Why random?

The questions of existence have plagued me for some time, especially when seeing current events in the world, especially religious wars, and from conversations with religious purists in a country that is greatly affected by religious supremacy. I will not say that I’m an atheist - far from it. In fact, I am not close to deciphering the idea of whether a creator exists – rather, I reject the idea of the deterministic creator, that some godly deity once upon a time sat down on his divine drawing boards and architected in absolute terms each and every nuance of our universe, and that he bestowed upon us a purpose, of never-ending toil, to transcend our flawed reality into his ideal. Nope. I would rather envision the creator (if ever there was one to begin with) as being a non-partisan agent who so eloquently created the entirety of reality (with the utmost indifference to all the good, bad, ugly or strange) through the bestowment of a singular, elegant operation. At this point of my thought, I have come to see this essence of being as Randomness – and that balance and equilibrium are the only observable truths resulting from this phenomena.

Of randomness and being; Of multiplicity and plurality in randomness; Of equilibrium and balance from randomness; Of meaning from the random

In the context of this essay, I shall define the term Randomness as a situation of unpredictability that arises from the inherent uncertainty of the states ontological matter.

Equilibrium and balance emerges as an inherent quality of randomness, indeterminacy and uncertainty. Random movement and flow of ontological matter within the continuum of time inevitably result in localized moments of intensity (what can be termed as aggregation, dispersion, intersections etc; can be classed as ontological behaviors). Such moments of intensity or momentary imbalances in existence causes tension in the system, and, ontologically speaking, these areas of tension could be areas where unique objects spring into existence. One could say that this is the cradle of meanings, experiences and knowledge. Yet, when these moments of intensity that give rise to meanings occur, they are simultaneously accompanied by moments of sparseness or meaninglessness.

Luciana Parisi in Contagious Architecture described the need to understand digital reality as a realm of infinite spatial and temporal quanitities that can be simultaneously understood in both a continuous and discreet manner. I think, the simplest example to illustrate this is the existence of a vector curve and its representation on the computer screen. One can zoom in infinitely into the curve (which is represented by an underlying mathematical equation – the continuous), yet, in each step of apprehension on the screen (each time one stops zooming), it is represented by a countable, finite amount of pixels.

Subjecting the abovementioned ontological behaviours to similar type of scalar shifts described by Parisi (not in the digital binary realm but rather in its own medium, one of ontological nature), it can be seen that large areas of seemingly balanced and coherent ‘noise’ can be magnified into localized sectors that yield observations of an imbalanced state. Going further closer, multiple sectors of imbalances again form a coherent whole. This, to me, describes a state of perfect imperfection, that perfection and ideals can only exist within a confined context, and that consequently, a multiple and plural state of ideals can coexist.

She can only be perfect the girl for you; An event I deem perfect to me can only be so to me in relation to my past experiences and interactions;In architectural regionalism, a design is best suited (perfect) to a context within the confines of specific criteria.

This back and forth between unpredictability and predictability in turns result in perceptions of non-random macroscopic phenomena which emerges from random events at the microscopic level. Thus, herein lie the beginnings of the notion of dialectics, duality and the discreet; of good and bad, top vs bottom, right vs wrong, etc. Yet none of them is or can be absolute, because they must all add up to satisfy the non-biased, non-selective coherence of the greater whole. To me, this captures the meaning of the saying there is no constant but change.

To an external observer (a being existing outside of time, one might say god, the omnipotent, etc) every event unfolding within this system of randomness can be perceived as random noise, thus the notion that all things being equal – the springing to being a grain of sand is no more significant than the emergence of life or that of two people falling in love, or that of a seemingly ‘spritually divine’ moment of birth or life creation – in other words, there is no meaning to be found here. It is only we, as beings/objects/observers within these localized areas of intensity, that are able to assign labels, classifications and a hierarchy of values to events – thus the formation of meaning for ourselves. I see the humanistic interpretation of the universe (that of viewing things and events from a sympathetic, sentimental and romantic standpoint of us humans as chosen/unique beings) as a good example of an emergence of meaning.

Furthermore, we, as beings which are inherently internal to this system of consequence of randomness, will never have a true way to reproduce randomness within our reality; rather, the closest we can get to true randomness is to simulate it through observation (one example is by way of recording positions of electron in an atom over time). From Wikipedia ‘…one of the intriguing aspects of random processes is that it is hard to know whether a process is truly random...’. Some mathematically defined sequences, such as the decimals of pi, exhibit some of the same characteristics as random sequences, but because they are generated by a describable mechanism, they are called pseudorandom. Yet it is us as humans who assign this describable ‘mechanism’ to the system in the first place. Thus as beings internal to this system we hold, or constantly invent, the ‘key’ to decode randomness as non-random, unique, events. Indeed, this could be the birth of logic, axiomatics and the subsequent body of human knowledge as we know it.

In Kwinter’s description of the cybernetic he assigns a series of autonomous or seemingly sentient feedback behaviours as a fundamental diagrammatic effect orchestrating reality – I suspect that these abstract machines are also a consequence of us decoding the random into the non-random.

Question of the creator

Does this attempt to contribute to the question of the existence of a creator? No, far from it. Just like the act of never ending magnification that turns the discreet into the continuous ad perpetuum, the issue of Questions means that there can always be a question to the question, that there can be no end to meaning. If randomness was the mother rule of all creation, then

who created the concept of randomness? I would apprehend my exploration here and resort to think that if there was a god, at least he would be wise and elegant enough to create reality through the single act of bestowing randomness – everything else is just a result of it.

Further readings

Quantum mechanics

Quantum computers

Grey areas

Could there be different lifeforms as we don’t know it existing within the particle?

Who created cause and effect?