h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Things do happen in our space at random - quantum events such as electron tunnelling, nuclear decay or zero point energy -not 'everyday' things but things nonetheless. Does this imply some kind of boundary with another universe where these events are being generated?

F

I think no. Even if there were other universes, random events in *our* universe could never show them to us.

Dealing with the sort of random events you mention probably requires a clearer definition of random than I've given (I take it to mean a change of state of a system from one state to another that has no causal connection to it.)

Noggin

Fair enough Noggin. While inarguably random, the events I've outlined are still constrained within their local circumstances. Nevertheless the universe is a big place so if random events were occurring *somewhere* we wouldn't necessarily be able to see it.

What you are saying is clearly that either there is only 'our space' and that the laws of physics (granted that we may not know what all of those laws are) hold true everywhere within 'our space'; or else if alternate 'spaces' do exist - for example in the various multiverse theories - no communication is possible between 'spaces'.

There's an obvious logical conclusion from this and I'm left wondering why you haven't gone on to develop and express it.

F

I think the problem runs in "the opposite direction", so to speak. If random events in our space *were* being "caused" by events in another space, we would have no way of seeing that other space. And if energy conservation laws were not being broken there would have to be a metarule that governed the interactions, as I noted in the original piece.

Part of the reason for not expressing the obvious logical conclusion is that, Wittgenstein-like, I want people to work it out for themselves, at least initially. And, who knows, maybe your obvious logical conclusion is different from mine .

Mine involves logical spaces, and is indebted to Spinoza,
Wittgenstein and Poincaré.

Noggin

Noggin

Ah, yes.

I see from your answer that your logical conclusion is different to mine but not unrelated to it. Mine involves illogical spaces and is indebted to Russell and Penrose.



F

no, hadn't seen this Noggin, cheers for the pointer.

I may have misunderstood the direction of the above but does not random merely mean not understoof?
If something truly were random then it would occur without cause and effect, without any rule or metarule. As such it would have no informational content, no meaning. And any meaning which an observer did confer upon it would be purely subjective on the part of the observer?
It is entirely possible that the the universe (metaverse?) is random and what we see as rules and metarules are merely just random fluctuations which appear to hang together but are in fact just chance coincidences.
Of course, should that be the case, then everything we know of could just disappear in a

flash.

Quite agree, Icky. Genuinely random events would indeed be information-free,which is why any attempt to talk about domains with an entirely different set of rules to our own (eg outside time and space) are entirely meaningless. They are necessarily information-free.

The 'not understoof', is a bit more complex. I'd say it meant not merely not understood, but actually unobservable/unknowable in some sense (we are, if you like, talking here about Kant's noumenon). But the distribution of the possible locations of an electron, for example, is not random, but stochastic, which suggests some sort of underlying reason (to me anyway ).

Of course, it could all be some sort of huge coincidence and


Noggin

then Einstein really would have been wrong with his plea that "God does not play dice..."

Whether or not there is some underlying order and causality to (ahem) apparently random quantum fluctuations is hotly debated.

While any truly random event adds no information to the universe what it does do is dilute the mechanistic determinism inherent in the operation of immutable physical laws on the material universe. Or something.

Of course we could continue to

F

thing is, just *one* truly random (i.e. without cause, unpredictable, without rule ) event blows the rest of causality away. Not in a necessarily literal way, but rather if it is possible for such a thing to exist then it must be outside of, or encompassing of, the causal world since a system of rules and regulations cannot contain a truly random event. If even one such event did occur then everything we see around us, everything we think we know is just a localised blip, a chance ocurrence, a spontaneous ordering within a chaotic universe and as such has no meaning.

As such it doesn;t dilute the mechanistic anything. I think I understand what this is trying to say, it seems to me to be saying that without a little bit of randomness (chaos) we'd exist in a totally deterministic universe. That little bit of randomness is required to allow us to deviate from a deterministic world.

I can't say I agree, mainly for the reasons above. Chaos and order are not dilutable, and what we generally refer to as chaotic systems are usually merely complex ones which we fail to comprehend.

Chaotic and complex systems are wholly deterministic because they follow the rules of causality just like simple systems. Chaotic systems however often appear random because they have a high sensitivity to initial conditions - as in weather systems where the famous 'butterfly flapping its wings' in Montana could eventually result in a hurricane over Texas. These are frequently employed as random number generators (cf. the UK National Lottery machines) although ultimately are not really random. On the other hand the random number generator for the UK Premium Bond office (called ERNIE for Electronic Random Number Indicating Equipment) uses tunnel diodes and the quantum phenomenon of electron tunnelling and therefore really is random. No outside causative agent has ever been discovered to explain this phenomenon and as mentioned above this aspect of quantum physics is hotly debated.

