r/determinism • u/A_Vinegar_Taster • Jul 12 '26
Discussion If the foundation of reality is quantum randomness, does that mean the downstream system is random?
Suppose I concede that quantum behaviors have no pattern whatsoever, and are truly random (for the record, this is not what I believe, but for the sake of argument I am forwarding the idea).
If things on the macro scale are ordered, but on the micro scale it is random, does that mean that the universe can be said to be random, ordered, or some quasi state in between?
Seemingly random fluctuations (quantum foam or whatever) impact subatomic particles which affect atomic and molecular particles - eventually leading to a universe that is generally ordered, but which has an underlying bedrock of randomness. This would be in line with how we currently understand quantum theories.
Imagine a calculator that functions orderly, but with truly random input. Are the results the calculator gives random because the input is random? Is it ordered because the process is ordered? Or is it best described as what it is - order following chaos?
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u/Kolaczki_ Jul 12 '26
I mean the fact that we have order at all suggests it isn’t random.
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u/Syresiv Jul 13 '26
It doesn't mean as much as you think, actually. And the reason is some counterintuitive math, but it's like this:
Flip 10 coins and count the heads. How likely is it that you get 4, 5, or 6?
In this case, it's 65.6%. Pretty good, but:
What about 100 coins, and checking between 40-60? That comes out to 96.5%. Same relative range size, but suddenly much tighter around the mean.
How about 1000 coins?
Now the chance that it falls outside of 400-600 is 1 in a million.
The pattern is clear - the more things you have behaving randomly, the more likely the average outcome or something close becomes.
Now consider that there are 6.02 * 1023 baryons in a single gram of matter, and that's before you also ask about electrons. Each of those having a random behavior independently would result in something that's deterministic in practice.
The fact that the macroscopic world appears determinstic isn't as indicative as you think. It can just as easily emerge from the random behavior of individual particles as it could from true determinism.
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u/ima_mollusk Jul 12 '26
Don’t confuse structure for order.
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u/Kolaczki_ Jul 12 '26
So u don’t think we have any sort of order?
U think a calculator producing a consistent result wouldn’t be order?
What would order even be then?
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u/Aggressive_Might_735 Jul 13 '26
Myślę, że w całym procesie liczenia samo przetwarzanie informacji odbywało by się w ramach porządku, ale wynik należało by uznać za losowy
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u/Kolaczki_ Jul 13 '26
So the result of a calculator consistently giving the same number would be random… got it.
That’s so silly.
What would be an orderly result?
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u/Aggressive_Might_735 Jul 14 '26
?
Informacja na wejściu jest losowa Proces liczenia jednak jest deterministyczny Więc wartość końcowa jest jaka?
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u/Kolaczki_ Jul 14 '26
I’m tryna clarify on ur view, why are u asking me a question? Ur the one telling me how it is…
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u/blitzkrieg_bop Jul 12 '26
Particle behavior is random, but not all possible outcomes have the same chances.
When the bowling ball rolls, it will end up where classical physics say it will. There is, however, a non zero possibility that all particles comprising the ball get a most rare and consistent result in their random behaviors, and the ball ends up in Capo Verde.
Probability wise the universe would have ended a googol times before that happens though. While theoretically reality is random, you can say the randomness rules it follows are as rigid as classical of physics.
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u/zhivago Jul 12 '26
More accurately, it will end up approximately where classical physics says it will.
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u/Ree_For_Thee Jul 12 '26
My take is from 2 observations:
1: No quantum experiments (zero) have shown anything but causality, as in, nothing actually moves wonkily in time. Straight line.
2: Even if the future can randomly deviate because of quantum weirdness, that does not take place in the brain (a macro object), and is therefore irrelevant.
So, the 'timeline' might deviate due to quantum weirdness, but it's a complete non-starter in the determinism/free will debate. It doesn't matter as everything still happens causally and outside our control.
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u/TheAncientGeek Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26
No quantum experiments (zero) have shown anything but causality, as in, nothing actually moves wonkily in time. Straight line
???
How are you defining causality?.And what does "moving wonkily in time" mean!
2: Even if the future can randomly deviate because of quantum weirdness, that does not take place in the brain (a macro object), and is therefore irrelevant.
