Is Randomness in Nature Possible?

Is Randomness in Nature Possible? Abstract. The idea of randomness in nature assumes that there can be an event in nature that is completely separated from any kind of environment that could include observable conditions that could be causes of that event. Randomness is associated by many writers with both predictability and complexity. If more than one outcome from an event is possible, and if none of the outcomes can be predicted to happen, by any kind of preferentiality, more often than the others, then the entire event process is considered random. If, in any type of situation, regardless of its number of dimensions, no regularities of any kind can be detected then the situation is considered not only random but also complex. Both predictability and complexity will inform my exploration of nature. By “nature” I refer to the observable world that includes human beings but is not manipulated by human beings or extensions of their bodies such as any kind of machine. Nature, in this sense, excludes mathematical calculations, random number generators, deliberate human actions such as coin tosses or dice throwing, and controlled, replicable experiments carried out either indoors or outdoors. Nature does, however, include multiple scales from the quantum to the botanical which involves the complication that while the quantum scale is unobservable with unaided senses, the botanical scale is observable, within limits, with the unaided senses. From the outset, I leave out the two possibilities of no predictability and predictability to infinite degrees of precision because, as far as I can see, both occur neither anywhere in the biosphere nor on any currently known scale of nature. I also leave out the possibilities that nothing happens and that everything/ anything happens, with the same reasons for leaving out the two preceding possibilities. I entertain the three possibilities that randomness in nature is possible, that it is impossible, and that the question itself is undecidable. I. Wild Mint. Wild mint grows on the verge of the slough near my cabins in the Interior Alaska wilderness. For years, I have watched the bright green plants rise from mud on the sloping banks of both the forest and island edges of the slough. I have found out where different versions of mint grow, waited until most of the single plant stalks are stair-step studded with lilac flowers from a few inches above the mud to the top of the stalks, and then, usually in August, picked, cleaned and laid out the harvest to dry on bare plywood boards in a smaller, older cabin used now for storage, tools and materials, and both mint and chaga preparation. I have found places where the mint plants grow taller and flower earlier than other places, where stalks grow taller and thicker than other places, and places where the plants are profusely close together and easy to gather. If it served any useful purpose for my living off the land, I could specify and record my observations in categories of time, size and taste. Doing so would make even clearer to me that I do not understand all the conditions—variables—that result in the features of the many plants that I pick, dry and eventually use as tea—the best tasting mint tea, by the way, that I have ever drunk. Some conditions are easy to identify. Two of those are amount of direct sunlight and proximity to water that is not mud or muddy. There are two islands in the slough from which I harvest mint—Green Island and Red Crane Island. Green Island is small and flat and in the middle of a wide bend of the slough in front of the cabins. On this island grow mint stalks that are longer, taller and thicker than any others I pick, and these grow up between long, sharp-edged stalks of a very coarse green grass. This island is so low and flat that an inch or two of water usually covers its entire surface and that water condition correlates with both the larger dimensions of the mint stalks and the size and toughness of the accompanying grass that covers the island from edge to edge. Red Crane Island is a little ways up slough from Green Island, in another widening turn of the slough, with navigable channels on its north side along the forest bank and on its south side along the forest bank close to the cabins. This island is roughly triangular in shape with a long, straight, sloping south side and two shorter, more uneven northeast and northwest sides that form a rounded point along the north channel. On Red Crane Island, which lacks the coarse grass on Green Island, the mint stalks grow in such profusion, smaller though much more plentiful than those on Green Island, that I can harvest enough for a year while leaving many fully flowered plants to continue the growth cycle. I can observe all of these conditions with unaided eyes and without manipulating the natural environment in any way other than the small surface disturbance of the slough water by my canoe and the crushing of some plants when I leave the canoe, on Red Crane Island, to pick plants that are too far up the slope of the island’s sides to reach from my seated position in the canoe. I also make no interventions in the growth of the plants such as application of biocides, adding soil conditioners, adding plant foods, removing or cutting non-mint