Can a human being ever be truly random? While we are all aware that computers can only ever make an attempt at simulating randomness in their relentlessly digital way, humans are the pinnacle of complex analogue machines, and should therefore be completely capable of authentically random action.
Food for thought, to be sure. I am going to follow a rather twisty thought process here for a moment, so bear with me. It might be messy. I am going to postulate that not only are humans incapable of random action, but that there is no such thing as random except as a logical concept (like zero).
It is possible (but difficult in many cases) to ascertain the probability of something happening as a ratio, and in fact some brilliant quantum mechanic has pretty much determined the probability of everything (I can’t back this up with an online link, but it was done to determine the maximum number of universes possible in the “Many universes” theory).
You could, in theory, figure out the likelihood of my continued rape of the comma, or my enslavement of parentheses. You probably have enough statistical data at this point.
If everything has a probability that is less than 1:infinity, then can anything be random? Unlikely, for sure, but not truly random, right? One can calculate the odds of someone killing someone else, or the odds of someone committing suicide, or the odds of someone falling in love with someone else, because it is less than infinite.
It got messy, as I said it might. I’m not sure what to make of randomness. I know the appearance of randomness can be achieved, but I lack the statistical mathematics to back up the idea that true randomness is unachievable.
But I managed to get you to read to the end of the post, just like I knew i would. ☿
~c