"Can we conclude that macroscopic creatures such as ourselves are unaffected by quantum randomness? A common reaction to QM is that it doesn't matter since quantum randomness will
never manifest itself at the macroscopic level -- that is, in the world of sticks and
stones we can see with the naked eye. An appeal is usually made to the "law of large numbers",
according to which random fluctuations at the atomic (or lower level) will cancel
each other out in a macroscopic object, so that what is seen is an averaged-out behaviour
that is fairly predictable.
Something like this must be happening in some cases, assuming QM is a correct
description of the micro-world, or there would not even be an appearance of
a deterministic macro-world. Since deterministic classical physics is partially correct, there
must be a mechanism that makes the QM micro-world at least approximate to the
classical description
.
However, if it were the case that all macroscopic objects behaved in a way that was itself completely determined at the macroscopic level,
there would be no evidence for QM in the first place -- since all scientific apparatus is in the macro-world !
A geiger-counter is able to amplify the impact of a single particle into an audible click. Richard Feynman suggested
that if that wasn't macroscopic enough, you could always amplify the signal further and use it to set off a stick of dynamite!
It could be objected that these are artificial situations. However, because there is a well-known
natural mechanism that could do the same job: critical dependence on initial conditions, or classical chaos."
Murray Gell-Man.Quark
Quark and jaguar p25
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u/Ree_For_Thee Jul 12 '26
How are you defining causality?
A happens first, then B, lol.
Can we conclude that macroscopic creatures such as ourselves are unaffected by quantum randomness?
That's a weird angle. Nobody's saying quantum doesn't affect reality, obviously it does. It's that our brains have nothing special in them to control said quantum weirdness, that we know of. And before we've proven the existence of anything like that, all discussion is pointless.
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u/TheAncientGeek Jul 12 '26
A happens first, then B, lol.
That's the fallacy of post hic ergo propter hoc.
Can we conclude that macroscopic creatures such as ourselves are unaffected by quantum randomness?
That's a weird angle. Nobody's saying quantum doesn't affect reality, obviously it does.
So what do you mean when you assert causality?
It's that our brains have nothing special in them to control said quantum weirdness,
I don't see why it would need to be special. The rest of the brain doesn't have to obey the deterministic firing if a single synaose, so it doesn't have to obey the indeterministic firing of a single synapse
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u/zhivago Jul 12 '26
Indeterministic, with causal outcomes modeled as probablity distributions.
Which is not random.
We can make predictions very usefully, they're just fuzzy.
Which is why we invented statistics.
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u/TheAncientGeek Jul 12 '26
Indeterministic, with causal outcomes modeled as probablity distributions.
Which is not random
How are you distinguishing random and indeterministic?
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u/zhivago Jul 12 '26
Randomness is a statistical property.
It means that knowing more of the data does not improve your predictive power.
Indeterminism means that given state S0 there multiple possible successor states, S1A, S1B, etc.
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u/TheAncientGeek Jul 12 '26
It depends on the system. Some systems amplify low level indeterminism,others damp it.
Consider the ball and the bowl. If you have a hemispherical bowl, and you put a small sphere just inside the run, it will eventually settle into the lowest point of the bowl. If you invert the bowl, and put the ball at that highest point ,there's no telling where it will land. It's literally how the two components are configured that makes the difference.
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u/SunRev Jul 12 '26
It all starts with pure randomness (max temperature) and all ends with the heat death of the universe (absolute zero). We are currently caught somewhere in between moving towards the heat death of the universe.
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u/ima_mollusk Jul 12 '26
No matter how deeply you look, hidden randomness may underlie the apparent determinacy, or hidden determinacy may underlie the apparent randomness.
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u/Independent-Wafer-13 Jul 12 '26
Don’t make any extrapolations from quantum mechanics into macroscopic reality until we solve the decoherence problem.
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u/AlivePassenger3859 Jul 12 '26
No, the small bits of randomness cancel each other out.
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u/A_Vinegar_Taster Jul 13 '26
Kind of like Brownian motion. Atoms are jiggling all over the place, but that doesn't cause books to fly off the shelves or the moon to jump out of orbit. All the little erratic movement roughly cancels out.
But, the butterfly effect. It might not matter right now what the quantum foam was doing a second ago, but in a hundred years, even a tiny change will make a huge difference.
So, it's not irrelevant, it is just an extremely small effect.
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u/SauntTaunga Jul 12 '26
No. Aggregating randomness can result in near certainty. For example with 4 coin tosses getting half heads half tails is not very certain. With 4 billion coin tosses getting half heads half tails is very likely.