I don't see how the existance of these random events "blows the rest of causality away". Although we normally only experience causality and the classical laws of physics only admit causality (if it is possible then it is also compulsory) quantum weirdness allows for a different scenario.

I can't accept your premise that "a system of rules and regulations cannot contain a truly random event." Much less your conclusion that "If even one such event did occur then everything we see around us, everything we think we know is just a localised blip, a chance ocurrence, a spontaneous ordering within a chaotic universe and as such has no meaning."

A system of *causal* rules and regulations cannot admit random events but the universe we inhabit is not necessarily that simple. On the other hand everything we see around us *is* (if not just a localised blip) a chance occurrence and I certainly wouldn't ascribe meaning to any of it.

Also:
I was not intending to suggest that randomness is somehow required by the universe to avoid total determinism as you seem to have read into what I posted. I'm merely saying that there are random events, albeit tiny, and they do affect the nature of determinism in some way.

F

The problem here is that one of the things we can't determine is whether the universe is deterministic or not. The only possible test (that I can think of) would be absolute predictability. But we know that the universe could be as deterministic as you please, and absolute predictability would still be impossible (special relativity, the uncertainty principle, the Church-Tuhring thesis etc).

Some events must therefore appear random, with no way of telling whether they are or not.

Noggin

Fathom:

I think I was a little opaque in my posting.

"A system of *causal* rules and regulations cannot admit random events but the universe we inhabit is not necessarily that simple."
OK, but that implies you can have a system of rules and regulations which is non-causal - I don't see how this can be.

To explain about my causal not containing random and one random event blowing away causality.

Basically I see two possibilities. One is that everything is causal. There are rules and regs for everything. Be that multiverses, universe whatever. And what we see is the 'practical' working out of those rules as they jostle with each other. what you get from that is complexity which may to us seem random but isn't.

OTOH there are no rules. True randomness or chaos. However, theory states that order can come from disorder (chaos theory to be precise, although I am somewhat suspicious that even here, chaos just means 'very complex and we don;t understand it'). Thus it is possible that the causality in which we exist, that which we see, is a small island afloat in a sea of randomness (to be poetical about it). And it is quite possible for some of that randomness to infuse the causality we exist in, since it too is a product of the surrounding randomness (I'm using 3 dimensional imagery here, but in no way to I think this has any such limitation. True randomness/chaos has no limits, by definition. It is not enclosed, but may be enclosing).

So what I'm saying is that one truly random/chaotic event means that the causal universe theory cannot be. If randomness exists, then it can only exist as the enclosing property and not the enclosed one. So one bit of randomness blows the idea of a totally causal everything out the water.

If there is randomness found inside a causal system, it must have come from outside the causal system since if it were enclosed by a totally causal system then it would be defined by that causal system meaning it was limited and not random/chaotic. Therefore any randomness in a system must have infiltrated it from outside/below/ontop thus meaning that at a fundamental level, the universe is not causal.

"I was not intending to suggest that randomness is somehow required by the universe to avoid total determinism as you seem to have read into what I posted. I'm merely saying that there are random events, albeit tiny, and they do affect the nature of determinism in some way."
Ah, I see. Although see above for where I think that leads.

I follow your logic here Ictoan: in a universe with "rules and regulations" all events are causal. However the implication is that those rules and regulations are themselves strictly causal which is, to me, a tad circular. I also accept that in that case one bit of randomness would demonstrate that the (causal) rules do not always hold. On the other hand can we not conceive of rules which allow for an element of randomness under certain conditions? After all, any random events we do observe only occur on tiny 'quantum' scales.

Whether these random events are being 'injected' into the observed universe from some wider enclosing realm is a valid conjecture but one which may never be answerable. If they are truly random then they carry no useful information about their source of origin. If we do discern a pattern however, this could provide a useful insight into some deeper structure of the universe as a whole. In either case there would still have to be some rule which controls how these random events (I'll use the following phrase for simplicity) enter our universe from outside and this rule would have to apply on both sides of the interface.

An article in this week's New Scientist explores the influence of randomness on the early universe:

http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg19626243.500-universe-explained-by-quantum-randomness.html

F

shame it's on a subscription, which I am far to tight to pay for

I should state here and now that my view reasoning from what evidence there is and what I have read is that we are indeed an island of causality in a sea of randomness. It's kinda key to my reasoning of what is, and what is not. However, in order to validate it properly, I'm trying to investigate and propose the argument for the alternative - that there is no randomness and all is rule based.

