Not sure if this is the right forum to post this, but here goes... I have begun thinking about the principle behind randomness and now ask myself: do things ever truly occur at random? For example, if I were to ask you to pick a "random" number at this very moment there would surely be an infinite amount of factors that influenced your choice of number. Everthing from air temperature to the colors of this page may have affected how the chemicals zipped through your brain and spit out that "random" number. Perhaps I should define "random" in the context that I'm using it in. I mean any event or outcome wherein premeditation did not take place, and the outcome was not influenced by any external factors. Good enough? Some say that our thought processes are not linear, as in those of a computer where one thought must logically lead to the next. I disagree and say that we do think in a linear fashion, but most of this takes place in the subconscious (sp). With that being said, are any of our thoughts ever random? If any of the base thoughts leading to the final conclusion were altered we would get a different outcome, which means that the outcome was affected by those base thoughts and thus the thought was not random (at least by my definition). Also what about genes and mutations and such? I am currently confused out of my head in my high school biology class because we just learned that gene mutation/nondisjunction occurs at random. HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE? Nothing EVER "just happens", even if its forces as small as gravity acting to alter the gene. What I'm saying is that random to me implies that an event occurs regardless of what events preceded it. I'm just saying doesn't absolutely everything have a factor in it? The universe does not fall into place on it's own but is guided by what happens, so I don't see how randomness can even be considered as existing. My head hurts folks, and being that this is getting long and rather spacey, i hearby truncate the thought. Ouch. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
sounds like you are saying what we normaly think of as random is really acting as a chaos system compared to true randomness am i right? if you are then i would say you are right
Sooo.... what if a bird sh*ts on my shoulder? Wouldnt that be classified as random? Not the bird sh*t, but the fact it fell on my shoulder? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! No, I agree with what you said. Its all so very large..... Isnt it? And a big fatty Welcome to ya, NebulaPlease Register or Log in to view the hidden image! You sound like you'll fit right in here. Take carePlease Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Sorry thought you were an old poster welcome star what he is saying (i think) is that its all one big system where you were efected wether you get shat on where the bird is what the wind is doing and 100 other things all add up to make it LOOK random but its not really
Well, I don't know what you are really trying to discuss. Do things occur at random? Depends on what it is. Can human thoughts be truely random? (which I think that is what you are asking) The answer is NO. Human cannot be truely random like a computer. It is has been proven. For example, if you are asked to pick a number between 1-10, you NEVER see someone write 3 same numbers in a row. Because people think if they write 3 same numbers in a row, it is not random. Even though the probability of that is 1/1000. When that those type of experiment is done, the probability is way less than 1/1000. So that answers your question. When I do that experiment myself, I have tendency not to pick as many 1's and 10's. Genes and mutations are random. Each genes in your body have a certain probability of mutating. If you are exposed to a certain chemical, that probability can increase dramatically. No. That is called statistical independence. That is not what random means. It is possible for two events to be random but still correlated. Take a class in statistics. It will all make sense.
Asguard No. I know, I was just teasing. Feeling goofy today. Oh, and "shat" - did you just make that up? If so, can I borrow itPlease Register or Log in to view the hidden image! To to funnyPlease Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Joeman ... "Human cannot be truely random like a computer." I think if you look into this a bit further you'll realize that it's just the opposite. That's why what a computer generates is a pseudo- random number or table. Take care.
Some clarification Thanks for the welcome guys [and grrls] **tear**. How absolutely touching. Joeman said: I am asking if ANYTHING can be truly random. I merely used human thought as as example. I'm saying that things don't "just happen", there is, as Asgaurd said, some form of ordered chaos. This would apply to anything, from human thought to computers to evolution: nothing is truly random. From what I know, computers are about as far away from true randomness you can get. I know that most [if not all] programming languages associate their random function to the computer's time. So theoretically, if both computer's clocks were fully synchronized, they would output the same number "at random". <---- feel free to correct me if i'm wrong about how computers generate random output, i'm not a programmer Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! In fact, this idea can be used to further illustrate my point. Let's say you have any type of system, a universe/computer etc. Now suppose that in that system occured some type of random event. If you created a second system and kept all conditions the same as in the first one, right from the beginning of time [let's not go there Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! ] then wouldn't the same "random" event occur? I would think so, because absolutely all things occurded in the same order. So then the event wasn't really random, as the outcome relied on previous events. I'm just saying everything is just one big chain reaction, and NOTHING ever breaks this chain. Okay, I understand that genes have a probability of mutating. But what I'm saying is WHY they mutate is not random. There has to be a factor as to why that gene mutated. Say you had two identical genes [or a billion for that matter] that were in the exact same environment and were exposed to an exactly equal quanity of an unknown mutagen. If all variables are exactly equal, will some genes mutate while others don't? NO. If absolutely everything is the same, the outcome will be the same. Also consider gene pairing: why do genes pair with the genes they do? There has to be some reason as to why they pair the way they do, ie proximity, chemistry etc. It's not just random. Joeman I believe I know what you mean about independece. I'm saying everything happens for a reasons[yet not necesarrily a philosophical reason]. Thanks also for your interesting post [as well as everyone's]. Whew!Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
It might turn out that randomness is a far more important and fundamental concept than we have hitherto imagined. This article by Marcus Chown appeared in the February 26, 2000 issue of New Scientist: "Space and the material world could be created out of nothing but noise... If you could lift a corner of the veil that shrouds reality, what would you see beneath? Nothing but randomness, say two Australian physicists. According to Reginald Cahill and Christopher Klinger of Flinders University in Adelaide, space and time and all the objects around us are no more than the froth on a deep sea of randomness. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that randomness is a part of the Universe. After all, physicists tell us that empty space is a swirling chaos of virtual particles. And randomness comes into play in quantum theory (when a particle such as an electron is observed, its properties are randomly selected from a set of alternatives predicted by the equations.) But Cahill and Klinger believe that this hints at a much deeper randomness. "Far from being merely associated with quantum measurements, this randomness is at the very heart of reality," says Cahill. If they are right, they have created the most fundamental of all physical theories, and its implications are staggering. "Randomness generates everything," says Cahill. "It even creates the sensation of the 'present', which is so conspicuously absent from today's physics." (Read the full article at http://www.socpes.flinders.edu.au/people/rcahill/NS.pdf) Using Godel's Incompleteness Theorem as a launching pad, Cahill writes, "The Universe is rich enough to be self-referencing (for instance, I'm aware of myself.) This suggests that most of the everyday truths of physical reality, like most mathematical truths, have no explanation." Michael
Re: Some clarification I still don't understand what you are trying to say. If anything is randomly random? Well, its probability density function is Gaussian, it is considered random. However different random process has different mean and variance. That part is not random. I don't know if that answers your question. I totally screwed it up I admit. I used computer as an example without really knowing how computer achieves its randomness. I should have said throwing a dice or something. I think you are confused between something being random and something being the same. There is a big different. If two system has the same randomness, that doesn't mean you get the same result. If you create a random system, and another exact replica of the system, you should have exactly the same mean and variance, but that doesn't mean you get the same data. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Randomness doesn't imply outcome is exactly the same.
A number is considered random if the shortest possible algorithm required to reproduce this number is no shorter than the number itself. This definition comes to us courtesy of Gregory Chaitin. He has a webpage at; http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/CDMTCS/chaitin/ Michael
