Ping! “Why were you late for the Bloggers Meet?” “Well, I was not in the mood for socialization.” “Then you shouldn’t have come at all!” “I tossed a coin. The coin said I should go. I tossed again. The coin said that I should be there for half an hour.“
The finiteness of time available to every human hinders him or her from treading the entire matrix of existence to arrive at a sound decision. In such cases, I think it would be better to toss a coin.
Of course, I would be working on the assumption that the coins in my right pant pocket are unbiased. I could test the coins for bias but then I would have to toss each of them infinite times. Let me explain: If I toss a coin six times and I get four heads and two tails, the probability of getting head is two-thirds and the probability of getting tails is one-third. If I tossed it two more times and got tails, the coin would be seem unbiased. But then, what happens if I toss it again? So, we have no choice but to toss the coin an infinite times to check for bias, where we would need exactly half an infinity heads and half an infinity tails.
There is also the assumption that the environment in which the toss is done is unbiased. The assumption simply discounts the possibility that a gravitational wave originating from the massive explosion of a star three thousand light years away might disrupt the space time continuum around the coin, thereby biasing the environment. Here again, I would working on the assumption that gravitational waves do exist though there is a high probability that they do.
There is always the possibility that there is hole in my right pant pocket and I lose all my “unbiased” coins. No problem! Most programming languages support methods for generating random numbers. I would be working on the assumption that the program language that I choose, has a random number generator which is random enough. But how can a non abstract machine generate something abstract like a random number? Well, I could always program it to generate a random number using a function based on user seed.
Using user seed would work on the assumption that humans are abstract entities, who are capable of generating perfectly random numbers. This would be in conflict with determinism, a school of thought which believes that everything, including human thoughts are determined. And by calculating the vectors of the Big Bang, we can determine every action or thought, past, present or future.
Now, that brings us to our final question: Would it possible to analyse a system being within the system?
To be continued…
PS: Thanks to KayB for asking me, “Why were you late for the Bloggers Meet?”.
And are you not,” said Fook leaning anxiously forward, “a greater analyst than the Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle throughout a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard?”
“A five-week sand blizzard?” said Deep Thought haughtily. “You ask this of me who have contemplated the very vectors of the atoms in the Big Bang itself? Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff. – H2G2 (link)