plants or bushes, or cutting/trimming trees to increase sunlight. II. Difference, diversity, variation. I want now briefly to clear away some conceptual brush in order to put a finer point on the question of randomness in nature. When I harvest mint, I look for tall, stout stalks with lilac flowers spaced up the stalk to the top. The features of “tall”, “stout”, and “to the top” are easily observable with my unaided vision. These features show me that the particular plant has reached its growth potential and so I pick it, usually breaking the stalk close to the ground and leaving the root system to decrease cleaning and leave organic matter in the soil. All of the three features can make one plant different than others around it. I don’t see something in front of me that I can identify as difference. I see differences in the features of each mint plant. Though sharing all three features as a species, the presence of differences among plants presents diversity across the growths of the plants. Since there is diversity among the features of hundreds of plants, there are many variations in the bodies of the plants. In more standard botanical terms, “Mint has tubular flowers with united petals with 2 long and 2 short stamens. The lilac-colored flowers grow in a whorl where the leaves meet the stem”. (Schofield, Janet J. Alaska’s Wild Plants: A Guide to Alaska’s Edible and Healthful Harvest rev.ed., p130). While these features are predictable in all Alaska mint plants, they do not occur at the same place on every stalk relative to either the vertical center of the stalk or relative to each other. Both leaf and flower sizes and saturation of the lilac color can also vary from plant to plant and from plant cluster to plant cluster. Difference, diversity and variation are therefore all possible in the growth of the wild mint. Are difference, diversity and variation also necessary? If “necessary” refers to what cannot not be, or cannot be otherwise, in nature, then the answer to the foregoing question can be found by comparing plants grown in more and less sunlight and shade, with more and less water close to their root systems and with different environments such as the heavily grassed surface of Green Island and the lightly grassed slopes of both Red Crane Island and the slough slopes down the banks from the cabins. Over the years, I have observed that mint plants in more sunlight grow taller and stouter and that the mint plants on Green Island are sparser but usually both longer and thicker than those on either Red Crane Island or the cabin proximate banks. Difference, diversity and variation across the mint plant features thus cannot not be, or cannot be otherwise, given the consistent differences in growing conditions. Does it make sense, then, to consider any of these variations to be random? If randomness is only unpredictability then it makes no sense. If randomness refers to observable conditions with no known causes then it likewise makes no sense. If randomness refers only to possibility, then it makes sense but “randomness” then becomes trivially a synonym for “possibility” and the title of this paper could be rewritten as the trivial redundancy “Is Possibility in Nature Possible?”. However, fortunately or unfortunately, a simple net search of “randomness” brings up many writings that position randomness not only as a feature of manipulations —eg. coin and dice tosses, and deliberate random number generators—but also as intrinsic to nature, on both macro (eg. astrophysics and meteorology) and micro (eg. quantum mechanics) scales to the extent, in some writings at least, that randomness can legitimately considered to be (close to) a law of nature. From here on in this reflection, therefore, the categories possibility (possible) and necessity (necessary) will be explicit in my attempt to answer the question that heads this writing. III. Whether the weather. I want to start this section by considering the statement “Randomness is in nature”. First, randomness is not a feature in nature that can be detected with any human sensory organ, such as all of those that I use to harvest mint, including hearing since alertness for bears is prudent in my area. Second, by far the most common operationalization of randomness is unpredictability. However, unpredictability is also not a sensory feature detectable in nature; rather, it is an absence of correspondence between expectation (prediction) and performance (event observed with or without quantitative measurement or physical recording). Third, if the foregoing is an acceptable view of randomness, then in what sense can it be “in nature”? In order to harvest mint (and chaga) I must be outside all of the buildings at our camp and I need no devices to control or manipulate conditions such as sun rays, air temperature, air movement, air humidity, mud constituents or water levels. To observe differences among mint plants and mint locations, I also do not need devices of any kind. In response to questions about differences among plants and locations, I cannot offer reports of observations and measurements that include any initial conditions, to arbitrary degrees of precision, with the conceivable exception of the change from winter to summer that includes return of direct sunlight to the mint locations and