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Randomness Quotes

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Randomness Quotes

“Boys climb hills “because they are there.” Men climb mountains because they know there is something beyond them and they want to see it. They want to see what is “behind,” “farther in,” and “deeper down.” Men are not afraid of what they will find. They know something is there because no matter where man has looked, there has always been more. Armchair explorers call that more “randomness.” Real explorers call it God.”

“There is no rhyme or reason for any of it. Life is just a casino—numbers, probabilities, and cigarette smoke—that is all we are. Life is like this. You walk into a casino. You walk over to the bar and the bartender gives you two shots of cheap whiskey. You walk in hungry, tired. Maybe you’re already a bit drunk. The whiskey goes straight to your head and you light a cigarette—you know, to calm the nerves. You walk over to a craps table. But with all of the smoke, with your eyes blurry from the alcohol, you can hardly tell what it is. Nonetheless, the dice are rolled. Nobody asks you any questions. They roll the dice and whatever the number is, that’s how long you have to play. That’s life. Just a numbers game.”

“The freaking randomness is what wears on you, the difference between life, death, and horrible injury sometimes as slight as stooping to tie your bootlace on the way to chow, choosing the third shitter in line instead of the fourth, turning your head to the left instead of the right. Random. How that shit does twist your mind. Billy sense the true mindfucking potential of it on their first trip outside the wire, when Shroom advised him to place his feet one in front of the other instead of side by side, that way if an IED blew low through the Humvee Billy might lose only one foot instead of two. After a couple of weeks of aligning his feet just so, tucking his hands inside his body armor, always wearing eye pro and all the rest, he went to Shroom and asked how do you keep from going crazy! Shroom nodded like this was an eminently reasonable question to ask, then told him of an Inuit shaman he’d read about somewhere, how this man could supposedly look at you and know to the day when you were going to die. He wouldn’t tell you, though; he considered that impolite, an intrusion into matters that were none of his business.”

“A lot of things that happen in life are random. Let’s explore this through an analogy: Grains of Sand in a bucket If you pour sand into a bucket, statistically, there will be some grains on the top, most in the middle and some on the bottom. All grains can’t be at the top. So, does it mean the grains of sands at the top special/better than the ones at the bottom? or is it just blind randomness at play? You might say the human mind is not a grain of sand, it has talent and the capacity to think. Well, what determined your talents and thoughts? Did you choose them or were they too influenced by factors beyond your control? I would argue that your talents and your thoughts themselves are not conjured up by you alone, but are also the result of luck and circumstances.”

“I hesitate to give advice because every major single piece of advice I was given turned out to be wrong and I am glad I didn’t follow them. I was told to focus and I never did. I was told to never procrastinate and I waited 20 years for The Black Swan and it sold 3 million copies. I was told to avoid putting fictional characters in my books and I did put in Nero Tulip and Fat Tony because I got bored otherwise. I was told to not insult the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal; the more I insulted them the nicer they were to me and the more they solicited Op-Eds. I was told to avoid lifting weights for a back pain and became a weightlifter: never had a back problem since. If I had to relive my life I would be even more stubborn and uncompromising than I have been. One should never do anything without skin in the game. If you give advice, you need to be exposed to losses from it.”

“It used to be that I would look for the deeper meaning in everything, thinking that I was some kind of hermeneutic sleuth moving through the world, but I stopped that when I was twelve. Though I would have been unable to articulate it then, I have since come to recognize that I was abandoning any search for elucidation of what might be called subjective or thematic meaning schemes and replacing it with a mere delineation of specific case descriptions, from which I, at least, could make inferences, however unconscious, that would allow me to understand the world as it affected me. In other words, I learned to take the world as it came. In other words still, I just didn’t care.”

“After the adrenaline of the disaster has passed and we face the dreariness of loss, despair lurks around the corner. Unable to attribute our misfortune to random chance, we wonder what we did wrong. Homes gone, dependent on the goodwill of strangers, fearing financial ruin perhaps with loved ones killed, we look for someone to blam, we turn to the outsider. A disaster can alter the behavior of the individual, like one who is part of a mob, divorcing us from our moral compass. We must remember the most dangerous threat in a disaster is the threat to our humanity.”

“Le possible est plus riche que le réel. La nature nous présente en effet l’image de la création, de l’imprévisible nouveauté. Notre univers a suivi un chemin de bifurcations successives : il aurait pu en suivre d’autres. Peut-être pouvons-nous en dire autant pour la vie de chacun d’entre nous.”

