HACKER Q&A
📣 slmjkdbtl

Is there any interesting philosophy about randomness?


Is there any interesting philosophy about randomness?


  👤 speedcoder Accepted Answer ✓
Podcast: Lex Friedman interview #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe @ 12:43 https://lexfridman.com/stephen-wolfram-2/ . And, In particular Rule 30 of Wolfram's elementary cellular automaton rules https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Rule30.html

👤 pizza
Martin Lof randomness - Chaitin’s omega

John Rawls veil of ignorance

Ergodicity economics

Negative probabilities

Vacuum fluctations

‘Negentropy’

Julian Barbour’s explanation for the statistical mechanics that disprove the possibility of Boltzmann brains

Matilde Marcolli’s work on using the Tononi phi/ integrated information metric to measure the information transfers through an information processing distributed system, and how that might relate to the brain

Flippism

Laplace/Maxwell’s demon

Hegelianism, if u treat history as contingent, random, uncomputable


👤 Bostonian
I don't think the deterministic Newtonian world has any room for free will. But does the randomness in quantum mechanics allow for it? Googling "quantum mechanics free will" yields essays on this topic.

👤 Snoozus
There is true randomness stemming from real random processes. There is also effective randomness coming from chaotic processes. Chaos means that perturbations grow very fast. Then there is the uncertainty principle which sets a limit to how precisely you can know the initial conditions. So even with infinite computing power most observations can not be predicted for longer amount of times. This leaves a lot of space for free will. And also for esoteric theories.

👤 Kuzutsukake
I adopted my philosphy for randomness (synonymous with luck in my opinion) during an intro to stats class. We were going over error bars for linear regression, and that is how I think of randomness - so when I wish someone luck, I'm hoping that whatever model they used to prepare for their "event", that their end result is the better end of the error bars.