thawing of both the earth of the slough’s edges and the slough water. More and less sensitive and comprehensive weather instruments of many different kinds could be installed and operated near our cabins, would return many different kinds of information, and is a set-up that I would not encourage because I prefer the solitude there. Besides their irrelevance to my harvesting, I have no way to make measurable predictions about features of any particular mint harvest with three exceptions: observable cloud cover preventing direct sunlight from reaching the mint plants; sensible low temperatures that prevent rapid, robust growth; and lack of rainfall. All of these conditions are currently measurable and all of them have features some of which clearly correlate with smaller, fewer plants and later harvests. Those three conditions, however, cannot be considered initial conditions in any rigorous sense. All three of them happen with no human intervention. Apart from very coarse-grained data from a few weather stations in southwest Alaska, I have no quantitative descriptions of them. And, most relevantly to the question of randomness, they are conditions that are parts of repeated events, uncontrolled by human interventions, such as changes of seasons and changes of weather. The relevance of this reflection to the question of randomness has to do with the fact that many writers, in many different fields, use their conviction that randomness is in nature to assert that chaos is also in nature or use their conviction that chaos is in nature to assert that randomness is in nature. Two necessary conditions for the existence of chaos in any system are knowledge of initial conditions to arbitrary degrees of precision and, with that knowledge, computation of the Lyapunov exponent describing divergence of trajectories from the initial conditions. In the natural wilderness of Alaska, with no controlling structures or devices, in repeatedlyly changing conditions of seasonal and meteorological change, arbitrarily precise specification of initial conditions is impossible, computation of a Lyapunov exponent is impossible and so, any attribution of chaos to such a situation can not be more than metaphor (or wishful thinking). Additionally, since the chaos of chaos theory is deterministic chaos—evolution of a system in (space)time with both rules and decay of predictability—connecting randomness with chaos seems appropriate with respect to unpredictability but inappropriate with respect to the types of unpredictability. The unpredictability of chaos theory refers to observable, especially with computer programs, relationships among trajectories. The unpredictability of randomness is usually operationalized as the lack of correspondence between a prediction—a controlled event of some kind— and measurable features of what is stipulated as the end state of the event—its outcome(s), effect(s), or consequence(s). Additionally, on larger scales and all at the same time, the earth does not stop rotating on its axis, revolving in its orbit, the Coriolis effect pauses, and the dominant flows of major weather systems from west to east and of the largest ocean current from east to west do not pause so that humans, with their millions of data-gathering devices on land, at sea, in the air and in outer space, can collaboratively specify initial conditions in a rigorously chaotic system. Nature does not, spontaneously and without deliberate manipulation of some kind, arrange itself in the physical conditions necessary for the existence in nature of rigorously measurable deterministic chaos. So, a first answer to this article’s question is, if “randomness” is taken as a strict synonym for “deterministic chaos” then it is either not possible for randomness to be in nature or its existence there is undecidable. IV. “But in all these theories the question naturally occurs:--If something is transmitted from one particle to another at a distance, what is its condition after it has left the one particle and before it has reached the other?” (James Clerk Maxwell, A Treatise on Electricity & Magnetism, Volume II, Merchant Books (2007) 437-8). On a smaller scale, the issue of continuity and discreteness relative to randomness comes forward. In a coin toss, there are only two possible outcomes —a head or a tail. Variations in characteristics of tossing with a human hand can be eliminated by using a computer program. With this done, the toss can go on indefinitely. However, it is quantized because two and only two values—states— are possible, the toss is part of no observable continuous causation other than the operation of the computer, and the variable has both possible values until the toss stops, whether a coin is spinning in the air or a computer program is sorting its options. This seems so obvious that I might overlook the question of how causality, conceived as a process linking causes and effects, in the case of mint plants, from water, air, earth and sky sources and directions, could reasonably be considered continuous rather than repeatedly cut? If it’s repeatedly cut, with some of such experiences quantifiable, such as available sunlight, air temperature and humidity, and some not, such as the feel of the place and the variety of events there—that is, if in a variety of ways the