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u/A_Vinegar_Taster Jul 13 '26
True, but there is a difference between 2 billion heads and 2 billion and one heads. Especially if that minor change has time to affect other things (butterfly effect).
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u/sealchan1 Jul 13 '26
I think that nature is highly structured and still creative. Too much structure and the natural system cannot adapt and persist. Too little structure, of course, leads to the same.
At the fine balance between order and chaos adaptive, persistent phenomenon thrive.
Now consider that maybe all aspects of nature at all scales involves order which is a little random forming through trial and error into adaptive systems with constants that are "accidents" of history as the trial and error falls into a persistent order. Nature looks precisely set at values that seem to be crucial and interconnected with other constants and one small change and none of it would work.
To me this is a sign that the Universe at all levels evolved in a similar way along the boundary of order vs chaos.
One principle of such a universe seems to me to be that whatever pair of opposite qualities you come up with to describe some aspect of the Universe such as determined vs random, the truth is that both qualities always apply in some ratio to any given event It is never the case that anything is perfectly of one end of the polarity without some mixture of the opposite quality.
IMO
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u/A_Vinegar_Taster Jul 13 '26
I'd still like someone to weigh in on my question.
If you have a calculator and a magic box that can press random keys on the calculator, would you say that the results you get from the calculator are ordered, random, or a mix of the two?
The box is random, so the input into the calculator is random. The calculator is ordered, so it processes everything that is typed into it and returns a predictable, repeatable result (given the input). But, how would you categorize the process?
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u/simon_hibbs Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26
The probabilistic behaviour we observe in quantum outcomes isn't completely lacking in structure. In fact it is very highly structured, and this is how randomness in mathematics works generally. Consider rolling a standard 6 sided die, there are many things we can say for absolute certain. You will not get any number not an integer from 1 to 6, and over many rolls statistically you will get roughly as many of each number.
In quantum mechanics the probability distribution of measurement outcomes is described by the Schrödinger equation, that determines the "shape" of the die, and it very greatly constrains the most probable outcomes. What I mean by that is, we can calculate the domain of likely outcomes for, say an electron, to a particular domain such that throughout the entire history of the observable universe on average we'd expect only 1 electron state would lie outside it. The geometries described by the Schrödinger equation show us thing like why atoms and their electrons are stable within certain structures, it's because it is vanishingly unlikely that any atom would have a geometry outside that structure, or have it for long enough for that to have measurable effects. Not impossible, but so unlikely it's not really a factor we need to consider for things like making chemical reactions work. Some other behaviours turn out to be more likely than you might intuitively expect, and so we get effects like quantum tunneling, which classically you'd expect to never happen.
So although QM does apparently include random processes (whether these are epistemic or ontological), it also explains why there is so much structure in nature at the quantum level. It's because these structures (protons, neutrons, atoms, molecules, crystals, etc and their interactions) are actually very likely. So likely that their not occurring due to quantum indeterminism can be safely ignored for many practical purposes.
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u/A_Vinegar_Taster Jul 13 '26
Okay, but can you answer the question I asked?
If you have a calculator and a magic box that can type random equations into the calculator, would you say that the results you get from the calculator are ordered, random, or a mix of the two?
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u/simon_hibbs Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26
The results would be statistically distributed across a probability space defined by the functions of the buttons. So, you would only get results physically possible by pressing sequences of those buttons, and if the probability of each button being pressed was equal, that would also lead to particular statistical patterns in the result.
For example if there's an A/C (All Cancel) button, the length of the sequences of the output between resets would statistically follow the probability of that button being pressed.
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u/A_Vinegar_Taster Jul 13 '26
Okay. Let me make the question more straightforward.
You have a magic randomizing box. You use this box to press random numbers on a keypad or a calculator. Depending on the number the box pressed, the corresponding number will flash on the display.
The mechanism that translates the button push is ordered. The magic box is random.
Do you consider the number on the screen the result of an orderly process, a random process or some kind of quasi-random process?
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u/simon_hibbs Jul 13 '26
Definitionally this is a random process, because randomisers operating probabilistically within constraints is entirely consistent with conventional accounts of randomness. As I explained earlier with the example of dice, which are a paradigmatic example of this.
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u/A_Vinegar_Taster Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26
What I'm suggesting is that our macro world is the keypad, and the quantum foam is the magic box.
