Here's my point, kind of, although I was just thinking out loud (or typing out loud, I guess). This is from a thread on the Physics Stack Exchange (http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24390/can-randomness-exist)
Chaos is not randomness, it is insufficient knowledge about the initial conditions. Admittedly, you'd need perfect knowledge of initial conditions, but leaving aside QM this is possible in principle if not in practice. It's only when you include QM that you find perfect knowledge of the initial conditions is impossible in principle.
So there's a distinction between chaos and randomness. We can never know all initial conditions. So we can also never know if anything is truly random.
But we know order when we see it, or measure it. For anything that doesn't seem to be ordered we can only say it appears to be random.
So randomness may exist, and it may not. There is apparently no way to make sure. My guess is that it probably does exist, because I can't imagine myself to be living in a completely ordered and deterministic universe. It just doesn't feel right.
But neither can I see this universe as completely random, or dominated by randomness. That doesn't feel right, either.
@kendewitt
Indeed there is a difference but initial conditions not only cannot be known but knowing them would actually be like dividing by zero and the whole universe would cease to exist. We are getting into way more philosophical rather than practical implications.
We measure order only from a given perspective. For example sand blown over your living room floor is disorder. Sand blown through a machine to clean that floor is order. This is why order is rather a silly word we use in order to communication a very limited range of events in the macro aspect of our reality.
If the universe was orderly in every way, that is, the elements and the constants then it wouldn't have existed.
It makes more sense to view the world as random and depending on the focal length of your perception to distinguish between the seeming order
Thanks for your reply. I'm just an armchair philosopher and wannabe author, so it's nice talking to people who seem to know what they're talking about on these topics.
In your example of sand blown across a carpet (by the wind, I presume) the disorder is in the arrangement the sand ends up in, and the chances of such an event happening.
And with the sand machine, I guess you meant that the perceived order is in the consciousness operating the machine, the intention behind it?
So, is it that consciousness creates order, by physical manipulation via a body, or by mentally projecting order onto apparent disorder?
It seems to me that there are two forms of order - order created by living beings in order to suit their purposes, and order that exists in nature, which may be real, i.e. the structure of an atom, or simply perceived, i.e. seeing a face in a mountain on Mars.
But disorder, I still can't wrap my head around it. There is definitely perceived disorder, i.e. an illiterate person who sees nothing but gobbledygook in written text. But actual disorder... I mean, entropy is the the tendency toward uniformity, which seems to me a form of order.
Maybe we are actually saying the same thing. You see the tendency toward equilibrium as disorder, but I see it as another form of order, for now anyway, my mind tends to switch back and forth as I digest information.
Both order and chaos are words that humans made up to describe the world. But maybe neither accurately points to what's really going on.
No worries. We are all armchair philosophers.
It is not so much as the consiousness creating order, rather than perceiving order. In the example of the floor our culture has ingrained us with the idea that floors should not have sand and that we should clean stains with a sand machine. The universe doesn't care about these actions. physical reality does not change. Only in our perception these things take place.
I gave the example of the tv pixels for a better clarification. zoom and take a photograph of your tv and you see green, blue and red lights. Stand afar and you see moving images. Its all about the perspective. Everything is disordered around us and only the point of view matters.
This is why you hear people saying that they make the best out of bad situations. Really, there is no such thing as "bad situation". This is why order is just an illusion. People try to balance things out in respect to something else (in order to achieve what is perceived orderly) but things never work as such in life. Whether we talk about relationships or the markets the phenomenon is a non-existent thing nowhere else oher than our heads.
Let me give you another example (The physics are approximate) just to demonstrate the Incalculability of the matter. Consider a pool table game. By the first game you can, with accurate mathematics, to predict where each and every ball will land on the table. To do the math for the second move it becomes exponentially more difficult although with the assitance of a supercomputer maybe you can do it in a decade. By the time you reach the 3rd game you will need to take into considerationt the gravitational pull of the people around the table. By the 5th the position of the planets in our galaxy. By the 7th game (or so) you will need to know the exact position of every single atom in the entire universe. All these, to predict accurately the position of any ball in a single pool table game considering that the universe will hold still at the end of it. In our ever expanding universe the task becomes simply impossible. simply. it does not apply.
Indeed the linguistic barrier is hard to shed in order to wrap one's head around this. We do agree on the subject. I am actually enjoying the fact you see it from your own perspective. it think validates more my point about subjective perception.