One of the oldest philosophical questions is whether the Universe is deterministic or indeterministic. In a strictly deterministic universe everything that happens unfolds, causally, from the previous configuration of the universe. In such a universe, the thinking typically goes, man has no Free Will. We do what we are compelled to do by the rules of the Universe, or by the gods, if you prefer religious terminology. Our lives are controlled by Fate.
The advent of quantum physics threw a monkey wrench into the deterministic view of the universe constructed by scientists between 1600 and 1900. After considerable debate and experimentation, quantum physicists decided that at least some things in the universe happened by chance. This gave strength to the Free Will schools of philosophy and religion.
As far as I know my favorite philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, did not decree the universe to be deterministic, or indeterministic either. Wittgenstein was a philosopher's philosopher. He offered no direct guidance to living life, unlike say Friedrich Nietzsche or Henry David Thoreau. In fact it is hard to find a place where he said anything definite about the universe, at least not after his earliest work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
In his later works, including Philosophical Investigations, you might say that Wittgenstein deconstructs philosophy. But he is not a nihilist. For Wittgenstein the universe exists, it is no illusion. Instead what gives the aura of illusion to much philosophy, religion, and magical thinking is a swarm of errors that result from careless reasoning and the inexact nature of English and the other languages we use to do our thinking.
So what can best be learned from Wittgenstein is a technique, a critical attitude. It is similar to the ancient Socratic method of asking questions that lead a student to a correct, if complex, viewpoint. The trick to the Socratic method is asking the correct questions. I've never seen a formula for generating the correct questions. Wittgenstein provides no explicit formula, but his later works provide large numbers of examples of trying to apply an analytic (but often intuitive) process to philosophy itself. Frequently we are led to conclude that philosophy, like religion, is riddled with nonsense. Eliminating nonsense is one Herculean task that must be done if you want a clean stable for your ideas about the world.
Based on looking at many human and natural phenomena, we don't need to abandon the terms deterministic and indeterministic. What we have to do is use them more carefully and to realize that in certain situations there are shades of gray between them, and even room for both to be present in the same phenomena.
One of the most interesting and well-examined domains is probabilistic phenomena. We can speak of the probabilities of drawing an inside straight in poker, of an atom of radium decaying within the next pico second, of fog in the morning in London in February, or of Aunt Betty calling unexpectedly. But probability is another big word that may be misleading if we over generalize. Does shuffling a deck of cards create the same sort of probability as weather or quantum uncertainty?
Probability can exist in both a determinate world and an indeterminate world. From Newton's time until Heisenberg every throw of the dice was believed by scientists to be subject to the laws of (what we now call) classical physics, laws that were totally deterministic. Sure, with 2 dice, snake eyes came up every so often, and seven came up a reliable percentage of the time, but that was because humans had devised this method to introduce randomness. The dice were supposed to be shook up or thrown hard, making slight variations in muscle movements, too small to consciously control, result in outcomes that the thrower could not predict. A man of skill, throwing carefully, might cause dice to produce specified results at least some of the time, but other men monitored such cheating. The end result, fair or cheat, was determined by the placement of the dice in space, the momentum of the throw (including angular momentum), the exact characteristics of their bounces, and even the friction of the air.
When quantum physicists first discovered random atomic events many thought that there would prove to be underlying non-random, deterministic events that could explain the randomness. Much like Newtonian physics could explain, at least in theory, any particular throw of the dice. Einstein, for instance, believed that. But they were wrong, as far as anyone can tell. Many atomic and subatomic events do follow classical physics. Momentum, for instance, is preserved in atomic collisions. But decay processes, including radioactive decay and the emission of a light quanta by an electron "falling" from a high energy "orbit" to a lower energy orbit seem to be random events. At least within an envelope.
An envelope? They always leave that factoid out when religious gurus who specialize in the mechanics of separating their followers from money are elevating Quantum Physics to a Recipe for Mysticism. An envelope, here, is a metaphor for bounded probabilities. For instance, no matter how many times you role a pair of dice, the results are limited to the numbers between 2 and 12. That in itself is a kind of fuzzy determinism. Casinos, the old-fashioned kind with roulette wheels and people dealing cards, were built of fuzzy determinism. You could not predict which gamblers would win or lose any given hand or turn of the wheel, but at the end of the night the casino had more money than it started with.
Likewise a radioactive atom. You can't know when a particular atom will decay, but you can bet on a large group of atoms of the same element and not lose your shirt because the group emits radiation at a very predictable rate.
