system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is there such a thing as true randomness?

As my understanding leads me to believe, every single thing, ever, has a cause and effect. 

This means that a dice roll is dependent on various factors, like the speed at which you throw it, the angle it has left your hand, the effect of gravity on the die (depending on the mass of the planet and even the table under it), which affect how it hits the table. The composition of the die leads to its bounce, which depending on the angle if incidence it has hit the table due to your actions, will make it have a perfectly predictable nature once you know the values you have chosen to throw the die with. In essence, a dice roll is *not* random, but a choice.

Rain on your wedding day is neither ironic or by chance. The weather patterns that are on any given day are a byproduct of the past history of the Earth and the pollutants we have put into the atmosphere. The sun heating up the surface of the planet effects the wind just as much as how the evaporation process effects it from the ocean, neither are random but carefully calculated scenarios which can be predicted (if the knowledge of how to calculate them is obtained, of course).

But, choice, as I mentioned above, is the tricky thing. We have this notion of free will, that the human mind makes a choice. Is this choice random? I would think no, that it is an accumulation of your environment, your exposure to the world, and how you best fit into your environment. There are other factors, such as chemical balances in the brain or how good of a sleep you had last night (dependent on the temperature in your room and how humid it was for example) which alter the function or your perceived notion of reality, but they are not random. A mathematical equation or a physics problem, if you would. Even choosing to snap and go on a killing spree can be broken down to the environment you live in, the pressures you have at home, your upbringing (that baseball game you missed with your dad, because it rained), a vehicle accident on the freeway because the physics behind a semi-truck barreling down the road at 70mph and hitting a bump at x_angle and the tension of the rope and how much weathering has affected it causing it to snap and releasing an oil barrel which split open due to the traumatic force hitting the lid at another x_angle, which caused your vehicle to crash and you to be ejected at x_mph at x_angle with a wind resistance of x_mph and your windshield taking some of the force from impact, which resulted in your neck breaking because you didn't drink enough milk and your bones were weaker than they could have been.

Really, you can break down any situation, ever, into a physics/math problem that can be solved. Cause an effect. I don't, personally, believe that true randomness can exist. The Big Bang came about by a set of events which permitted the existence of matter, unless if you believe the God theory in which God himself set the universe into motion through the means of a Big Bang. Really, then, only the Divine would be truly random, but there is no evidence of this. Supposed miracles take place because of certain situational events that the common mind can not comprehend, so they leave it to superstition that God did it, because they can not explain it. If you study any miracle you can break it down to a sequence of events that led to that miracle. Visions included, which could be the result of fasting, dehydration, bad diet, a wanting to see something divine, or hallucinogens.

Life itself did not randomly start, nor has evolution. There was a specific mixture of elemental matter, atmospheric pressure, minerals and deposits, that set the stage for the first single celled organisms to start. If a lightning strike ignited life, that strike was a product of, again, atmospheric pressures, hot and cold, etc. and was not random.

So, back to my original question, is there any evidence of a true random event, or is everything the by product of previous events set in motion by the First Event (Big Bang, or whatever set that in motion)?
gpt
It's a nice idea. Unfortunately in our universe the number of events that *do* have causes is completely swamped by the number of events that *do not.*

Imagine that you are able to collect a truly huge number of unstable particles — free neutrons, say — and somehow detect when each individual one decays. Maybe you sequester each one inside its own little box somehow; it doesn't matter, because this is just a thought experiment.

If you measure the time it takes for each particle to decay, you'll find it converges to a single value. So you can say that, on average, a particle of that time will last some amount of time before decaying. In the case of neutrons, it's about a quarter of an hour.

But predicting the decay of *a single individual* particle is completely impossible. Not practically impossible, not very difficult. *Completely* impossible. Because it has no cause. There's nothing that causes a particle to decay. It decays spontaneously, for absolutely no reason.

Or consider another simple thought experiment. You have an electron, contained within an apparatus that pins its location down inside a potential. This apparatus has two sets of powerful electromagnets, oriented exactly at right angles to each other. You turn on one set of magnets, such that the electron is now in a powerful electric field, and then you wait a while.

The electron is now, as they say, "prepared." Its component of spin is now aligned with the magnetic field.

So you turn off the magnetic field, and then turn on the other one, which runs at a right angle to the first.

One of two things is going to happen in short order. Either the electron is going to emit a photon of a very particular energy, telling you that its magnetic moment has spun around to align with the new magnetic field … or it *won't* emit a photon, telling you that its magnetic moment was *already* aligned with the new magnetic field. There are no other possibilities; one of those two things is guaranteed to happen.

Except it turns out there's a straight-up 50/50 chance of each outcome. If you conduct the experiment ten times, you might get five photons and five no-photons … or you might get six and four, or you might get eight and two, or you might get no photons at all.

If you conduct it a million times, the results will probably converge pretty closely to 500,000 and 500,000.

If you conduct it an arbitrary large number of times, most likely you'll get a photon half the time.

But the next time you turn on the apparatus, you have *absolutely no way* to predict whether you'll get a photon or not. And not because you don't have enough information, and not because your equipment isn't sufficiently precisely machined. Because there's no cause. There's no underlying reason why the spin would end up being aligned in one run of the experiment and not aligned in the next. It's totally non-deterministic.

That's how quantum phenomena are. They're non-deterministic. They can only be described in terms of probability. When an experiment has two possible outcomes, what *causes* it to come out one way or the other? Nothing at all. There's no cause.

And since there are *many orders of magnitude* more quantum-scale events going on in our universe than classical-scale events at any given time, it's not unreasonable to say that causality is the anomaly.