Random Thoughts (Part 1)

 In The Origin Question, I brought up randomness and its role in the structure of different models of the universe. This post is a non-authoritative ponder on the nature of randomness.

Randomness requires that information, in particular causal information, be unavailable but that there be a detectable effect.  In other words, there is a causal component, a component with an attribute that's coupled or adjacent to an affected component, but the components and the coupling mechanisms of the causal component are either a) unknown, or b) don't exist.

Unknown causal behavior comes in two forms; not known and can't be known.  Not known, is perhaps the cleanest.  All that means is that there's an incomplete but potentially resolvable causal chain to a worldview.  Can't be known is potentially more interesting.  It would imply that there are unresolvable gaps in the causal mesh (the system of interlinked causal chains).  I guess that means that they effectively (no pun intended) don't exist, thus the decomposition of randomness collapses a bit.

A component as we've discussed might be visualized as follows...

A simple causal chain might look like...

A causal mesh might look like ...

Note that each component in the mesh may have different attributes that they exhibit and different effects that they are sensitive to.  It's also not the case that a mesh is linear in that it may contain arbitrarily complex feedback loops.

... This has been an interesting drill down into the nature of components, but I can't address randomness yet until I address knowledge and world views.  This helps to frame that discussion but it will need one or more separate posts.

Things to explore further...

• Models, worldviews, and knowability.