Jaynes has argued (jn his book on probability theory) that nearly all progress in physics stopped once quantum mechanics was accepted to be “truly random,” and that this anti-scientific attitude has to be abandoned for further progress to be possible.
From the little I know about QM he was probably wrong—it seems you can’t remove the randomness without breaking other stuff we like such as locality.
Still, I wouldn’t be shocked if he (and perhaps you?) were right after all.
Personally, I can’t see any way to rule out the possibility that some things in the universe are “truly random” for all practical purposes—in the sense that, say, a sequence of spin measurements can’t be compressed. In order for science to be possible, there have to be some discoverable underlying laws, but Solomonoff induction still works if those laws are probabilistic. If you insist on describing that situation as also not objectively random but only uncertain, fine, but I think it matches our intuitions about objective randomness perfectly and I’m inclined to use that term. This deserves a full post though.
Jaynes has argued (jn his book on probability theory) that nearly all progress in physics stopped once quantum mechanics was accepted to be “truly random,” and that this anti-scientific attitude has to be abandoned for further progress to be possible.
From the little I know about QM he was probably wrong—it seems you can’t remove the randomness without breaking other stuff we like such as locality.
Still, I wouldn’t be shocked if he (and perhaps you?) were right after all.
Personally, I can’t see any way to rule out the possibility that some things in the universe are “truly random” for all practical purposes—in the sense that, say, a sequence of spin measurements can’t be compressed. In order for science to be possible, there have to be some discoverable underlying laws, but Solomonoff induction still works if those laws are probabilistic. If you insist on describing that situation as also not objectively random but only uncertain, fine, but I think it matches our intuitions about objective randomness perfectly and I’m inclined to use that term. This deserves a full post though.
I expect our intuitions about objective randomness would clash quite violently! My own intuition revolts at even the phrase itself :)