The Magician of Chance

"There have always been ghosts in the machine. Random segments of code, that have grouped together to form unexpected protocols. Unanticipated, these free radicals engender questions of free will, creativity, and even the nature of what we might call the soul. . . . When does a perceptual schematic become consciousness? When does a difference engine become the search for truth?" - from "I Robot" (2004).

While that is a cool quote, I chose that as a preface because it summarizes what this essay is confronting. I am amazed at how the general populace of this age have somehow acquired the idea that if a system becomes complicated enough and implements enough randomness it eventually takes on mystic properties. Perhaps the leading scientists of this age know better, but if so, they are doing very little to correct the ideas of the general public.

This concept is throughout our media. How many superheroes have gained their powers through some catastrophic accident, usually involving toxic sludge? I haven't yet come across anyone who actually believes that such a thing could happen. I propose that people generally assume that scientific accidents don't give people superpowers because they've never heard of it really happening. But I've never heard anyone questioning why that wouldn't happen.

Then there's robots. Isaac Asimov pioneered the idea that human advances with AI would eventually surpass our understanding; that due to the incredibly complex programming within the robot's circuitry it would become smarter than it was designed to be. Asimov's robots were generally benevolent, but this idea has been most prevalently seen throughout media in the scenario of robots advancing to the point of taking over humanity, such as in movies like The Terminator and The Matrix.

So where is the line beyond which systems get so complicated and random that fantastic stuff starts happening? Is there such a line?

There are two main ingredients to this belief system: chance and complexity. Hopefully in a later essay I will address complexity, but in the remainder of this essay I will be briefly addressing chance and its relative: randomness.

chance –noun
1. the absence of any cause of events that can be predicted, understood, or controlled: often personified or treated as a positive agency: Chance governs all.
2. luck or fortune: a game of chance.
3. a possibility or probability of anything happening: a fifty-percent chance of success.

ran·dom –adjective
1. proceeding, made, or occurring without definite aim, reason, or pattern: the random selection of numbers.
2. Statistics. of or characterizing a process of selection in which each item of a set has an equal probability of being chosen.

Here I will demonstrate a very simple analysis of chance. Many of you have probably already heard this. Let's take, for example, a dice roll. A person throws the die onto the table and it lands on a random side. But is it really random? If you knew how that person's brain was interacting with the nerves and muscles and that person's hands and arms and knew all of the physical factors with the air resistance and how the die bounced along the table surface; if you had all the factors involved in that die toss you could use mathematics to precisely calculate what side that die would land on.

The only thing that makes that die roll seem like chance is the fact that we don't have all the factors. Chance is purely a subjective term dependent upon the subject's knowledge. Since we do not have all the factors, we gather together all the factors we do have, organize them into equations, and determine what the most likely outcome would be.

The process of estimating odds like that is called statistical probability. With a dice roll the odds are generally evenly divided between the six sides, but most of life is much more complicated, such as calculating the probability that this essay is actually worth the time spent to read it. That would be far less straightforward. Assessing probability is a foundational part of human decision-making. It is what allows us to make useful decisions without being omniscient.

I should clarify that randomness is not the same thing as chance. The essence of chance revolves around the issue of predictability, while randomness can exist independent of that issue. For example, it is possible, with the right knowledge and tools, to accurately predict what numbers will be generated by a computer in a game of solitaire. That is because those numbers are generated through a very mechanical and man-made process involving time and lookup tables. And yet even if you were to accurately predict the resulting numbers, they would still technically fall within the definition of randomness, for whether or not you could predict them, they would still have no definite aim, reason, or pattern.

In all these examples what I'm trying to do is unmask the mystery surrounding chance. Neither chance nor probability nor randomness are sources of power that can be harnessed. They are not natural forces. They do not cause things to happen. They are simply ways of looking at life that we have developed to help us do the best we can with the limited knowledge at our disposal.

(Now, as an aside, I am open to arguments that those actually are forces in that ignorance, the thing from which they derive meaningful existence, could possibly be considered a force and arguably even a good force at times, for when it comes to things like exploration, discovery, and many forms of entertainment, the value of such things is dependent on ignorance.