sources of energy can be experienced then, to me, that’s a natural experience. Would I call it “random”? It could be considered to be deterministic because the appearance of a head causes the non-appearance of a tail and the appearance of a tail causes the nonappearance of a head; however, the absence of causation between the two states such that, during the toss, a head creates or destroys a tail or a tail creates or destroys a head, allows for probabilistic prediction only. A physical or electronically simulated coin toss, however, is not a chaotic system because there are not discrete trajectories of possible states the predictability of which decays rapidly in the time evolution of the system. Both the coin toss and the chaotic system are deterministic but the behavior of the deterministic components differs in the two systems. This reflection puts a finer point on the question of randomness in nature because the unmanipulated wilderness of my mint harvesting cannot be reasonably modeled with either a coin toss system or a chaotic system. Since both types of system are, in specific senses, deterministic manipulations, the question of the possibility of the existence of randomness in nature is not answered by the existence of either system. However, on a mature mint plant there are also two states: bare stalk with no leaves and flowers, and clumps or whorls of leaves and flowers, with these two states repeated from close to the soil and/or water to the top of the plant. There is superposition in the sense that both states exist simultaneously although the two states cannot reasonably be considered +1 and -1 variances unless the clump is arbitrarily given the value of +1 and the whorlless stalk -1 or vice versa The two states are commutative variables since they can be observed together and, if so desired, measured in certain dimensions such as height and thickness. So, perhaps an answer to Maxwell’s question is that, in terms of a linear relationship between separables, nothing happens because the variation in states is the phasing of vibration in which something does something to itself and the doing, since it both creates and destroys spacetime, presents different faces, or, surfaces, depending on how the human approaches it. Scaling in nature is then a type of vibration within which there are always already additional vibrations, regardless of the size of the system relative to the human approach. The variation in the process and structure of the mint plant is itself a measure of the conditions in which the vibration of its growth occurs. Predicting its features with more and less refined approaches changes the outcome(s) of expectation(s) because it changes the way(s) in which vibration(s) appear(s) and is(are) experienced. The preceding three sentences could be re-written in the language register of compression-expansion with Spring to Fall growth, for example, as expansion and Fall to Spring wilting, dying and becoming part of the earth for the next expansion, as compression. “Vibration” would, in this re-writing, then refer to a repeated event in nature in which the identification of any one cause, or of any linear causal chain/sequence, would seem to be impossible or at best arbitrary. Making a choice between randomness and determinism in this example of nature would not seem to fare any better. But, the mint plants continue to come and go and do what they do. Clearly, from only ordinary observation, there are differences in how the mint plants do what they do at least because there are differences in where they occur. V. Location, location, location. It would seem reasonable to suppose that since the quantum world can best be modeled, understood, and used as quantized, that the macro-world would show observable quantization. It would seem reasonable to suppose that there would be both observable and unmanipulated pauses in, or cessations of, causation such that boundaries could be observed and states could be measured. In other words, it seems unreasonable to assert that the condition of matter/energy necessary for the existence of any physical thing, quantization, occurs only on a physical scale that is completely unobservable by living things and in no way repeats itself on scales that are observable to living things. Of course, weather could be observed as a rigorously chaotic system if it were created in a large structure such as an airplane hanger. In this setting, and given appropriate equipment and skill, weather changes from laminar to turbulent could be produced along with their boundaries. But, outside the hanger, nature is indifferent to human intervention, with the significant exceptions of fossil fuel combustion, industrialized mono-crop farming, deforestation, geoengineering, widespread slash and burn farming, mining, frequent large forest fires and heatsink cities. However, so far as I know, in my area of the Alaska wilderness, no one has ever tried to measure any of these human activities as impacts on local botanical events. In living with, watching and harvesting mint, do I encounter, experience or observe any pauses or cessations of causation that I can reasonably consider a quantization of nature? In a sense, all of nature is quantized because every observable existing thing has boundaries that differentiate it from