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Where my world view diverges from most

Discussion in 'Religion & Philosophy' started by bricklayer, Jul 18, 2019.

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  1. bricklayer

    bricklayer Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I do not believe that chance actually exists. I do not believe in spontaneity. I do not believe that anything is random. In a word, I do not believe in chance.

    I do not believe that chance, even if it did actually exist, could ever be a creative force. I have no reason to believe that anything increases in functional complexity or available information by chance.

    I do not believe that human beings choose from undetermined possibilities. I have no good reason to accept choice as evidence of the actual existence of chance.

    Chance is what man calls the void where the knowledge of his own subjectivity would be.
     
    bricklayer, Jul 18, 2019
    #1
  2. Daniel Light

    Daniel Light Well-Known Member

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    Let me answer this by asking you a question.
     
    Daniel Light, Jul 18, 2019
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  3. Moonglow

    Moonglow Well-Known Member

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    By chance please do..
     
    Moonglow, Jul 18, 2019
    #3
  4. bricklayer

    bricklayer Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    The belief in chance equates 'because I don't know', or 'we don't know', or 'we can't know' with
    it's not known or even knowable.

    Pride is an ignorance. Pride is a very specific ignorance. Pride is the ignorance of one's own subjectivity.
     
    bricklayer, Jul 18, 2019
    #4
  5. edna kawabata

    edna kawabata Well-Known Member

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    Heads I believe you, tails I don't
     
    edna kawabata, Jul 19, 2019
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  6. bricklayer

    bricklayer Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    From all I discern from the material world, I am left to believe that the material world is a creation and therefore has a creator. To date, given the limits of my imagination, the author/character paradigm is the best way for me to describe how I view the relationship between the creator and the creator's novel work.
     
    bricklayer, Jul 20, 2019
    #6
  7. Moonglow

    Moonglow Well-Known Member

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    The creators creation is flawed like the creator..
     
    Moonglow, Jul 20, 2019
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  8. Diablo

    Diablo Well-Known Member

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    damn, you beat me to it....
     
    Diablo, Jul 20, 2019
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  9. Diablo

    Diablo Well-Known Member

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    and the guy who created the creator, and the one before that.
     
    Diablo, Jul 20, 2019
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  10. Distraff

    Distraff Well-Known Member

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    Go to a Casino. Look around. Chance exists. Randomness exists.

    Go to a bar. Sit by a very drunk person in a great mood. Spontaneity exists.

    Bacteria have evolved the ability to digest nylon using random mutations and natural selection in front of our very eyes.

    This is a word smoothie. I don't know what this means.

    Choice is by definition not chance or random. So in this case you are right.

    When scientists call something chance or random, there are actually deterministic forces determining the outcome. For example, when you roll some dice, if we perfectly understood the physics, we could always know the outcome and it wouldn't be chance anymore. So calling it chance is just us not understanding everything involved.

    Chance and random are just useful words for classifying events that although have deterministic causes, in practice do produce a varying set of results that are almost impossible to predict. For example, random mutations are caused by deterministic forces. However, those forces are so complex that its impossible to predict where these mutations will be located, and produces varying results that acts like there is a dice being rolled to determine the mutations.
     
    Distraff, Jul 20, 2019
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  11. Diablo

    Diablo Well-Known Member

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    Is the cat dead or alive?
     
    Diablo, Jul 20, 2019
    #11
  12. bricklayer

    bricklayer Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    or the creator is revealing what He is and is not.

    Good is what God is; evil is what God is not. God reveals both good and evil because anything, even God, is revealed just as much by what it is not as it is by what it is.
     
    bricklayer, Jul 20, 2019
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  13. Moonglow

    Moonglow Well-Known Member

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    God created evil so there must be some evil in God.
     
    Moonglow, Jul 20, 2019
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  14. bricklayer

    bricklayer Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Not necessarily. It could just as well be God revealing both what He is and what He is not.

    So, how does a God, who can only create good and only do good also reveal evil? The solution was genius. He gave us a law to break, so that when we sinned, we would know both good and evil. You see, up until that point, all we knew was good. Consequently, we were left to believe that we were as good as God.

    Because the devil was never given a law to break, the devil never sinned. One can say that the devil sins by proxy, and continues to get from sin by proxy what man gets from sin directly. Consequently, even though he has become the very personification of evil, evil remains unrevealed to the devil. To this very day, the devil is left to sincerely believe that he is as good as God.

    God can, and did, take upon Himself our penalty for our sin, but God cannot take upon Himself our ignorance of what He is not.
     
    bricklayer, Jul 20, 2019
    #14
  15. Meta777

    Meta777 Moderator Staff Member

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    I think that it is incorrect to suggest that chance does not exist.
    Though... perhaps you do still have a point, it could be that chance exists,
    but not quite in the way that we humans generally understand it to exist...

    Definitions vary a bit depending on who you ask, but we typically tend to
    think of chance as a possibility for something happening (or not happening),
    which has to some degree a random element to it... something which cannot
    be fully predicted nor controlled, at least not 100% of the time...

    Note then that the opposite of chance, is certainty.
    True certainty implies that there is a 100% probability that something will or wont happen.
    Take computer systems for instance, which often have coded into them various mechanisms
    for outputting seemingly random results, but which we often refer to instead as pseudorandom.
    To the untrained eye, pseudorandom results may appear chaotic and lacking in any pattern,
    but they are generated by deterministic functions, meaning that given a certain set of inputs
    such a function is guaranteed to always output the exact same result every time. Or to put another way,
    as long as you know what the inputs are, you can predict/control the outcome with 100% accuracy.

