To be honest I found this article a bit of a let down. I'm no mathematician or physicist, but I've thought about randomness a bit, though I don't have a satisf

To be honest I found this article a bit of a let down. I'm no mathematician or physicist, but I've thought about randomness a bit, though I don't have a satisfying understanding of it. First, we probably (haha) need to at least distinguish between epistemic randomness -- an outcome is unpredictable because we the observers have imperfect knowledge -- and real randomness, where an outcome is simply unknowable, period, and therefore undetermined and separate from the laws of classical physics. (That's where the quantum part comes in.) A roll of the dice is epistemically random -- we don't know how it will land because we can't get and calculate accurate data quickly enough. Presumably a god could. Apollo, the god of prophecy and Delphi seems fitting here. Don't go playing dice with him. He sees the dice in mid-air and knows on what atoms they'll land, what the windspeed is, the exact weight and spin, he saw the thrust of your fingers as they tossed the dice, and he can call out the result before they land and fall still. Indeed, if the universe is deterministic, he could have known since the beginning of time what you'd roll today. Lord Apollo would simply consult the great chain of cause and effect. Likewise, he'd know the outcome of all of your pseudorandom generators. The article seemed to deal only with epistemic randomness, right? Then there's the "real" randomness that is also called ontic (as in ontological), or quantum randomness. According to quantum mechanics if I've understood it correctly, electrons decay at _truly_ random intervals, intervals that have no cause whatsoever. This is perhaps to be disputed, or will be disputed, but hey, I'm happy that there's at least a chance for some indeterminacy in this universe. Even Apollo presumably couldn't guess quantum randomness. And so, maybe he couldn't guess your thoughts, because without some indeterminacy I don't see how there can be such a thing as free will. So the big question to me is, where and to what degree, if at all, does real randomness exist? If it doesn't exist, then presumably there is also no free will, although some "compatibilists" believe that determinism and free will are, well, compatible. From the little I've understood of their arguments (made by truly brilliant people like David Hume and many others), there's usually some sneaking in of a bit of indeterminacy, a bit of ontic randomness, when we (and probably they also) have a hard time noticing it. So anyway, that's the little I understand of randomness, but it's deeply interesting. I wish the article had been also. What I wish I could understand better would be how much some quantum randomness could effect our larger world, and if it could affect our neurology enough to grant us free will. Hmm... And now, back to work... ;)