every other existing thing. Every existing natural thing is a state of nature that needs certain conditions to come into existence, that varies, with varying degrees of predictability, within certain limits in both its growth and its maintenance, and that needs certain conditions to go out of existence. Perhaps the best the human observation and recording systems can do, with multiple throughput processes for our own existence, such as breathing, eating, drinking, excreting and sensing, is to conceive vibration as coming into being and passing away while knowing, at the same time, that every existing thing returns in some way to its own beginning of repetition and variation. No matter how thickly the cranberries and the blueberries grow on their stalks, every berry is both separate from and similar to every other berry; no matter how many black spruce trees grow in a bog, each tree is both separate from and similar to every other tree; and, no matter how many salmon are caught and tangled in my set-net in the Yukon River, every salmon is both separate from and similar to every other salmon. Likewise, no matter how many fully mature mint plants grow together on Red Crane Island, every plant is both separate from and similar to every other plant. Such discreteness is right before my eyes. Additionally, the quantization of the mint plants is quantized again in the sense that dimensions of features are repeatedly and consistently limited to observable ranges of values that could, with considerable but, for my utilitarian purpose, pointless effort be precisely measured. For example, while the lengths of the stalks of the mint plants on Red Crane Island are not all the same, a fact that is visibly clear when the picked plants are laid out and spread out from each other to dry on the plywood boards, their lengths, year over year, vary in inches, not in feet. Their discreteness, with similar average dimensions, is a repeated natural event, like the changes in pressure, temperature and humidity of the air in seasonal change. Where, in all of this unmanipulated nature, can there be randomness? Perhaps the most enlightening feature of the mint plants to consider is their location. There are typically mint plants in four locations: in the wet earth both above and below water line at the bottom of the trail down from the cabins to the power boat mooring; in the wet earth both above and below water line at the end of a second trail to a small area used to exit and enter a canoe, to fish for pike and sometimes to wash dishes; on the south and east slopes of Red Crane Island, most but not all above water line; and, among the long, tough strands of grass on Green Island, usually but not always rooted under an inch or two of slough water with that depth varying in relation to both the surrounding slough water level and the irregularities in the top surface of the island. On a smaller scale, the distances among the stalk into earth entrances vary from fractions of an inch on areas of Red Crane Island to inches on Green Island. These probability spaces for the occurrence of mint plants have been constant in my experience since the late 1970’s; however, in some summers, apparently related to less rainfall and no water layer over the island, Green Island has had no mint plants at all. VI. Without calculation. The foregoing reflection on location opens another way into the question of randomness in nature through the etymology of “random” from the Oxford English Dictionary (Compact Edition, p2413). This word has come through English from an approximately 4thc form “randun” both in a cluster of words with similar spellings and with a more or less consistent reference to action and motion done at high speed and with no clear pattern or purpose. For example, the OED states, “3. Phr. At random, orig. at great speed, without consideration, care, or control; hence a. With vbs of action or occurrence: At haphazard, without aim, purpose, or fixed principle; heedlessly, carelessly, etc.” (Ibid). The step from this phase of “random”’s etymology to the popular expression “That is so random!” is short. My mint harvesting is done slowly, with a pattern set by the growth areas of the mint plants, and with the purpose of collecting enough mature mint plants that, after being cleaned, dried, crushed and broken into fine pieces and powder, will provide enough for a year’s use until the next harvest. The mint plants also show patterns of growth and location. For example, on Red Crane Island, the long narrow stand of mint along its entire south side and turning short distances from northwest through north to northeast ends abruptly and gives way to water plants, some of which I know are poisonous and others I don’t know and don’t harvest. It would seem inaccurate to regard these natural configurations as happening either heedlessly or carelessly. Considering the number of botanical options in this southwest Alaska area, many choices have been made, both by me and by things of the biosphere with which I connect, to manifest the presence of wild mint with my harvesting going on with it and in it. Especially when I walk and pick the south side of Red Crane Island, the strong and volatile aroma of broken mint bodies surrounds me. I can only be grateful for both the aroma and the harvest.