Once you start putting atoms together you quickly reach a point where quantum physics becomes pointless and you might as well fall back on classical physics. Yet engineers can build machines that make use of quantum mechanics for devices humans use, as shown by almost every electronic device made since the invention of the transistor. We use quantum uncertainty in our devices, yet we do that to increase predictable, deterministic behavior. If our devices get a glitch, the most likely sources are not quantum mechanical fluctuations outside the expected envelope but the failure of old classical components like a battery or solder joint.
So be careful about philosophical extrapolation. Or remember the modern key to all knowledge and wisdom: It's Complicated. You are made up of the same stuff of the rest of the universe, the arrangement is just different. We are arranged like mammals, only more so. Thinking about Free Will or Not Free Will will not help you make a decision. So take a deep breath and know that causality and randomness, determinism and indeterminism, are both going on all the time, within you and without you.
This essay is offered as a sacrifice to the Roman goddess Fortuna, and to the lucky Roman soldiers who won Jesus Christ's clothes at the crucifixion.
More quantum physics and philosophy
Showing posts with label dice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dice. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Randomness, Chance, and Two Darwins
We have the usual missionary cult groups in rural Mendocino County, California, near Point Arena: Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, and Jehovah's Witnesses. In general they seem to be pretty nice people. I don't mind them visiting their neighbors. They'll talk if you want to talk, and go away politely if you don't want to talk. It is interesting to see their opening talk lines.
A few month's ago Paul (not his real name), an earnest young man (younger than me, anyway, no big feat these days) from one of these groups, asked me, "You don't believe all of this is due to chance, do you?" His sweeping arms indicated my bishop pines, eucalyptus, the people present, the sky and the universe.
"Yes, I do," I said. That threw him. He acted as if they forgot to put that in the recruitment play book. We talked a bit more, and they left (they always seem to come in pairs, which is good, because you can offer them a beer and they'll say No).
Yesterday I read about the difference between the randomness of classical physics and the randomness of quantum physics in Inward Bound
by Abraham Pais. It reminded me of how much trouble I have had accepting the nature of reality at the quantum level, of how most people are even more confused by randomness than I am, and the conversation with the earnest Christian.
I knew Paul was referring to the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. No, for things to be as snafu as they are in this world, you need a Central Planning Intelligence, a sort of cosmic CIA, God's designer intervention team.
Because even trained scientists have difficulty with issues of causation and randomness, you can bet (or lay odds) that religious recruiters are going to use people's confusion to lay out their own highly improbably, but very simple, causal story: God created things (and he speaks directly to the leaders of my religion, the only true religion).
Natural liberation involves understanding nature's randomness and causality. That means understanding their respective roles in the world. You need to remind yourself some times that words like chance, randomness, planning, and causality are used by humans to lump together a wide variety of natural phenomena.
It is said that some Roman soldiers worshipped Chance (Fortuna) as a god. Plato, on the other hand, did not like randomness, and preferred unseen causes to explain the otherwise inexplicable world. There are also the related ancient ideas of Fate and Free Will. Some people don't like causality because it seems to take away free will, but most people accept some causality in the "outside" world while reserving free will for people's decision making process.
A lot of this is illuminated by understanding the difference between the randomness of genetics and evolution, the randomness of classical physics, and the randomness of quantum physics.
Classical physical randomness is the best starting point. Think about dice or better still, a card game. The cards in poker are supposed to be dealt randomly, and for practical purposes we don't think about that when playing poker unless we think the dealer is cheating. But we know that each physical card maintains its physical identity from hand to hand; shuffling cards is a causal process that gives the card order a sort of practical randomness.
The classical physics problem that is solved with this sort of randomness is calculating the energy, specific heat or temperature of some matter. It is easiest with certain "ideal" gasses (ideal because the theory works out!). In classical physics everything is causal. The gas molecules all have locations, masses, and velocities. They bounce off each other in a causal manner similar to colliding marbles. But there are two many of them to use ordinary calculus to keep track of, much less calculate the temperature. By treating the molecules as having random velocities and directions, scientists could group them. The properties of the groups, fit into the right equations, give good answers. Even then this is complicated enough that scientists (notably Ludwig Boltzmann) did not get this essentially right until the late 1800's.
