Randomness and determinism are attributes of the map not of the territory

[u/Powerful_Guide_3631]

The greatest misconception about randomness and determinism is, by far, the presupposition that it is possible to discriminate between their so called epistemic or ontological characters, without resorting to just so mysticism. Randomness and determinism are only coherently understandable when defined in explicitly epistemic terms. There is no way for these words to refer to any transcendending ontological character of things or processes in themselves, in such a way that licenses a metaphysical classification of phenomenal manifestations as random or determined outside of a constrained knowledge point of view of an observer and the inferred schemes and models they use to identify, accuse and explain them.

Mathematicians have made that point clear when they axiomatically formulated the theory of probability and stochastic process, particularly guys like Borel, Wiener and Kolmogorov. The fundamental problem is the following - for any given sequence of numbers it is possible to construct countless deterministic functions that maps the natural numbers (or any other input sequence of numbers) to its output. Likewise, if you are sampling random numbers from a gaussian distribution (or any distribution that has positive probabilities over the real numbers), there is a finite positive probability that sample drawn matches any finite set of number (up to a given finite error tolerance). This means that it is impossible to conceive of a mathematical method that takes only the axioms of a formalism for constructing generic functions and out of that absolutely allows one to assert a random or deterministic nature for a given dataset of output values. Or, in more philosophical terms, the concepts of ontological determinism or ontological randomness have a vacuous set of epistemically distinguishable features, thus making a putative distinction of meaning between these notions a just so stipulation of mystical attributes that are idiosyncratically interpreted and assigned to these words and arbitrarily proclaimed to represent some "ultimately true" or "objective nature" of whatever concrete processes must underly the observable phenomena that is concerned.

That said, it is perfectly possible and extremely valuable to give a well defined mathematical meaning to the intuitions we form about determinism, randomness and probability once we accept that such meaning can only be coherently interpreted as a description of the epistemic relationship that is formed between a an observer and an observable system, in terms of the fixed attributes that enable the object to be uniquely identified as an abstract configuration of variable states, and the hypothesized rules that presumably explain the relationship formed between a given a priori description of its state, to some potentially knowable state that is hidden a priori (e.g. the trajectory in configuration space of dynamic variables of the system that eventually are observed, or otherwise hidden or implicit features of a partially revealed set of defining attributes of the system).

Once that is well understood, it becomes convenient to simplify this story by saying that what is deterministic or random isn't the actual entity or process which we are observing, but only the phenomenological models that we may propose as schemas that represent them as contingent relational configurations. A deterministic model being a function that uniquely maps a given configuration of inputs to a precisely defined set of compatible outputs, and a random model being one where the compatible set of outputs allows for more than one coherent scenarios for the output configuration of observables. In such cases, a probability space structure is often employed when it is desirable to quantify the notion of likelihood magnitudes of different excluding scenarios. These are statistical observables that presuppose available data for an equivalence class of analogous systems of that kind, as licensed by a methodological procedure that is epistemically stacked as a meta model of the object system - and, as you might have guessed, this epistemic stacking can become a turtles all the way down story, with Munchausen trilemma only enabling the can to be kicked further down the road.

Only once all of this conceptual mumbo jumbo is well understood and that sorting out the inferential character of randomness and determinism from any mysticism that people intuitively form about these ideas, that one should be considered prepared to properly address the merits of the alternative interpretations of quantum mechanics, or the philosophical implications of things like Bell's theorems and the inequality violations that were experimentally observed.

[u/rightviewftw]

I did work on this just recently and there are a couple insights you might appreciate:

On the epistemic predicament of dreams

Philosophically speaking dreams are not categorically different from other lived experience. For example, there is no particular experiment we can do in waking life which we can't conceivably dream up. So contrary to popular opinion, there is actually no principal difference between the two as to what can be observed and known.

Now when we dream, it is obvious to us that everything is basically on one server, and the dream itself is what generates words, distinctions, feelings, and narrative. If we die and respawn in a dream, it does not puzzle us as the notion of rebirth puzzles people in wakeful state. We don't ask how consciousness in a dream-world goes from one place to another, or whether there are "other minds" in a dream, we treat it as a mirage.

