Morfydd St. Clair wrote:I think that many things are random, but the larger effect follows a pattern. For the fallen-leaf example, a leaf falls randomly (subject to wind, etc.) but fallen leaves will accumulate, and thus be noticed by us, based on patterns like: a depression in the ground, or an obstacle making the wind suddenly drop.
Another example: evolution is caused by random mutations. The mutations that are passed on are largely passed on because they make the owner more likely to have viable offspring. Those advantages follow patterns - brighter plumage->more mates, or malaria resistance->more surviving children.
I think this is very close to it. Order or patterns are an "emergent" feature of the world: all the little chaotic, random, basic events add up, over long time scales, to organised patterns. There's a tendency towards increased complexity.
Quantum mechanics tell us that the smallest-scale events of the universe are random in the truest sense of the word, not just unknown to us because of our limited understanding, but unknowable, to anyone. Try as you might, you can never know exactly both the position and the momentum of the same particle, however fancy your equipment. The more precisely you measure one, the less accurately it's possible to know the other. You can never be certain what a given particle will do in the future, you can just work out the probability that it will be found at such-and-such location at a specified time. And yet, all the little interlinked random events create patterns of incredible complexity.
We can to some extent trace the chain of causality: the wind blew like it did because the contours and albedo of the land were exactly as they were, and because the exact pattern of solar radiation heated the atmosphere in precisely this way. Trace it back farther, though, and you end up on the truly random events: where did this precise pattern of solar radiation come from? Why did precisely this many photons of precisely these frequencies end up exactly there? Here we end up back at the quantum unknowables. Trace the chain the other direction, and the wind that blows the way it does partially because of the contours of the land, will also change those same contours. The leaves will end up in the places they do because of the wind, shifting future winds ever so slightly. Mountains will erode in patterns determined by past weather, and the wind will build massive dunes from the liberated sand, which will in turn affect future weather. Everything affects everything, all things build patterns, and yet, all these patterns are built on an enormous number of truly random events.
Pattern and randomness are not opposites, I think, but two sides of the same thing, the heart of the universe.
