Is The World Completely Deterministic?
I am currently reading the popular science bestseller “A Brief History of Time” written by a very well known physicist called Stephen Hawking. Hawking makes a suggestion in the first chapter of the book that human beings' understanding of the laws that govern the Universe is itself governed by the laws of the Universe!
I write computer programs for a living and random number generators have always intrigued me a lot .
A random number generator is a function (from computer programming) used very often in the kind of programs that I write and is an algorithm that generates a number that is completely random (what else do you expect? :) ). Although I do not know about the workings of any of the established random number generator algorithms, I wonder many times as to how an algorithm can generate a value that is not dependent on anything. When I was reading the book that I mentioned above, I started thinking about how there can be randomness in nature itself? Isn't the universe governed by immutable laws? That just got me thinking of the idea that the working of the Universe which includes my act of writing this right now is in fact deterministic and was determined and precoded in the beginning of time. The idea of randomness somehow does not go well with me. If there is an effect is it not be caused by something? In which case me and all the actions that I perform in my life and the way my life goes is in fact coded in someway in the beginning of the universe.
How can the idea that, everything that is to happen in the Universe after its creation is perfectly deterministic and dependent on the beginning of time be reconciled with the idea of will, that is the feeling power to determine one's actions?
This is a really really tricky question that needs a lot of meditation to answer.
I feel randomness is just a word used to indicate our ignorance of the laws that govern the Universe which human beings and the social structures that they have created are a part of.
Think of it, everything that happens to you or what you do, is predetermined.
Your birth was caused because your parents came together, which was caused because of a host of reasons, which were caused by a host of other reasons, this chain ultimately tracking back to the beginning of the Universe. To understand this better, think of yourself as being made of atoms which are governed by exactly the same laws that apply to any other atoms in the universe outside of yourself. So the fact that you are reading this at the time you are and the place you are, the clothes that you are wearing right now, the thoughts you have as you read this, and whatever else that you can think of was pre-coded in the beginning of the Universe!!
Heavy eh?