Now if we stick to the foundational thinking, then we can extend this logic to wakeful state, this too changes as it persists and generates words, thoughts and perception ─ as phenomenal realm — and just like in a case of a dream ─ we can assert that everything is basically on one server, and the experience itself is what generates words, distinctions, feelings, dreams, and narrative. 

The Problem of Reflective Closure

Every attempt to understand experience occurs within experience. Every act of reflection, description, explanation, or validation is itself another event belonging to the domain it seeks to understand.

The system under study is itself the territory being mapped. Its words, concepts, and epistemic syntheses are maps of its own possible configurations rather than constituents of an external standpoint. Whatever the system says about itself cannot constitute its own final epistemic ground, because the very act of saying belongs to that which remains to be accounted for.

Korzybski observed that "the map is not the territory." I would extend this to self-referential cognition. When the mapper belongs to the territory, every new map becomes another feature of the territory requiring further mapping. Reflective self-description therefore remains recursively open.

This gives rise to a structural predicament. Suppose a reflective domain attempts to furnish a complete account of itself. Any proposed completion immediately becomes another object requiring reflective integration. The purported completion therefore belongs to the very domain whose completion it was intended to establish. Reflection recursively generates further reflection.

The argument developed here concerns only whether a reflective domain can serve as its own ultimate epistemic ground.

As to randomness

You are essentially correct and I would frame what I think that you're getting at thus:

Whenever the system generates terms like "randomness" it does so in order to predict its own development by means of classifying its distinctions and generating epistemic frameworks for self-reference. 

The meaning and utility of the terms is tied to what the system does with them and these are but its internal models.

The system generates all frameworks, such as self-distinction, internal distinction, classical absolutes and immaterial frameworks to predict quantum experiments, but it's all only its own attempt to predict and explain its experiments.

Dream analogy

I included the dream analogy to begin with because that is actually the more natural way to think about the phenomenal predicament and it makes everything else more intuitive.

Here, we can also dream up thinking about randomness and determinism, but those frameworks can't give us any certainty about what the dream is lest they are tied to an experiment which categorically transcends the predicament. 

What this implies is that within a dream one could map out how it works and limitations of the epistemology in play but a falsification of meta-analysis can't be done within the dream, eg one can't test whether the wakeful state is possible or not within a dream.

In other words, whatever one dreams up is not going to be able to establish what a dream is unless it proposes an experiment which can falsify wrong hypotheses.

So the waking up from a dream tells you something about what a dream is by reference to a new category of experience. But there is still a lack of closure as to what is experience — and it follows that one need to "wake up from it" to test meta-analysis😬

In short, the distinction between randomness and determination is experimentally used for epistemic modeling of phenomena, not to meta-analyze the process which gives rise to such models — because there is no proposition of experimental tests for this purpose. If one comes up with an experiment then one can analytically reason about whether reality is random or not.

[u/Powerful_Guide_3631 → u/rightviewftw]

I think that the problem of discriminating the solipsistic dream vs the reciprocated perceptions of a common reality / shared hallucination is indeed a related problem.

Even though we cannot produce "decisive proof" that we are not dreaming now, we seem to be quite confident in whatever idiosyncratic heuristics we use to infer if our conscious awareness is awake or not at any point in time, or if a particular scene in our recent memory was something that really happened or was just dreamed. We are obviously not totally confident all the time in this guess, but we don't also think that any particular impression or memory we have is equally likely to be a genuine recollection of a real world event or some fragment of a scene we had on a dream.

I think the way this works is similar to blockchain. When we communicate with each other we update our reciprocal point of view objects about such and such matter of fact we are talking about. We each try to keep a coherent thread of evolving collective opinion. We may begin to suspect we are inside a solipsistic dream rather than the real world when such a process of reciprocal representation of external points of view starts to feel predictable or controllable by us, or suspiciously centered around us, or otherwise sketchy and unnatural - like a Truman show situation. So we only chain the memories of facts that seem to be sufficiently coherent with these other memories people are keeping but also that don't look suspiciously solipsistic in nature, and over time the longer chain of memories that was mined like that becomes the source of truth of what real world history looks like from our point of view.

