The basis of randomness

I was thinking today about the basis of randomness.



I'm still thinking about how to write this down so bear with me here.

After the invention of calculus, mathematicians saw the world as a sort of giant clockwork machine.  "Give me the initial conditions and the law of motion, and with calculus I can predict the future -- or better yet, reconstruct the past."  Einstein's spacetime implies the same thing, that all of time and space are fixed, that we can move forward or back, given the mathematical ability.  There is no randomness in this view of the universe.

And so we thought until the discovery of quantum theory.  The problem being that the world is not infinitely divisible.  Eventually everything must collapse into particles.  This collapse introduces a rounding or truncation error, that is the basis of randomness.  The universe is really digital not analog.  The present is the moment that the continuous changes into steps, quanta.  It's the present that changes infinitely divisible potential into particular actuality.  The collapse of the present is the reason we can't go forward or backward - forward - we can't know the future before it arrives, backward - we can't tell exactly what happened from what we know about the present.

Update: I have been thinking about this and I think the point of collapse is simply the present.  I am not sure what the present is exactly, when considered in the light of Einstein's general relativity, but then as I said before, spacetime and quantum collapse don't seem compatible anyway.  The idea that the point of collapse is the present does not require an observer or multiple universes, although I do wonder if the collapse releases energy and/or information.

Free will and determinism as part of a continuum

Sometimes I am filled with a forbidding mortality.
I'm thinking of my life from the point of view of a Buddhist or Hindu soul at the beginning and the end of a life. Perhaps it's the same as the view of one day in our lives.

If everything is determined then a life is like a book, a play, a movie, predetermined, lived over and over, the same.

It seems as if we have free will and if we have, the view is different at the beginning and the end. At the beginning, a life full of potential to be anything, at the end, completed, fixed, determined. We live life as an observer in a quantum drama, fixing our lives, collapsing potential, choosing choices, moving through it, fixing it to a single fixed trail. I have to ask though, if the life, the day, the week is fixed at the end, how is it not fixed at the beginning?

Yet even our memories are notoriously fickle - two people can remember a particular happening as quite different and as the event becomes distant it blurs.

What if our lives are part of the multiverse, all possible choices made, chosen, fixed, unfixed, all those lives, connected by us, we, I, am the glue that binds all my lives into one, at the beginning and the end of my life, all these lives, all these possibilities, choices.

What if there is a continuum between these choices? A multiverse with some kind of resonance, some kind of probability, preference. A path through the multiverse that is more travelled than the others. Still those other less travelled paths exist on the edge of our lives. Even if that preference is just lives that resonate with this one. Distance from here. A blurring. How much the probability blurs? If the life is more in focus it is like a simple determined life, if more blurred like a resonant path through the multiverse.

I sometimes think we live life as though walking backwards, able to see/remember the past, only able to see briefly into the future, the way we are going, sometimes guessing sometimes missing and bumping into things we didn't see.