Posted in: General

The Problem with Random

or

My theory of almost everything

I am not a physicist, a mathematician, a philosopher or a scientist… but I do like/love to contemplate on life, dissect it and analyse it. Basically, I guess, I’m just trying to make sense of it all.

The thing that always bugged me the most and was the hardest for me to make sense of was the use of “Random”…

If you search in Google for the definition of Random you get this:
“Made, done, happening, or chosen without method or conscious decision”

My biggest problem (being that I believe in Determinism) is that this to me just can not happen… I.E. there can not be something that had happened without a method, or a system. Something had to happen before the so-called “Random” event to generate the outcome.

For example; if a person was to throw a dice, the act of throwing the dice would have been the initial Cause and the dice landing on one of it’s sides would have been the Effect.

My believe

I believe that, given enough information (the speed of the dice, it’s rotation, movement, weight, height from the surface, etc…) I can accurately predict on what side the dice will fall – which means anything can be predicted (given enough information about it’s initial state) and the only reason something could be considered Random, is when it’s initial state is not known or there is not enough information to predict an outcome.

The problem with all this, is that this is not as simple as it may seem… You see, most of the time, it is virtually impossible to gather all the data on an initial state of a system in order to predict its outcome. Furthermore most systems are extremely complex and even the smallest parameters changed can make a huge difference on the system end state.

Never-the-less I still believe that everything in this world (and universe) is a direct result of Cause and Effect, this means that everything that is happening now is because of something that happened before, we are products of our past and the projection of our future.

Just because we do not have the understanding and the tools to accurately predict the outcomes does not mean that the universe is chaotic or unpredictable.

The First Cause Issue

But if everything happens for a reason, no matter how meaningless it is (the reason I mean), you would argue the “first cause” issue…

The First Cause issue is basically saying, if all effects follow a cause, what cause would have generated the first effect??? the beginning of the universe? obviously in our minds the universe had a starting point, before it there was nothing, if there was nothing before it then there could not have been any cause to generate the first effect – and that is puts a spanner to the whole theory.

Some will argue, a God… which means – God was responsible for the first cause, and the universe has been Deterministic ever since. But I don’t believe in that at all. it makes no sense! what caused God then??? I am not saying God does not exist I am just saying that even God must have originated from something.

So what does it all mean?

I think the explanation is much simpler, I believe that Time is what we got wrong…

See, we look at time as linear, just like a very long line, what happened in the past is behind us, we are travelling along side the present and ahead of us is the future. this means you can only travel it one way.

I think it is our perception that makes us see time as linear, we all experience time differently; for example if I sleep for eight hours without any conscious dreams and you are awake for those eight hours in an empty room doing nothing, time will move differently for both of us – I will summarise my eight hours as five minutes, and you will see them more like 30…

If we can experience time in different speeds, why not also assume that time can go backwards.

ok, so again…

I believe that there was no beginning to the universe, I believe that the universe is pulsating in time, starting a cycle very very fast; big bang,  galaxies expanding, stars being born (at this point time is going by very fast) and then slowing slowly more and more until the universe expands so much it is so vast time stops and the reveres happens – time rewinds slowly speeding backwards the universe implodes into itself, it shrinks until it reaches its smallest size (at that point at unbelievable speeds) and the big bang happens (again) and it all starts over. cycling like this for eternity…

To me, this means, that the universe always “happens” the same way, its been doing it for “god-knows-how-long” and every single time a cycle like this had happened it had happened exactly the same way.

Which means, we keep re-living our lives making the same decisions, same mistakes, same experiences, but because we do not know what will happen next – this all looks new to us.

Obviously, like I said before, I am not a scientist (or a physicist) and I have no way of proving any of this or even knowing if this is physically possible… but this is what I believe in (just like other people believe in God and they can’t prove it either) and I guess this whole post is meant to see if there is anybody out there that can either disprove me or prove me right…

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