The point to be noticed is that in classical physics, there is no inherent randomness in matter or energy. Randomness is at the macro level, or the level of human perception. It arises out of microscopic events that are too difficult for us to keep track of. When we roll dice, they obey all of Newton's laws of physics, we just can't keep track. Nature, presumably, does keep track.
Charles Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection is covered under this classical randomness theory. Darwin did not know about chromosomes or DNA. We now know that the DNA of two parents is randomly mixed and selected for each child. This is an example of classical physical randomness: causal laws are at work on the cell level, but we can't follow them, we can only see the results. Survival until reproduction of the next generation involves both events that we classify as causal (quicker, and so escaped a predator) and random (standing in wrong place, wiped out by a flood).
I knew I was technically wrong to say, to Paul that I believe "all this" was a result of chance. There is chance involved, but evolution is really best described as causal. Its randomness is classical, a matter of humans using statistics to describe complex large scale events that are causal at a microscopic letter.
A second scientist Darwin (or fourth, if you want to include Erasmus Darwin and George Howard Darwin), Charles Galton Darwin, a grandson of Charles, was one of the many scientists who contributed to the creation of quantum physics. Coincidence, or caused by his high level of intelligence, education, and a family tradition of breaking new ground?
In quantum physics, very early on, it appeared there were truly random processes in nature. Radioactivity was the first example. Atoms of radioactive elements appear to decay randomly. So of course all the bright guys of the era set out to show that there were underlying causes for the decays. That would have set their classical physics world to right. But they could not find any underlying, classical mechanism for the randomness. In the 1920's some younger physicists started accepting this quantum randomness as just inherent in the universe. Today there is still no causal theory that explains quantum randomness. It is an simply a human observation about nature at the quantum level.
The philosophic and religious interpretations of this facet of natural reality tend to simply be used to reinforce prior prejudices. Some say quantum randomness proves there is free will. Some say it means there must be a multiverse. Many project the randomness into scales well beyond quantum physics. In fact, randomness averages out very quickly, even quantum randomness. Put a few atoms together in a molecule, and quantum randomness tones way down. By the time you have anything worth worrying about, say a few hundred molecules of gold in a lump, quantum randomness has no effect on causality. Classical physics works better.
Scientists and technicians have produce clever ways to bring quantum randomness into the world of objects that humans can see, but this is an engineering trick. Electronics parts may use quantum randomness (as in quantum tunneling), but they are themselves very predictable.
It takes a lot of study to gain even a basic understanding of quantum physics. Even the Bible is an easier read than an introduction to quantum physics text book, not to mention the mathematical prerequisites required to comprehend the equations in it. Pop quantum physics is about as useful as Bible quotes taken out of context.
Nevertheless, here's a recipe:
Two Darwins Quantum Piety
"Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. And they parted his raiment, and cast lots [for it]." The Bible, Luke 23:34 [See also similar Matthew 27:35]
Thus is was that lots were cast at the most sacred event of the Christian religion, the Crucifixion [if it is not just a myth]. It was recorded because Fortuna wanted people to know that She does roll dice, both in the classical and quantum sense.
A few month's ago Paul (not his real name), an earnest young man (younger than me, anyway, no big feat these days) from one of these groups, asked me, "You don't believe all of this is due to chance, do you?" His sweeping arms indicated my bishop pines, eucalyptus, the people present, the sky and the universe.
"Yes, I do," I said. That threw him. He acted as if they forgot to put that in the recruitment play book. We talked a bit more, and they left (they always seem to come in pairs, which is good, because you can offer them a beer and they'll say No).
Yesterday I read about the difference between the randomness of classical physics and the randomness of quantum physics in Inward Bound
by Abraham Pais. It reminded me of how much trouble I have had accepting the nature of reality at the quantum level, of how most people are even more confused by randomness than I am, and the conversation with the earnest Christian.I knew Paul was referring to the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. No, for things to be as snafu as they are in this world, you need a Central Planning Intelligence, a sort of cosmic CIA, God's designer intervention team.
Because even trained scientists have difficulty with issues of causation and randomness, you can bet (or lay odds) that religious recruiters are going to use people's confusion to lay out their own highly improbably, but very simple, causal story: God created things (and he speaks directly to the leaders of my religion, the only true religion).
Natural liberation involves understanding nature's randomness and causality. That means understanding their respective roles in the world. You need to remind yourself some times that words like chance, randomness, planning, and causality are used by humans to lump together a wide variety of natural phenomena.
