Is randomness a myth?

Asking from a layman's perspective, if everything has a cause and effect relationship, how can anything be truly random? Wouldn't any event occur as a result of a preceeding causal effect?|||"if everything has a cause and effect relationship, how can anything be truly random?"





You assumed your answer in your question.





Why do you assume that everything has a cause and effect relationship? Radioactive decay is an example of something that is simply random. Chaotic behavior, such as turbulent fluid flow would be random. Various noise sources can be random.|||From a quantum perspective, everything is random and unpredictable, and nothing is ever certain. The location of electrons inside of a probability cloud is random. The time at which a single uranium atom will decay is random. But on a larger scale, everything is, in theory, predictable. The path of a ball through the air is predictable if one knows the angle at which it was thrown, the energy imparted on the ball, etc. The rate of decay of a lump of uranium is predictable, to an extent.





So really it's all a matter of scale. Not everything in the universe has a cause and effect relationship.








On an unrelated note, thoughts can be and often are very random ;D|||For most of his lifetime, Einstein agreed with you. He believed in materialistic determinism. If you could know the state of every particle of the universe at any point in time, you could completely predict the future. That was of course impractical. But the discovery of quantum physics showed that it was also theoretically impossible. Randomness is a fundamental component of the physical laws of the universe.|||I can come up with a few 'true random' events:





Gender: Specifically in humans, the male 'chooses' the gender, but nothing can predict accurately which type (X or Y) will penetrate the egg. You can only tell until after it gets in and gender-specific qualities start forming on the fetus.





Gambling*: Okay, not exactly gambling, but dice rolling. When you roll dice, you can't be sure what number will land up. Luck or not, you have a 1 in 6 chance of guessing a specific 6-sided die to land on any particular number.





Okay, two examples. I'm sure there are more, but I'm too young to have experienced them.|||Randomness is not a myth. You raise a good point about causality but aren't figuring on the nature of the cause and effect interplay. You aren't seeing what Randomness is.





A landslide for example. It can be started by a pebble dislodging in a gust of wind. It hits another rock and both of them start falling. As they fall, they hit a larger rock that falls and hits a rock that was holding more rocks in a delicate balance. Disrupting the balance causes the whole weight of rocks to slip which in turn hit more and more rocks until eventually a whole side of the mountain's collection of loose rocks and boulders comes tumbling down.





We can take an event that has happened and walk it backwards to figure out what happened. By doing this we can see the cause and effect. By seeing the C%26amp;E, we think "was this really random if we can see what happened step-by-step?"





Yes it was, since we cannot escape cause and effect. Something has to cause something else to happen. A popcorn kernel pops because heat is applied. A drop of water falls off of a leaf because the condensation formed a droplet too heavy to stick to the leaf. Etcetera.





Randomness comes into play BEFORE the events unfold. That same pebble dislodged by the wind might instead have been moved by a stronger or weaker gust of wind changing how much it moves. A slight change either way may cause the pebble to hit a tuft of grass and stop before it hits anything. Some sand might slow or even mire it down. It might land against the other rocks without enough force to move it.





Say we change the speed of the wind. Now the pebble lands in a tuft of grass. What happens next? Did the pebble injure the plant? Did it help trap more soil? Did it shade a seed that would have otherwise been cooked by the direct sun?





Cause and Effect are inescapable. Randomness is the uncertainty of what the effect the cause may create.





In a perfect universe, if you drop a rock from the same height, and hanging by the same point, and dropped in the same orientation, and dropped on the same surface...it should fall the same way every time. But in the real world, a change in air pressure, temperature (of the rock, surface, air, etc) a floating dust mote, any number of possible changes that are too small to be seen by us will change the way the rock falls.





This is the heart of what is called Chaos Theory...at least at it's simplest, most laymans terms.