Indeed, I wonder if there is a third option (ok, I admit, I think there is always a third option!). The view of a causal universe seems to me based on a ground up theory of a hierarchy of laws or rules. I.e there is a basic bottom level of rules, where they interact you get a higher level of rules (like E=mc^2) and so on up till you things like v=IR. The search for the grand unified theory seems to be a search for a bottom level rule which gives rise to everything else and seems predicated on a purely mechanistic causal universe.

If the 2nd option is a random universe (as the bottom level with no rules) from which other rules pop up as they feel like it (ykwim) then a third possibility would be many bottom level rules which interact to produce the higher level. In some ways I'm bringing the theories of how the brain works in here. It used to be thought that there was a mind and it did stuff. Now we know there are lots of different modules which interact and co-exist, but are not built upon each other. And it is the interaction of these different modules which produces the behaviour we see. So is it not possible that in the universe we have lots of different modules (gravity module for example, quantum module etc) which coexist but do not have a common parent?

thinking further to that (is all philosophy driven by insomnia?) both option 2 and 3 are are random universe based, just different ways for the observed causal world we find to exist. No real way of ever knowing for sure since we can't ever know that we have got to the bottom rung of ladder.

"On the other hand can we not conceive of rules which allow for an element of randomness under certain conditions? After all, any random events we do observe only occur on tiny 'quantum' scales."

Thing is, if randomness exists, then what we are actually saying is that 'the rules do not apply here' so you can't have rules which allow for randomness. Or rather, any rule allows for randomness since the randomness is outside the scope of any rule. Rules cannot define randomness, only their own limits. So in a way, the limits of the rules define the boundary of the causal universe. Obviously different rules will have different boundaries, so where one ends another starts. If there is a 'gap in the rules', which is what your 'tiny bit of randomness' really is (or so it seems to me!) then that means that the rules do not cover everything, hence we do not have a totally causal universe and we're back to option one of a random universe and islands of causality.

BTW I hope this isn't coming across wrong - I'm working this out as I go along in response to the comments I am getting back!

<>

Isn't this more or less where we came in?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't most quantum uncertainties have a statistical pattern/distribution?

This appears to be *exactly* where we came in; and now I'm confused but thinking it over. In summary:

I say there are random events in our universe.

Ictoan says there can only be random events in a causal 'space' (to avoid the word 'universe') if they are generated from a non-causal 'space'.

You say any 'space' which can affect another 'space' must obey some rule or meta-rule which is obeyed in both spaces.

So far so good but:

Ictoan seems to be saying that any space which admits randomness cannot be causal and therefore does not obey any rules.

All four of these premises seem valid to me but they also seem to lead to a contradiction over the rule or meta-rule at the boundary.

Have I overlooked something?

F

don't think so

I think the way to rationalise the non-causal affecting the causal is thaqt the causal is in fact a random event. Albeit it a (4 dimensionally) big event. What I means is that a causal event can be a random event in that something could cause something else to happen, randomly. The rules which govern that causality being a random event themselves. I.e. due to some random happening these rules exist at some point and causal events happen within the constraint of those rules. This means that although within the causal 'space' (good way of wording it, shall use this from now providing we are all happy that space here does not mean 4d-space/time) you have an internally consistant causal universe where x lead to y, that causal space is a subset of random space and has no meaning externally to it and any internal meaning is exactly that, only internal and only means anything with reference to itself. Hence I guess you end up with circular reasoning that x causes y because you are in a causal space where the rules state that x causes y. There is no reason why there is a rule that means x causes y, that rules just randomly happened.

Two points

As per post 11 there is a distinction between unpredictable-in-principle, and indeterminism. Even in a fully deterministic universe some events are unpredictable-in-principle, and may appear random.

Secondly, there is an epistemological point. There is no way of distinguishing an event that is caused in a non-rule-governed way by another event, and an event that isn't caused by anything at all (as per Fathom's point about information).

Does that help?

Noggin

point 1:
"Even in a fully deterministic universe some events are unpredictable-in-principle, and may appear random."
True, and I covered that with my comments about randomness/chaos as 'we don;t know'. This means it isn't random and is causal. Unpredictable-in-principle is still predictable and not random.

point 2:
If the event is non-rule governed then it wasn't caused by anything, which means it *is* "an event that isn't caused by anything at all " which is why you can't distinguish between the two, they're the same.

If something causes something else to happen then you have interaction which is essentially the playing together of rule sets. You can't have a randomly meanindering physical particle because movement is governed by rules. Equally, you can't randomly cause an event to happen because the cause and effect is rule based.

What you can have is random creation and destruction of rules. What those rules then cause may appear random, but it isn't. In order to have something which can do something or cause something you must have rules to define it and its behaviour.

So, for example, a particle cannot randomly influence another. But it is possible for it to randomly appear as a result of the random creation of a rule which lets it so appear.