“Teri in aankhon mein Teri in aankhon mein kuch alag baat hai, Ek an-kahi daastan, kuch anjaane jazbaat hai, Aaj dil mein tera pyaar, haaton mein tera haat hai, Tham jaaye ab ye waqt, bas itni si darkaar hai, In aakhon mein teri chehra, baaton mein teri hi baat hai, Kat jati hai yaadon k sahare, ab ye lambi kali raat hai, Ek aag si lagti hai, bekaraar ho jate jazbaat hai, Kar deta hai agar koi, tanhaaiyon mein teri baat hai, In saanso mein teri hi mehak, aakhon mein tera hi aks hai, Tuje soch soch kat jate, mere ab din aur raat hai, Teri in aankhon mein kuch alag baat hai, Ek an-kahi daastan, kuch anjaane jazbaat hai,”

“In any analysis of any part of the world, it is mandatory to institute a general reasoning in which the whole – the Absolute – is also included. This is what science scrupulously avoids. Science is all about the parts, and ignoring the whole. Science is non-holistic, which is why it cannot arrive at a grand unified, final theory of everything. From the whole you can get to every part, because the whole defines the parts. If you start with the parts, as science does, you can never get to the whole because the parts are necessarily defined piecemeal, heuristically and with no regard to the whole, since the whole is unknown. A bottom-up approach can never work. Only top-down approaches have any chance of working. Empiricists are always parts people and bottom-up people. Rationalists are holistic and top-down. These are opposite worldviews. The PSR is an explanatory, top-down principle. Randomness is a non-explanatory, bottom-up speculation.”

“Conventional wisdom nor scientific, mathematical prove of randomness in life could do nothing to deter human's curiosity for the unknown, however small the chance of a positive outcome maybe.”

“If the principle of sufficient reason means that everything that happens has a reason why it is thus and not otherwise, the opposite is things happening for no reason at all – randomness! This is the entire basis of the scientific “explanation” of existence. Science is a formally irrationalist system opposed to the principle of sufficient reason. That’s why it’s astounding when people such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris claim to be on the side of reason. They plainly don’t know the meaning of the word.”

“There is no such thing as randomness. No one who could detect every force operating on a pair of dice would ever play dice games, because there would never be any doubt about the outcome. The randomness, such as it is, applies to our ignorance of the possible outcomes. It doesn’t apply to the outcomes themselves. They are 100% determined and are not random in the slightest. Scientists have become so confused by this that they now imagine that things really do happen randomly, i.e. for no reason at all.”

“No random event has ever been empirically demonstrated. Events have been observed which have been interpreted as being based on randomness, but this is merely an inference, and rationalists can advance totally different inferences that never once refer to randomness.”

“Wavefunction collapse is anything other than “random”. If you could really see what was going on, you would see that nothing ever happens randomly, any more than a dice throw produces a genuinely randomly outcome (if you could see what was going on, all the forces in play, you would know exactly what the outcome would be). Sensory ignorance is not ontological uncertainty. Reality knows exactly what it is doing even if you don’t!”

“It’s actually funny that science lays claim to randomness since no one has ever seen a random event. Scientists interpret events as random rather than causal because of their dogmatic ideology. Their paradigm forbids them from referring to unobservable causal processes – implying a reality more fundamental than science which science cannot penetrate – but accepts randomness, as the least threat to science’s supremacy, even though, in Hume’s terms, randomness is no more empirical than causation, hence no more scientifically valid, and infinitely less rational!”

“A person’s perception on the existence of free will affects how they perceive reality. Rather than exercising any resistance against the inevitability of the future, philosophical pessimists resign themselves to accept whatever will happen. I do believe in limited free will, in part, because I am unwilling to accept that the choices we make and our hard work to accomplish personal goals is a silly frivolity. The universe is conceivably an unstable entity subject to random events and chance encounters producing unexpected and unanticipated events.”

“Our definition of an atheist as someone who denies perfection has an immediate corollary; he is also someone who denies meaning. If you think about it, meaning is entirely invested in perfection. We expect a perfect being to know the meaning of existence, and be capable of telling us. We expect a perfect evolutionary process to culminate with we ourselves being perfect and knowing everything. Our pursuit of perfection/God is the meaning of life. To be an atheist is to reject perfection, hence reject meaning. That’s why we brand all atheists as nihilists. They don’t believe in anything. They don’t believe in meaning. And that makes them no different from machines. They are not living beings, or they refuse to be living beings. They are unquestionably high on the autistic spectrum, and they see themselves and the universe as machines rather than living, evolving organisms, getting more and more perfect.”