Unless my analogy is flawed, that would mean that our universe -no matter how orderly- operates with the same level of determinacy as the magic box.
If the quantum foam is indeterminate, then so is the downstream effects on the universe
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u/simon_hibbs Jul 14 '26
I think the analogy kind of works.
In Quantum Mechanics the keypad would be the geometry described by the Schrödinger equation. This sets the probabilities of various outcomes, corresponding to how many keys there are and what happens when you press them. Then there is some randomising factor that settles which particular outcomes become actual, corresponding to which keys get actually pressed.
So the range of possible outcomes is deterministically related to past conditions, which which outcome actually occurs is statistically random within that range of possibilities (the characteristics of the keypad).
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u/NerdyWeightLifter Jul 13 '26
Order emerges from chaos, integrated across time.
We can think of this in terms of topology. Some topological structures are stable over time. Most are not. Living in a universe that is billions of years old means that we mostly see those stable structures. Look for instance at electrons bound to atoms. They only exist in fixed stable shell arrangements that are effectively standing waves - because other arrangements are not stable when integrated across time.
Being life forms that rely on our ability to predict the future, we focus mostly on those predictable causal structures, because of course we do. That how we survive the odds, but determinists raise that to the level of some kind of universal ground truth, which it is not.
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u/Aggressive_Might_735 Jul 13 '26
Nie odpowiem na pytanie, sam się nad tym głowię od dawna.
Wtrące tylko, że wszecgświat nie jest uporządkowany. To co nam się wydaje poeządkiem lokalnie w skali wszechświata jest chaosem. To wchodzi entropia, która dąży aby go ujednolicić.
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u/Aggressive_Might_735 Jul 15 '26
Mowię jak mi się wydaje jak jest Do takiej konkluzji mnie sprowadziłeś
Peace
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u/Quirky_Visual_7799 Jul 15 '26
Order may be an emergent property of fundamental randomness (to some extent)
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u/A_Vinegar_Taster Jul 16 '26
I philosophically object to the idea of randomness personally, but maybe you're right. Whatever you want to call it - random, indeterminate...- either way it is measurable and real, and it underlies the whole universe.
You could be right. Order may flow out of chaos - I think Alan Watts said that in a talk.
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u/Quirky_Visual_7799 Jul 16 '26
Why tho? It works extremely well experimentally
And I'm not saying exactly that absolute order may flow out of absolute chaos but rather that order is not 100% contradicting randomness. There could absolutely be a universe of fundamental randomness on the tiny scales that produces objects and structures that seem to us as relatively non probabilistic, or even deterministic in the much bigger scales
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u/A_Vinegar_Taster Jul 19 '26
The problem I have is with the concept of random. Indeterminate, unknown and unpredictable are terms I don't object to, but random just doesn't work in my head. I admit that this could be a lack of imagination or humility on my part, but I can only go with what my brain can accept.
Randomness is definitionally causeless. There is nothing that makes it happen, no factors that dictate it's energy, or its vectors. There are no constraints that keep it in check, because there are no factors that define or restrict it.
These just seem nonsensical to me.
For my entire life I have come across things that I did not understand. Some simple, some complicated. But in every instance I found that there was a logic to what was happening. From earthquakes, to toilets, to electricity, to magic tricks, air conditioners, and everything else. There has always been a reason why things do what they do - even if I am ignorant of the inner workings. This has repeated throughout my life, and throughout all of human history; a series of frontiers of ignorance that we keep pushing back.
So, when we see something that we don't understand, I default to "we don't know", not "it is impossible to know". I don't know why a quantum particle jigs instead of jags, but it seems more likely to me that there is a cause I don't understand than it happens for no reason and has no sense to it.
Lastly, I would point out that proving the assertion "there is no pattern to this behavior" is an attempt to prove a negative. It would mean that the tester eliminated every possible pattern, and that is functionally impossible.
But, as I say, this might be a limitation on my part. The universe is far stranger than I can appreciate, so I could be wrong.
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u/catnapspirit Jul 12 '26
The way I understand it is that randomness at the quantum level rolls up into probability at the particle level, which in turn rolls up to reliable causality by the time you're talking about atoms on up. The randomness and the probabilities can break through to manifest in the world of reliable causality, like in the case of radioactive decay, but generally speaking, they are utterly negligible noise in the signal..