There are many systems ruling our universe, and piling upon each other, they make new ones ever increasingly. Whether it is particles, concepts, processes, is it all part of the same root and would it be possible to draw connections?
To make it very clear, I am no physicist, doctor, or have any other kind of qualifications, so it is entirely your choice to decide how credible what will follow is.
Randomness
To begin with, what is randomness? Fate, chaos, hidden will, causality, coincidences, etc…? We struggle to define it, and our brain doesn’t help when we associate elements regardless of correlation.
It can be seen everywhere in appearance, such as the exact time to reach a destination, if you will see a bird fly above, what you feel depending on the day, what faces the dice will show, you could make a case for everything. But mirrored to that, it is possible to deduce fairly accurate outcomes for the same situations depending on the information we can access.
Another case of randomness is in computers, with Random Number Generators. While we call them random, we know exactly how they work, by taking very volatile information that is considered pseudo-random enough.
What we can infer from all this is that randomness is orphan results, any result that we lack the causes of can be considered random. Our brain’s inability (and refusal) to handle every element in a system too big is what creates this randomness.
Being blind to the causes will make any effect happen randomly, but it is through a deterministic approach that we can experiment and slowly uncover parts of the mechanisms hidden underneath. Free will is influenced by deterministic interactions, causality is opposite of will. Can we really consider ourselves having a will when the world works by causality?
The biggest question to answer this is in quantum physics; when we figure out the working system, we will have the final key to existence.
Quantum Physics
There is a lot of research in that domain because it’s such a difficult yet important matter to solve. My uncultured opinion on it is that we’re fundamentally mistaking quantum physics because of the concepts. We have to measure statistically because it’s physically impossible currently to get the quantum values at our level, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist, just like for randomness.
So having possibility waves as basis is something I have trouble accepting. The very crux of this problem is that a probabilistic system creates uncertainty, while I think it’s caused by the (current) impossibility to have measurements without collapsing the wave function. But I am deeply convinced that this is a deterministic system.
So it’s not that a particle is a cloud of positions, but that we’re unable to have its values (until measured), leading to an outcome similar to a probabilistic system. That’s the whole meaning behind randomness, which is anything with unknown causes and known results. Anything that has unknown causes for a known result will be random to the relative perception of it.
And while more simple things can be figured out with lower effort (like wind making a leaf fall when the applied force becomes stronger than the linking force), quantum variables are so difficult to obtain without measuring, that we become “forced” to consider them random because finding the causes is absurdly troublesome.
Causality isn’t a rule you can break, it’s how the world works. If something breaks causality, it’s because we missed something to explain it. Maybe there be an infinitesimal particle that forms every system, making it a unitary actor to all that is currently unexplainable.
Systems
Another part that really rubs me wrong is when hypothesis mention different dimensions/universes. It’s often used as an example to go from perception of 1D, to 2D, 3D etc and that a lower one can’t perceive the higher dimension. But there’s a big logical fallacy to it; those dimensions are conceptual, in reality they do not apply, they’re useful as tools but aren’t the pattern.
We live in one dimension with all the various variables, and there’s no going in higher or lower dimensions aside from conceptually. The most important point from this is that there is no interaction beyond this dimension to explain all of it(even if we’re missing some parts currently), it’s self contained. So even if you wanted to conceptualize more dimensions, they wouldn’t matter for here.
Like a bubble, it’s all dependent in being enclosed, and any kind of external pressure would pop the universe (slowly or not) through a leakage disrupting all the systems. In the same way, a system cannot be calculated in its entirety within itself. Because for each unitary element to calculate, at least a new one has to be created and infinity is only a concept, not a reality in our finite world.
The part of a system cannot encompass its entirety. An omniscient god cannot be part of the universe.
Indeterminism
In the end, it doesn’t matter whether or not our universe is deterministic, because we cannot prove something outside of it at the risk of total collapse. So it’s completely possible to believe this is simply a test world that a god created for any reason. The important part is that there is no interactions possible, so it is an impossible question to answer.
It is unbearable for our brain to have to reconsider too many beliefs at once, and something that can be proven is not a belief (barring misinterpretations due to beliefs) but a conviction. It is often because it’s the hardest to accept that this something may be real, otherwise disproving (not denial) it isn’t difficult.
Even though some results seem to hint a true randomness, we still have to use solid values to use any of it, so in the end we’re still bound by causality.
AI
In the same line of thinking, there are a lot of fantasies about being able to create a thinking AI, yet we’re still unable to fully grasp the way bodies and brains work in the deep details. Sentient AI cannot work because it needs to be flawed like the brain to forget and merge information to lower the amount of processing.
It needs to work by bias, otherwise it cannot function with sentience because a computer works through a determined set of systems. And the closer we make it to sentience, the more it will become limited by the same issues we have to face with bias, mental trickery, false impressions and memory alteration.
So not only is it impossible to create fully, but it is not useful to have. We can already make sentient humans by reproducing, we don’t want that sentience for AI, because AI is a tool and it needs to be efficient. There is a major hardware and conceptual limitation to have reliable efficiency while also having a self reflecting behavior for constant change.
Progress
What can be said in the end? Maybe most of what I said (if not all) is simply bogus, and new research will prove how wrong I was. Maybe it is in the right direction, and new advances in difficult domains will happen, proving it.
With certainty, things will change, even if it is undetermined for now.