At the beginning of the twenty first century the prevailing and vigorously defended view is that the Universe happened by chance. All fundamental sub-atomic processes are thought to be “random” and the only way to quantify them seems to be the “uncertainty” principle. Clearly, our conclusions about the Reality of the Universe are determined and limited by our imagination. Can we imagine alternatives? What if nothing in the Universe is by chance? Could it be by CHOICE?
At the beginning of the twenty first century the prevailing and vigorously defended view is that the Universe happened by chance. All fundamental sub-atomic processes are thought to be “random” and the only way to quantify them seems to be the “uncertainty” principle. Clearly, our conclusions about the Reality of the Universe are determined and limited by our imagination. Can we imagine alternatives? What if nothing in the Universe is by chance? Could it be by CHOICE?
On a very intuitive way of thinking, if it is already determined that some event will happen, then there is no non-trivial chance of it failing to happen, and if it is already determined that some event will not happen, then there is no non-trivial chance of it happening. A different sort of worry that arises for an actual frequentist analysis of deterministic chance is that such an analysis seems unsuited to theories like Boltzmannian statistical mechanics or Bohmian mechanics insofar as those theories are supposed to describe the evolution of the Universe as a whole. It should be clear, then, that there are options available for understanding deterministic chance that are in keeping with several of the leading metaphysical analyses of chance. It is widely accepted that whatever chances are, they are to be contrasted with individual credences . According to classical statistical mechanics, the fundamental laws are Newtonian and thus deterministic.
Even processes that inherently involved chance were pre-determined. Long before dice were used for gaming, they were used for divination. Ancient thinkers thought the gods determined the outcome of a die roll; the apparent randomness resulted from their ignorance of divine intentions. Oddly, modern science at first did little to change that view but it showed that randomness was nothing intrinsic; just a reflection of humanity's lack of information. Here, Brooks examines whether anything in the universe is truly random.
Many people in the world of science will often employ terms like 'indeterminacy', 'chance', 'probability', etc., and using knowledge from the world of science they will often attempt to draw philosophical conclusions about the nature of reality as a whole.Claims typically made center around the idea that everything happens by chance, or everything is a result of probability, or that reality is fundamentally indeterminate, etc. But at the root of these claims is a vague and imprecise understanding of what these terms really mean.
In classical physics there is, in accordance with common sense, an objective world ‘out there’. That world evolves in a clear and deterministic way, being governed by precisely formulated mathematical equations. This is as true for the theories of Maxwell and Einstein as it is for the original Newtonian scheme. Physical reality is taken to exist independently of ourselves; and exactly how the classical world ‘is’ is not affected by how we might choose to look at it. Moreover, our bodies and our brains are themselves to be part of that world. They, also, are viewed as evolving according to the same precise and deterministic classical equations. All our actions are to be fixed by these equations - no matter how we might feel that our conscious wills may be influencing how we behave. Such a picture appears to lie at the background of most serious 1 philosophical arguments concerned with the nature of reality, of our conscious perceptions, and of our apparent free will. Some people might have an uncomfortable feeling that there should also be a role for quantum theory - that fundamental but disturbing scheme of things which, in the first quarter of this century, arose out of observations of subtle discrepancies between the actual behaviour of the world and the descriptions of classical physics. To many, the term ‘quantum theory’ evokes merely some vague concept of an ‘uncertainty principle’, which, at the level of particles, atoms or molecules, forbids precision in our descriptions and yields merely probabilistic behaviour. Actually, quantum descriptions are very precise, as we shall see, although radically different from the familiar classical ones. Moreover, we shall find, despite a common view to the contrary, that probabilities do not arise at the minute quantum level of particles, atoms, or molecules - those evolve deterministically - but, seemingly, via some mysterious larger-scale action connected with the emergence of a classical world that we can consciously perceive. We must try to understand this, and how quantum theory forces us to change our view of physical reality.
I suppose one could imagine laws of physics which would dictate that a world be exactly so, and not otherwise, allowing no detail to be varied. But what could dictate that those laws of physics be ‘the’ laws of physics? By considering a spectrum of possible laws, one could again consider a spectrum of possible worlds. In fact the laws of physics of our actual world, as presently understood, have no such dictatorial character. So that even with the laws given, a spectrum of different worlds is possible. There are two kinds of freedom. Although the laws say something about how a given state of the world may develop, they say nothing (or anyway very little) about in what state the world should start. So, to begin with, we have freedom as regards ‘initial conditions’. To go on with, the future that can evolve from a given present is not uniquely determined, according to contemporary orthodoxy. The laws list various possibilities, and attach to them various probabilities. The relation between the set of possibilities and the unique actuality which emerges is quite peculiar in modern ‘quantum theory’ – the contemporary all-embracing basic physical theory. The absence of determinism, the probabilistic nature of the assertions of the theory, is already a little peculiar… at least in the light of pre-twentieth-century ‘classical’ physics. But after all everyday life, if not classical physics, prepares us very well for the idea that not everything is predictable, that chance is important.
How to unite scientific zest for universal causation with ubiquitous randomness is a profound question. Nearly a century ago quantum physics and then genetics were forced to accept both concepts as two independent realities which seemingly contradict one another. Here we are not going deep into philosophical considerations about the essence of the material world and science. However, it is difficult to deny that randomness, or in other words uncertainty, looks like a serious challenge to universal causation and science has to moderate the importance of this traditional core principle. Surprisingly such an uneasy shift did not significantly reduce the capability of science to describe and predict. Even more surprisingly this fundamental change went relatively smoothly and did not dramatically affect the “daily business” of science. This does not mean of course that science can still operate in a purely Laplacian deterministic framework. A steady transition to a new scientific perception of the world is inevitable and ongoing.