    So then, if chance in most computer systems is a sham,
    is it then possible for chance to exist elsewhere within reality?
    Are there truly certain outcomes in this world which cannot be predicted or controlled?
    Or is the entire idea of chance merely an abstraction we humans use to fill in the gaps of what we do not yet fully understand?

    My belief is that the answer to that question doesn't really matter at all, not even in the slightest.
    If the concept of chance is nothing more than an abstraction, then even if the reality beneath that abstraction
    was something other than what the abstraction implied,... the abstraction itself does still exist regardless.
    Therefore, the real question ought to be whether or not that abstraction is of any use to us humans...

    So let us then presume for a moment, that true chance is in fact an impossibility.
    That anything and everything can be predicted or controlled with certainty given we have sufficient knowledge of what drives it...
    Does this mean that the concept of chance as a mere abstraction is useless?? I don't believe so.

    Consider that today is the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. An amazing feat,
    but how did we ever achieve such a thing? And how did we repeat that success several times thereafter?
    After-all, spaceflight in general is a tricky thing. It involves complex systems comprised of many parts. Any one of those parts has a certain rate of malfunction. And we know all too well the deadly consequences of failure...

    So what exactly gives us the confidence to keep launching these things? Its not as if we are certain that none of the parts will fail... even to this very day... we as a species have been unable to refine our mastery of physics such as to completely eliminate the failure rate of each of the individual parts as well as to account for the numerous external factors in addition. Even if we assume that its possible in theory, it is simply a matter of fact that, given our current levels of understanding, we can neither control nor predict the behavior of these disparate elements with 100% accuracy. So what we do instead is to implement concepts such as fault tolerance and risk management. We identify the likelihood that various components of the system will succeed or fail, we aggregate the rates of the many into a rate for the whole, and we use redundancy and other risk mitigation methodologies to increase a 90% probability of success rate, to a 99%, then to a 99.999% and beyond, on and on, until we are satisfied that any remaining risk has become low enough to be deemed acceptable. All of this is predicated upon the idea of chance.

    But... there is always some risk left... and of course, even if the risk is infinitesimally small, being truly certain would still be preferable. But again, even if such absolute certainty exists within all things, as is the presumption, we have yet to figure out how to obtain such universal certainty for our own understanding,... and who's to say if humanity ever will, or what costs may be involved in unlocking that knowledge if we do.

    So for now, and perhaps forever, we have but our abstraction left, our concept of chance, when it come to assessing risks. Its not prefect, even when implemented as intended. But still better that than relying on the gut feeling of management, putting faith in... well... faith, or holding out indefinitely for the discovery of a perfect certainty which may never be. Wouldn't you agree?

    So, whether or not its possible for us to eventually predict or control the outputs of reality with a 100% success rate,... at least until that day arrives, let us not toss to the wayside the concept of chance. We still very much have a use for it.

    -Meta
     
    Meta777, Jul 20, 2019
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  16. Derideo_Te

    Derideo_Te Well-Known Member

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    :applause:

    Yes, we make use of the concept of chance every time we choose to take a chance on something or somebody without sufficient knowledge of the eventual outcome. Criminals, addicts and alcoholics are given a "second chance" so you are correct that we still very much do have a use for it.
     
    Derideo_Te, Nov 21, 2019
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  17. modernpaladin

    modernpaladin Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Its all about perspective. If I throw a beer bottle at the wall as hard as I can, I will not be able to accurately predict where all the pieces of glass will land. It is of course predictable, just not by any means we currently can access. For now, its chance, in all meaningful ways.
     
    modernpaladin, Nov 21, 2019
    #17
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  18. Blaster3

    Blaster3 Well-Known Member

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    chance is a definition, not a concept...
     
    Blaster3, Nov 21, 2019
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  19. Derideo_Te

    Derideo_Te Well-Known Member

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    The chance of something occurring is an abstract concept until it happens.
     
    Derideo_Te, Nov 21, 2019
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  20. william kurps

    william kurps Banned

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    Agree, winning the mega ball the odds are 300 million plus to one, but people do win it.
     
    william kurps, Nov 21, 2019
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  21. Derideo_Te

    Derideo_Te Well-Known Member

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    The odds of anyone accurately NAMING who the person that will be the winner at the next drawing are even greater.
     
    Derideo_Te, Nov 21, 2019
    #21
  22. HonestJoe

    HonestJoe Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    You keep talking about this but I'm not aware of anyone who knows what they're talking about calling change a force at all, let alone a "creative force", a phrase I'm not clear what your definition is. I suspect you're taking casual language of laymen and attributing literal formal definitions to them and therefore coming up with something that nobody is actually saying.
     
    HonestJoe, Nov 21, 2019
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  23. fmw

    fmw Well-Known Member

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    Back in the day when I worked for other people I was offered the best job I ever had by a CEO who was in the audience for a presentation I made. Had that CEO not attended he wouldn't have known who I was and I wouldn't know he existed either. I received a job offer because the CEO was, by chance, in the audience and looked into me for job because of the presentation. Are you suggesting that a creator decided I should have that job and caused the CEO to attend the presentation? The CEO had no choice other than to attend? What possible evidence could you have for such a position?
     
    fmw, Nov 21, 2019
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  24. Gelecski7238

    Gelecski7238 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    The decay of radioactive elements is a pure chance process. The atoms decay randomly without cause. An overall statistical rate can be determined as an average over a particular span of time, e.g. typically expressed as the half-life duration.
     
    Gelecski7238, Nov 21, 2019
    #24
  25. undertheice

    undertheice Well-Known Member

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    the question remains whether the "creator" is sentient or merely a force working within laws we simply don't understand. religion tells us there is a will behind creation. science gives us a set of laws that fail to allow us to understand creation. neither one counts out the possibility of random chance being a factor in the creation of the universe.
     
    undertheice, Nov 21, 2019
    #25
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