In fact "only God could play dice" was the neat enough title of this thread ... don't see why it had to be dragged to Drabsville ...

According to the Tracatarian or logical notion of objective probability, objective probability is a normalised count of the number of states of affairs that make a proposition true.

So "god doesn't play dice" to me seems to be a grammatical objection to the conflation of the epistemic notion of probability with the objective notion of probability that physics by definition is supposed to describe.

In short, quantum probabilities that are not reducible to objective probabilities cannot by definition be part of a physically descriptive theory.

My only concern with physics's obsession with objective probability, is that I can only understand objective probability as an "intra-physical" notion, whereby it only makes sense to refer to "laws" of physics when comparing physical data to other physical data in a manner that is relative to scientific conventions for making data comparisons.

Note to posters: my opening post was also "modded" ... and some of my intention has been lost. I am not actually asking for help with understanding randomness; I am declaring true randomness to be impossible. Number sequences, such as the digits of root 2, are repatable by recipe, so can't count as truly random.

I am declaring true randomness to be impossible. Number sequences, such as the digits of root 2, are repatable by recipe, so can't count as truly random. — Jake Tarragon

Then you should have put that in your opening post instead of "Randomness, like, WTF??"

It was only part of the OP. I think it was an apt and meaningful phrase to use though I accept the language was colloquial.

I'm not sure that God could play dice. Because for me an essential feature of playing dice is not knowing what the outcome will be. Perhaps that's what Einstein meant. — andrewk

I think Einstein was using "God" as a stand in for the laws of physics, and of course he was wanting a neat aphorism. Don't we all!

God could play "truly random" dice and still know the outcome in advance, but we couldn't work it out... seeing as he's a god and all that. But that's God for you. Doesn't get you anywhere really.

I don't think true randomness exists. We are just incapable of defining all of the variables that go into causing an outcome. If we could perfectly understand and measure how every neuron in the brain will behave under certain circumstances, we could predict exactly how hard you would flip a coin at any moment, and therefore know how it will land. But since we have no clue how consciousness even arises from matter, there is currently no way to come close to the level of precision that would be required to measure the variables and predict the outcome.

If there is some sort of intelligence force behind creation and evolution, I doubt that even it would be able to predict the outcome of a seemingly random event. More likely is that the intelligence has created the program, but the number of variables is too large to be able to reliably predict outcomes in real time. By the time you've measured all the variables, the variables have changed. So God could play dice! (Even though the result of each roll would be determined by the billions of variables that existed at the time of the roll.)

In other words you are not happy to accept "just random ". And if you are like me to do so would feel wrong because effects need causes. Einstein could have said "only God could play dice" rather "God doesn't play dice" because it would require a miracle to have an effect without a cause. — Jake Tarragon

Yes, precisely my thoughts, Jake. To say effect without cause is to chop off the bush at the base and swing it around as if you have the entire thing in your hands.

Yet only randomness can impart "flavor" somehow ... which is why the many worlds interpretation of quantum events is so attractive. Things can appear truly random in one's own universe but only because we don't have access to the bigger picture. Every deterministic flavor of philosopher could be happy with that!

Note to posters: my opening post was also "modded" ... and some of my intention has been lost. I am not actually asking for help with understanding randomness; I am declaring true randomness to be impossible. Number sequences, such as the digits of root 2, are repatable by recipe, so can't count as truly random. — Jake Tarragon

My contention is, that a proper understanding of the various senses of lawfulness and randomness cannot lead to the conclusion that randomness is "impossible", since both lawfulness and randomness are only relations defined by convention for comparing the descriptions of sub-sequences of an observed sequence of finite length, and that these concepts cannot therefore be applied to a single sequence taken as a whole.

Since the universe cannot by definition be compared to anything outside of it, it is nonsensical to describe the history of the universe as a whole as being either lawful or random, just as it is nonsensical to describe the state of a deck of playing cards as being random or lawfully ordered - except of course in the trivial and uninformative sense that is relative to our card-ordering convention.

Since the universe cannot by definition be compared to anything outside of it, — sime

That depends what you mean by "universe"....