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"but less important than the process of natural selection, which is not random at all." This is wrong. A random process (gene mutation), within a randomly chan

"but less important than the process of natural selection, which is not random at all." This is wrong. A random process (gene mutation), within a randomly changing environment - is a 'net random process'. The author tricked himself. The purely physical/materialist perspective does have this paradox: we're just purely random bags of particles, and there actually cannot be any such thing as 'intelligence' or 'life' or 'love' or 'language' - just the appearance of it. If you throw a bag of a trillion^trillion^trillion particles into a purely self contained environment (i.e. the Universe), and let it stir for a while - whatever is going on - at least from a materialist perspective - is random. Scientists realize this and there's a new field of thought called 'emergence' which at least tries to grapple with it 'one step' away from materialism, and they toy with the idea that properties of complex entities may 'emerge' independent of their more simplistic constituent parts.

sambe 10y ago
It's very clear from the context - which you've omitted - that they meant the selection part rather than the mutation part: "random mutation is an important element in evolution, but less important than the process of natural selection, which is not random at all" So their point is that random mutation occurs but is then filtered non-randomly, like a high-pass filter on noise. It's still a bit of an overstatement to say "not random at all" since there is obviously some (bad) luck in "fit" individuals dying or "unfit" individuals surviving. In the long-run though, you can see their point. They go on to make a ridiculous claim that because you are here, nothing random happened to your ancestors. I would say it's just one possible history, and perhaps everyone makes mistakes with randomness.
- delinka 10y ago
  It seems you're saying that the 'fitness algorithm' filters randomness and therefore the result is 'less random.' And while I can see your point, I'm of the mind that filtered noise is just less noise. But it's still noise.
  - peeters 10y ago
    If I give you a stream of decimal digits, and you filter out everything except for 9s, would you call the resulting stream as random as the input stream? How about if you filter every digit that is not exactly one more than the last unfiltered digit?
bradfordarner 10y ago
> If you throw a bag of a trillion^trillion^trillion particles into a purely self contained environment (i.e. the Universe), and let it stir for a while - whatever is going on - at least from a materialist perspective - is random. This seems to lead to a meaningless/useless definition paradox. 'Randomness' comes to mean everything and nothing. This is one of the things that led me away from an interest in the materialist/physicalist position. Like you said elsewhere, it seems hard to swallow the idea that all that we can achieve in defining 'randomness' is a negative definition. Personally, I find it problematic that materialism has no positive definition of what 'randomness' is and does not seem capable of offering a meaningful/useful definition.
- jjaredsimpson 10y ago
  Are you saying you think dualism has some persuasive explanatory power?
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  Sort of by definition, you can't fully describe a random process. (A little fiddling actually turns that in to a pretty good definition of what a random process is, but that gets really technical, really quick.) I doubt you'll find any better usage of randomness in other fields, and in many ways, "random" is used to censor things our theories can't represent, and wrap them in stochastic approximators. This is useful, because we can then use the stochastic models as a bound on the possible outcomes caused by things we can't model (for various reasons). This let's us calculate useful predictions involving things we don't or can't know. I don't think randomness is a negative definition, just that our primary usage of the concept is boxing up unmodelable things.
philipov 10y ago
Emergence is the principle that people are more than the sum of their parts: they're the product.
- jjaredsimpson 10y ago
  Emergence is the idea that properties may arise in complex ensembles which have descriptions which are best describe by the collection. These properties are not best describe by the behavior of the simpler constituents.
malloryerik 10y ago
I'm sorry but, if you "threw a huge number of particles into a self-contained environment and let them stir for a while," you should have a purely deterministic, non-random, and if you could get the data and do the math, a predictable situation. Maybe I'm missing something, or we're talking about different things? Nietzsche's "eternal return" posited just this type of situation, a limited (though huge) amount of stuff, and a limitless amount of time, well with those two you'd relive your life an eternal amount of times, presumably. As an aside, I personally find a warming way of thinking of this idea by fictionalizing it to imagine that "I" might live a future life of every other person and even animal. Maybe by thinking like this I will be more likely to treat them as ends in themselves, and not as a means to an end, that's to say, closer to Kant's "categorical imperative". That would be nice.
- edblarney 10y ago
  "you should have a purely deterministic, non-random, and if you could get the data and do the math, a predictable situation." From a Newtonian/Classical perspective - yes. But we're at quantum physics now - so no. Every single particle interaction is basically 'inherently random'. Also - what you are saying would apply to 'us' as well, that we are all deterministic ... again, because we're living quantum (as far as we know) - no, it's random. Purely random is where materialism stands now. I should add that materialism is just one metaphysical presupposition.
  - malloryerik 10y ago
    What I don't understand is how much indeterminacy the quantum allows into our Classical-seeming world. At what levels? I completely agree that the classical determinism I mentioned also applies to us. One of my questions is whether and then how and then to what degree the randomness from quantum events can allow free will and then free action. So, I wonder how much quantum randomness affects things. For example, atomic clocks face indeterminacy but are all the same the most accurate clocks we have, by far. Of course, once you add things like eternities, this can surely get very different... But 13 billion years is very far from an eternity... Also I do understand that materialism is only one of many metaphysical suppositions. But it's the one that we can seem to do the most with. Hard to do much with metaphysical idealism, for example... Anyway I'm no scientist or mathematician or philosopher so I'm out of my depth here. I'd be interested in your thoughts though. Thanks ~~

