you assume that determinism is the default state of things? It seems intuitive that it is, but only because we live in a world that seems fairly deterministic. That deterministic appearance is an emergent property of an underlying probabilistic nature, though, and follows fairly straightforwardly from it.

It is like looking at the shadows on the walls of Plato's cave, and when told that there are three dimensional objects casting those shadows, insisting that further investigation will almost certainly reveal that the objects are themselves composed of shadows because that's the only way they make sense.

[Lord Antares]

9 minutes ago, Delta1212 said:

Why do you assume that determinism is the default state of things? It seems intuitive that it is, but only because we live in a world that seems fairly deterministic. That deterministic appearance is an emergent property of an underlying probabilistic nature, though, and follows fairly straightforwardly from it.

It is like looking at the shadows on the walls of Plato's cave, and when told that there are three dimensional objects casting those shadows, insisting that further investigation will almost certainly reveal that the objects are themselves composed of shadows because that's the only way they make sense.

And why do others assume that ''random'' is the default state of things? Because they can't find a pattern to QM's randomness, which is ironic, because the sole prerequisite of events being random is not knowing the pattern!

It is my belief. I've had many thought experiments about this as well. Too long or drawn out to write here. My point is, the default shouldn't be assumed either way.

Edited August 18, 2017 by Lord Antares

[Strange]

3 minutes ago, Lord Antares said:

And why do others assume that ''random'' is the default state of things? Because they can't find a pattern to QM's randomness, which is ironic, because the sole prerequisite of events being random is not knowing the pattern!

1. QM is not random. 

2. The probabilistic nature is not an assumption.