Randomness: the Ghost in the Machine? (2014)

Just want to add that biological neurons are stochastic and that artificial neural nets rely on noise injection, random connection dropout, random initialisation and random mini-batch reshuffling to work well. GANs start from a random number in generating images or other types of data. Alternative optimisation strategies to gradient descent - such as evolutionary strategies, use randomness in combining genes for the next generation of agents.<p>Without randomness we would have no intelligent artificial agents. It&#x27;s like intelligence can only happen at the demarcation line between chaos and order.

&gt; you are not your body, you are not your brain, you are not your genome, you are not your connectome, you are not what you eat, you are not your social network, you are not your taste in music, you are not your history<p>This totally reminded me of the Chuck Palahniuk quote from Fight Club: “You are not your job, you&#x27;re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You&#x27;re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”<p>This article covered a lot of ground, I quite enjoyed it. It made me think there’s a big irony, or maybe it’s a paradox.<p>We need the existence of true randomness in physics in order to allow for free will. And yet willfulness is the exact opposite of randomness.

Interesting how the concept of randomness can only exist in contrast to the recognition of order, but who notices order other than a mind that defines it as such? But this mind could not have been created in the first place were it not for some intrinsic order, some consistency in reality. Makes my head spin...

&quot;Free Will&quot; as a concept just makes no sense. I think it&#x27;s obvious that any system can be conceptually described as a function of all-inputs-that-affect-it, plus randomness. No room for free will.<p>The only thing free will has going for it is the unmistakable, unshakeable feeling that I <i>really</i> have it.

I&#x27;m not familiar with the inner workings of random number generators but is true randomness even possible or is the randomness just so complex that we can&#x27;t reverse engineer it?<p>My instinct says that if you run the same random number generator in the same hardware with the same Unix timestamp and same inputs wouldn&#x27;t the outputs be the same?

In a maximally efficient interactive system, user input appears as random noise. This is because such a system will contain a model of the distribution of its input in order to be able to predict it and react as soon as possible. The system only needs to react to the component of input which it was not able to predict using this model. Thus if there is an intelligent entity manipulating our universe, and if our universe is efficient in this sense, then the outside entity&#x27;s input will appear as perfectly random maximum entropy noise when viewed from within the system.