It is said that some Roman soldiers worshipped Chance (Fortuna) as a god. Plato, on the other hand, did not like randomness, and preferred unseen causes to explain the otherwise inexplicable world. There are also the related ancient ideas of Fate and Free Will. Some people don't like causality because it seems to take away free will, but most people accept some causality in the "outside" world while reserving free will for people's decision making process.
A lot of this is illuminated by understanding the difference between the randomness of genetics and evolution, the randomness of classical physics, and the randomness of quantum physics.
Classical physical randomness is the best starting point. Think about dice or better still, a card game. The cards in poker are supposed to be dealt randomly, and for practical purposes we don't think about that when playing poker unless we think the dealer is cheating. But we know that each physical card maintains its physical identity from hand to hand; shuffling cards is a causal process that gives the card order a sort of practical randomness.
The classical physics problem that is solved with this sort of randomness is calculating the energy, specific heat or temperature of some matter. It is easiest with certain "ideal" gasses (ideal because the theory works out!). In classical physics everything is causal. The gas molecules all have locations, masses, and velocities. They bounce off each other in a causal manner similar to colliding marbles. But there are two many of them to use ordinary calculus to keep track of, much less calculate the temperature. By treating the molecules as having random velocities and directions, scientists could group them. The properties of the groups, fit into the right equations, give good answers. Even then this is complicated enough that scientists (notably Ludwig Boltzmann) did not get this essentially right until the late 1800's.
The point to be noticed is that in classical physics, there is no inherent randomness in matter or energy. Randomness is at the macro level, or the level of human perception. It arises out of microscopic events that are too difficult for us to keep track of. When we roll dice, they obey all of Newton's laws of physics, we just can't keep track. Nature, presumably, does keep track.
Charles Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection is covered under this classical randomness theory. Darwin did not know about chromosomes or DNA. We now know that the DNA of two parents is randomly mixed and selected for each child. This is an example of classical physical randomness: causal laws are at work on the cell level, but we can't follow them, we can only see the results. Survival until reproduction of the next generation involves both events that we classify as causal (quicker, and so escaped a predator) and random (standing in wrong place, wiped out by a flood).
I knew I was technically wrong to say, to Paul that I believe "all this" was a result of chance. There is chance involved, but evolution is really best described as causal. Its randomness is classical, a matter of humans using statistics to describe complex large scale events that are causal at a microscopic letter.
A second scientist Darwin (or fourth, if you want to include Erasmus Darwin and George Howard Darwin), Charles Galton Darwin, a grandson of Charles, was one of the many scientists who contributed to the creation of quantum physics. Coincidence, or caused by his high level of intelligence, education, and a family tradition of breaking new ground?
In quantum physics, very early on, it appeared there were truly random processes in nature. Radioactivity was the first example. Atoms of radioactive elements appear to decay randomly. So of course all the bright guys of the era set out to show that there were underlying causes for the decays. That would have set their classical physics world to right. But they could not find any underlying, classical mechanism for the randomness. In the 1920's some younger physicists started accepting this quantum randomness as just inherent in the universe. Today there is still no causal theory that explains quantum randomness. It is an simply a human observation about nature at the quantum level.
The philosophic and religious interpretations of this facet of natural reality tend to simply be used to reinforce prior prejudices. Some say quantum randomness proves there is free will. Some say it means there must be a multiverse. Many project the randomness into scales well beyond quantum physics. In fact, randomness averages out very quickly, even quantum randomness. Put a few atoms together in a molecule, and quantum randomness tones way down. By the time you have anything worth worrying about, say a few hundred molecules of gold in a lump, quantum randomness has no effect on causality. Classical physics works better.
Scientists and technicians have produce clever ways to bring quantum randomness into the world of objects that humans can see, but this is an engineering trick. Electronics parts may use quantum randomness (as in quantum tunneling), but they are themselves very predictable.
It takes a lot of study to gain even a basic understanding of quantum physics. Even the Bible is an easier read than an introduction to quantum physics text book, not to mention the mathematical prerequisites required to comprehend the equations in it. Pop quantum physics is about as useful as Bible quotes taken out of context.
Nevertheless, here's a recipe:
Two Darwins Quantum Piety
"Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. And they parted his raiment, and cast lots [for it]." The Bible, Luke 23:34 [See also similar Matthew 27:35]
Thus is was that lots were cast at the most sacred event of the Christian religion, the Crucifixion [if it is not just a myth]. It was recorded because Fortuna wanted people to know that She does roll dice, both in the classical and quantum sense.
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