sambe 10y ago

It's very clear from the context - which you've omitted - that they meant the selection part rather than the mutation part: "random mutation is an important element in evolution, but less important than the process of natural selection, which is not random at all" So their point is that random mutation occurs but is then filtered non-randomly, like a high-pass filter on noise. It's still a bit of an overstatement to say "not random at all" since there is obviously some (bad) luck in "fit" individuals dying or "unfit" individuals surviving. In the long-run though, you can see their point. They go on to make a ridiculous claim that because you are here, nothing random happened to your ancestors. I would say it's just one possible history, and perhaps everyone makes mistakes with randomness.

delinka 10y ago
It seems you're saying that the 'fitness algorithm' filters randomness and therefore the result is 'less random.' And while I can see your point, I'm of the mind that filtered noise is just less noise. But it's still noise.
- peeters 10y ago
  If I give you a stream of decimal digits, and you filter out everything except for 9s, would you call the resulting stream as random as the input stream? How about if you filter every digit that is not exactly one more than the last unfiltered digit?

bradfordarner 10y ago

> If you throw a bag of a trillion^trillion^trillion particles into a purely self contained environment (i.e. the Universe), and let it stir for a while - whatever is going on - at least from a materialist perspective - is random. This seems to lead to a meaningless/useless definition paradox. 'Randomness' comes to mean everything and nothing. This is one of the things that led me away from an interest in the materialist/physicalist position. Like you said elsewhere, it seems hard to swallow the idea that all that we can achieve in defining 'randomness' is a negative definition. Personally, I find it problematic that materialism has no positive definition of what 'randomness' is and does not seem capable of offering a meaningful/useful definition.

jjaredsimpson 10y ago
Are you saying you think dualism has some persuasive explanatory power?
SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
Sort of by definition, you can't fully describe a random process. (A little fiddling actually turns that in to a pretty good definition of what a random process is, but that gets really technical, really quick.) I doubt you'll find any better usage of randomness in other fields, and in many ways, "random" is used to censor things our theories can't represent, and wrap them in stochastic approximators. This is useful, because we can then use the stochastic models as a bound on the possible outcomes caused by things we can't model (for various reasons). This let's us calculate useful predictions involving things we don't or can't know. I don't think randomness is a negative definition, just that our primary usage of the concept is boxing up unmodelable things.

philipov 10y ago

Emergence is the principle that people are more than the sum of their parts: they're the product.

jjaredsimpson 10y ago
Emergence is the idea that properties may arise in complex ensembles which have descriptions which are best describe by the collection. These properties are not best describe by the behavior of the simpler constituents.

malloryerik 10y ago

I'm sorry but, if you "threw a huge number of particles into a self-contained environment and let them stir for a while," you should have a purely deterministic, non-random, and if you could get the data and do the math, a predictable situation. Maybe I'm missing something, or we're talking about different things? Nietzsche's "eternal return" posited just this type of situation, a limited (though huge) amount of stuff, and a limitless amount of time, well with those two you'd relive your life an eternal amount of times, presumably. As an aside, I personally find a warming way of thinking of this idea by fictionalizing it to imagine that "I" might live a future life of every other person and even animal. Maybe by thinking like this I will be more likely to treat them as ends in themselves, and not as a means to an end, that's to say, closer to Kant's "categorical imperative". That would be nice.

edblarney 10y ago
"you should have a purely deterministic, non-random, and if you could get the data and do the math, a predictable situation." From a Newtonian/Classical perspective - yes. But we're at quantum physics now - so no. Every single particle interaction is basically 'inherently random'. Also - what you are saying would apply to 'us' as well, that we are all deterministic ... again, because we're living quantum (as far as we know) - no, it's random. Purely random is where materialism stands now. I should add that materialism is just one metaphysical presupposition.
- malloryerik 10y ago
  What I don't understand is how much indeterminacy the quantum allows into our Classical-seeming world. At what levels? I completely agree that the classical determinism I mentioned also applies to us. One of my questions is whether and then how and then to what degree the randomness from quantum events can allow free will and then free action. So, I wonder how much quantum randomness affects things. For example, atomic clocks face indeterminacy but are all the same the most accurate clocks we have, by far. Of course, once you add things like eternities, this can surely get very different... But 13 billion years is very far from an eternity... Also I do understand that materialism is only one of many metaphysical suppositions. But it's the one that we can seem to do the most with. Hard to do much with metaphysical idealism, for example... Anyway I'm no scientist or mathematician or philosopher so I'm out of my depth here. I'd be interested in your thoughts though. Thanks ~~