I find that I am continually haunted in my life by a core set of theoretical issues, which is very much preferable to being haunted by my core set of practical issues. The theoretical ones are more flexible, they conform to me, not I to them.

One of the aforementioned core theoretical issues is whether language is most effective when used descriptively or prescriptively. This is a very old debate between two imaginary groups of nerds.

The “descriptive language” (DL) group says that the rules of language are best dictated by observed natural and practical everyday usage. The “prescriptive language” (PL) group says that the rules of language should be established/prescribed before usage, and then the usage should conform to those agreed upon rules.

When someone from the PL group wants to better understand some language, they’d consult a dictionary as their source of authority. Someone from the DL camp is comparatively unscrupulous about linguistic authority… “you know what I meant”. The disagreement between these groups is kind of a fun reflection on the classic differences in human personality. A “Type A” person is like a PL person who wants to be proactive and organized, a “Type B” person will “go with the flow”.

So, what if we go ahead and apply this concept to the word random? Well, this gets so majorly sticky that here I am writing an essay about it.

Interpreting through a descriptive lens is always easier, as this requires only observation of what is and not preponderance of what ought to be. When we use the word random in everyday speech, it is basically interchangeable with the word “unexpected”. If we stay in the colloquial/DL world, we’re pretty much done here. Dude, that was so random, why did you do that?

I’ll mention one more interesting everyday application of this word, I’ve seen this many times. It can be used to mean inferior or undesirable as part of an attempt to “other” someone else. For example, if I am at a party full of affiliated people, and someone unaffiliated shows up, I could call him “a random” in a derogatory way. This again meshes with “unexpected/unfamiliar”.

So now we’ll switch gears and imagine ourselves to be aliens from outer space who have mastered the form of English, but have no understanding of the substance. This describes a lot of you people actually. We’ll look first at etymology.

The earliest known usage of the word that I can find is from 14th century French (“randon”). At this time, you’d say “the two knights collided with great random.” So random meant something like forceful, unrestrained, impetuous. The two knights collided with such uncontrolled and unrestrained force that nobody could guess what the result would be. The word proceeds into the 1650s to solidify into an adjective that means “having no definite aim or purpose, haphazard, not sent in a particular direction.” This is basically “unpredictable”, which is still how we use it colloquially today.

So, when they say “random”, these humans seem to be vaguely pointing to something they feel unable to predict. They will even sometimes extend this and say, not only do I feel unable to predict what comes next, it is impossible to predict what comes next. But does their lack of predictive ability really constitute “randomness”? Why bother having two words that mean the same thing in random and unpredictable? Surely there is some deeper meaning that most of them fail to grasp.

If we visit the prescriptive science nerds, what’s their take on randomness? Your computer has built-in random number generating functions - how does this work? Sorcery? No, they have not discovered sorcery yet. Their computers just have clocks that track time down to the nearest one millionth of a second (microsecond). Time on this scale is simply not perceptible to a human, so, at the instant the human wants a “random” number, we’ll just use the current “millionths of a second” number and call it random. So, yes, from the perspective of the human, it’s random. But, simultaneously, isn’t time the least random thing in the universe? If we don’t have this steady, predictable, linear flow of time, our concept of prediction dissolves into the aether. So actually, your computer’s random number generator is extremely predictable, it’s only a matter of knowing the current time down to the nearest microsecond. This is yet another descriptive definition of randomness.

So you say, I have free will, watch this, and you start picking your nose right in front of me. I never expected you to do that, but really that’s a lie. I prompted you to prove your free will to me, knowing you would interpret this through the lens of predictability. So, of course, you think up something that seems unpredictable. The problem is that I was expecting something unpredictable, and in that way I categorically predicted your action as something that would be socially taboo.

Humans rely on patterns, and we’re not all that different from one another at the end of the day. People are really incredibly predictable if you can build a good representative dataset from which to infer the probability of them taking a certain action. So then, we’re tempted to conclude that proper randomness simply does not exist, that all events conform to a multidimensional and probabilistic cause-and-effect model, that the notion of “free will” is just one more religious dogma to be discarded once science has gotten far enough to replace it. It’s not that you have no free will, it’s just that you are so banal and unimaginative that we can compile a lost of every decision you will feasibly make and assign them probabilities.

Yet, people much smarter than me insist that true randomness does in fact exist. It is impossible for them to accurately predict radioactive decay, so this is considered to be truly random. How do they know they are not just missing information? Is there an unknown variable which would allow for prediction if it was known? They have managed to prove that this is not the case, there is no measurable information about the state of a nuclear core which allows for a prediction to be made about its decay.

This is actually a huge problem for our understanding of the universe we inhabit. I encourage you to read about Bell’s Theorem and try to understand all this for yourself. Here’s my rough understanding as it currently exists:

Ever since the Enlightenment and the rebirth of scientific inquiry, we have rested on a physical theory of the universe which always obeys the following two rules:

  1. Locality: No influence can travel faster than light.
  2. Realism: Objects have definite properties independent of measurement/observation.

A couple guys won the Nobel prize in 2022 for shattering this comfortable illusion of understanding. At least one of those rules does not hold up to experimentation on the level of quantum mechanics.

We understand pretty well how physics works in our macroscopic reality on our Earthly time-scale. This macroscopic reality is made of countless smaller quantum elements which we understand only when combined on a relatively massive scale. This is a bit unsettling, but what would be far more unsettling is human mastery over reality at every scale, through all of conceivable and inconceivable time and space. I cannot begin to imagine the creative ways we’d dream up to abuse ourselves with this information.

What, then, can we as a human species consider progress? Technological advancement is not progress. Not on its own.

I will close with some absolutely prophetic words from Fyodor Dostoevsky:

“The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.”

“And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse (it is his privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals), may be by his curse alone he will attain his object–that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated–chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point!”

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