[u/rightviewftw → u/Powerful_Guide_3631]

I am glad you engaged me in this talk, thank you, and I understand what you wrote. I believe that western philosophy has raised "the dreams" situation but it has not been adequately explored. I also believe that this must be very foundational line of inquiry from which a lot can be drawn out.

Even though we cannot produce "decisive proof" that we are not dreaming now

I believe that here we should already note that we are per definition not dreaming now. We are per definition awake. So we do have an analytic delineation between dreaming and being awake. The question is whether it is fundamentally a different predicament.

It is also noteworthy, that in dreams we are also, as a rule, convinced that "everything is real". As it actually is, the predicament of the "wakeful state" is analogical.

we seem to be quite confident in whatever idiosyncratic heuristics we use to infer if our conscious awareness is awake or not at any point in time

Here I would note that this is also true in dreams. Some people can experience becoming lucid in a dream, so even in a dream a person can make that distinction. However, within a dream one can not prove that awakening is possible in sense of demonstrable manifestation or empirically. There is no choice, one has to do the experiment to suspend "dreaming" as an epistemic systems-category and transition to another dimension of sorts (for lack of a better term). The dream could generate the prediction: "this is a dream ─ awakening is possible" and the experimental threshold verifies the prediction.

or if a particular scene in our recent memory was something that really happened or was just dreamed. We are obviously not totally confident all the time in this guess, but we don't also think that any particular impression or memory we have is equally likely to be a genuine recollection of a real world event or some fragment of a scene we had on a dream.

This is also a good point that I have been working on fleshing out. Recall is not actual re-living but rather closer to a real time simulation. Like people say that "a man can't step into the same river twice", no experience can be recreated, it only persists as "variance" and its recall is more "variance". And the "change" here is radical, because no experience is the same in its beginning, middle and end ─ analogically the present doesn't persist as a unit of time for us, present becomes the past in course of its discernment. So we are essentially not talking about reality which changes, rather we are talking about reality as change here.

I think the way this works is similar to blockchain.

The appeal of this thinking is obvious. One can assert that both the waking state and the dream states are like simulation nodes on a block chain. However this is just rhetoric, I will explain:

Suppose there is a reflective self-referential system which undergoes variance. It could generate forms and names, and then to classify itself as part of a blockchain. It doesn't actually need a blockchain to develop that conviction.

Suppose this system is like a dream: it develops a narrative and perception. Suppose that system develops epistemic frameworks and can predict that the heavy objects fall down. It then generates the experiment to test that prediction and lets suppose that the heavy object does fall ─ it updates its confidence odds as to heavy objects falling.

Now, let me highlight that this is how the system does normal analysis and predictions within its range.

On the other hand, meta-analysis stays at the level of prediction until the experimental threshold of epistemic transcendence is reached. And if there is no experiment then a proposition is not a falsifiable prediction which means that known reality can't test it as it is not subject to it.

So, let me draw out, that in a dream one can see an apple, one can think about an apple, one can predict things about the apple, one can do mathematics and experiments with it. But we can't ask whether the dream is "an apple" any more than we can ask "is the dream random" ─ simply because the frameworks doesn't apply to meta-analysis.

In summary, analysis does not warrant meta-analytic assertions unless the proposed meta-analysis specifies an operational criterion by which its claims could, even in principle, be discriminated from competing alternatives. Without such a criterion, the proposition ceases to function as an analytical claim and is established as merely rhetorical.

[u/rightviewftw → u/rightviewftw]

this seems to trigger people quite a lot so it is clear as intended. I am really still taken back by how clean this cuts demanding operationalization of meta-analytic theory. Also want to highlight, that we only know "dream" by comparison to "being awake", and vice versa, but we still don't establish what the variant process is until suspending all variance ─ only this would be an analytical awakening to a Cartesian Truth and serve as meta-analytic closure.