Life is anything but random. It is nothing but a collection of actions and outcomes, both of which are tightly coupled and definitely connected.
Let's take a simple example: you had an important meeting at 9 am but since you were stuck in traffic, you were late by 10 mins.
The final outcome can be clearly explained by actions that directly or indirectly led to them. May be there was an accident causing the traffic jam. May be you woke up 10 mins late than usual thereby getting caught in rush hour traffic. May be the cab you took to work, arrived late at your destination cause he woke up late.
All of the above are totally controllable actions, albeit not in your direct control. Hence the feeling that life is random. Because none of us have any control over the outcomes of the actions of others, who subtly influence our lives on a daily basis.
Think of it this way: our life is intertwined with the lives of others in one way or the other. From the cab driver who drives us to work to our loved ones who shatter our hearts, their actions influence us, some more than the others, but influence us nonetheless.
It's a complex equation, with a whole lot of variables, most of which are beyond our control and unknown and the solution to this equation is the outcome of an event.
I believe that if one knew the values to all the variables at any given point of time, then one would be able to solve the equation with precision
Randomness implies unpredictability, which implies a lack of knowledge; if you can accurately predict what is going to happen next in some sequence, temporal or otherwise, by observing what has come before, then it isn't a random sequence.
But to someone who possesses all possible knowledge, nothing is random, because everything is predictable. A sequence might still retain certain properties that we associate with randomness (e.g. an unbiased distribution), but no sequence is random if you can always accurately predict the next item.
Obviously, none of us mere mortals is omniscient, but it is possible, for instance, to develop new predictive techniques and to turn once-thought-random sequences into non-random sequences.
My background is not in quantum mechanics, so I could be totally misunderstanding the idea of quantum indeterminacy, but I thought it had to do with what we can know based on measurement. But a truly omniscient being would not have to rely on measurement.
So ...
Are you saying an omniscient being is impossible, because something about quantum mechanics implies that it is impossible to possess all possible knowledge?
Or are you saying that even if an omniscient being possesses all possible knowledge, they would nevertheless be unable to accurately predict all sequences because of some knowledge we have about quantum mechanics?
Turning the math into words is subject to interpretation (because it's _so weird_, it's not clear what it means; and I'm no physicist or mathematician either, but my understanding is...), but quantum mechanics seems to say there are physical laws actually limiting how precisely something can be known. Which is part of what makes it not just "what we can know based on measurement."
That is, a "truly omniscient being that would not have to rely on measurement" would apparently violate the laws of physics, is one thing quantum mechanics maybe seems to say.
"Thus, the uncertainty principle actually states a fundamental property of quantum systems and is not a statement about the observational success of current technology"
> Are you saying an omniscient being is impossible, because something about quantum mechanics implies that it is impossible to possess all possible knowledge?
> Or are you saying that even if an omniscient being possesses all possible knowledge, they would nevertheless be unable to accurately predict all sequences because of some knowledge we have about quantum mechanics?
That's an extremely astute question. I'm impressed that you managed to realize that that's an important distinction and that you don't know which it is.
It's actually the latter, and incredibly we can prove it. And the proof of this is surprisingly accessible:
I'm still not sold on this. I'm no quantum mechanics expert, but I do have a philosophy background, and it seems as if true omniscience -- possessing all possible knowledge -- seems like it should transcend this limitation.
Maybe I'm thinking about a form of omniscience that exists outside of time, in which case, of course an omniscient being would know what happens next, because they would know the future just as well as the past. (Example: Any omniscient being will know which photons will pass through a polarizing lens not based on prediction but based on already knowing the outcome.)
There are always hidden assumptions. The proof only applies up to half-omniscience being that know everything in the current and past of the universe, but not in the future.
As a less powerful entity, if you know all the result in the lab until now, you can consider an experiment made 1 hour ago and "predict" the outcome without breaking the laws of quantum mechanics.
We experience the world as a series of observations. Predicting those seems to be fundamentally impossible.
Of course that still leaves room for an omniscient being that never collapses the wave function and just deals in probabilities. But then your predicitions sound like "there's a 99.978% probability you will be hit by a car on tuesday at 10:04 am." with the remaining 0.022% accounting for quantum flactuations adding up to produce a different result. Whether you call that "all knowing" and whether that proves that nothing is random sounds like an interesting philosophical question.
Quantum mechanics theoretically is just another deterministic universe or hidden variables and effecting our deterministic universe to appear random but in reality is deterministic.
However your life is also influenced by quantum effects, and the possibility that uncertainty in quantum physics is based on hidden variables seems to be thoroughly ruled out. To our best understanding the entire world is just a truly random probability distribution.
You can have a deterministic universe effecting our deterministic universe and where we would perceive the effects as random but isn't. It could also be impossible to measure the effects as deterministic based on our lifespan not being able to analysis the data.
Let's take a simple example: you had an important meeting at 9 am but since you were stuck in traffic, you were late by 10 mins.
The final outcome can be clearly explained by actions that directly or indirectly led to them. May be there was an accident causing the traffic jam. May be you woke up 10 mins late than usual thereby getting caught in rush hour traffic. May be the cab you took to work, arrived late at your destination cause he woke up late.
All of the above are totally controllable actions, albeit not in your direct control. Hence the feeling that life is random. Because none of us have any control over the outcomes of the actions of others, who subtly influence our lives on a daily basis.
Think of it this way: our life is intertwined with the lives of others in one way or the other. From the cab driver who drives us to work to our loved ones who shatter our hearts, their actions influence us, some more than the others, but influence us nonetheless.
It's a complex equation, with a whole lot of variables, most of which are beyond our control and unknown and the solution to this equation is the outcome of an event.
I believe that if one knew the values to all the variables at any given point of time, then one would be able to solve the equation with precision