Random II

 

Fine and Dandy

Honey, I'm so keen on you
I could come to lean on you
On a random bay, give you your way
Do what you say

And not only a bay, but life is random

"Rule #1 is young men die. And Rule #2 is doctors can't change Rule #1.  So goes one of my favorite lines  from the TV sitcom M.A.S.H.  And while it was dealing with the inability of doctors to prevent death in the Korean War, it sums up the random nature of life and how humans can’t change that randomness.  We can bemoan randomness. We can try to deal with the impacts caused by randomness. But we can’t change the fact that it is random.

And the fact that life is random, and that a human life is short, is why there is free will.  The fact that we are free to choose is why it is random.  The fact that a human life is short and will end is why those choices matter.  We can pretend that solutions are deterministic and repeatable, but that does not make them less random, it only means we are picking the optimal random solution.  In my profession of Traffic Forecasting, if we are not using a maximum entropy/maximum likelihood/most probable process to pick the most probable solution and are instead picking a random solution from a list, we often use a pseudo random number generator to  make it repeatable.  But the fact that appears to be deterministic, does not make it deterministic. In fact, it proves that it is random.