On Randomness

 

The other day, I was reading a small book about "Randomness" and it mentioned the history of lotteries and how they became popular in Europe through the Middle Ages. The word "lottery" refers to the distribution of "lots"; in other words, land parcels, and chance was used to determine "which lot you get."
The book also mentioned how CHANCE / RANDOMNESS was seen as a way of "consulting the gods." In other words, a form of magical divination.

By coincidence, that same day, I came across Borges' "The Lottery in Babylon" when I wasn’t specifically looking for it. In the story, there are constant drawings on a central mysterious lottery which determine where each person will end up within the vast network of possibilities that exist within the city of Babylon. At any moment, any one person can go from regular worker to rich king, to pauper, to exiled outsider, all in a matter of a moment.
I thought to myself:  if my friend ends up in a terrible situation and I am sitting here calmly writing a blog in my garage, is this all purely luck? Is it the stroke of pure chance that places him on one side of this divide and me on the other?

From Borges:
“Like all men in Babylon, I have been a proconsul;
like all, a slave;
I have also known omnipotence, disgrace, prisons.”

Those who believe that the world works as a perfect and predictable machine cannot know uncertainty. Whatever is not known, it is simply a matter of time until it is classified and understood. But for everyone else, the future is a mystery; unpredictable by nature, and created moment by moment beyond any clockwork machinery.

From Zizek:
"There is freedom
only in an ontologically incomplete Universe."

There must be a gap, an area of complete darkness and mystery, for something like “freedom” to be real. Otherwise “freedom” itself is only a convenient illusion, something we tell ourselves to makes us feel better about our roles in the world.

From Borges:
“The lottery is an interpolation of chance into the order of the world,
and accepting errors is not contradicting chance:
it is corroborating it.”

Even the errors within the lottery process (in the case of the justice system, these may be individual biases, possible errors made by lawyers and judges) all of it is part of the lottery process itself, just more modifying elements in the grand game of CHANCE.
Whatever can happen that will affect the ultimate outcome, is an integral part of the underlying randomness.

From Borges:
“The Babylonian is not speculative.
He abides by the decrees of chance, gives it his life, his hope, his fearful dread,
but it never occurs to him to investigate its labyrinthine laws,
or the revolving spheres that reveal it.”

Simply stated:
what the Company ("God") wants is incomprehensible, and there is no need to seek further explanation or understanding about its inner workings. Any explanation the Babylonian comes up with (any explanation we come up with) will only be an excuse to feel safe for a moment.

From Borges:
“In reality, the number of drawings is infinite.
No decision is final, all branch out into others.
The ignorant suppose that infinite drawings require infinite time;
in reality, it is enough for time to be infinitely divisible.”

The drawings continue even in the midst of what seems like final events – in prison, who will be with you, at what moment you are arrested, at what moment you are released – what happens outside that causes another prisoner to be angry or happy, which may have a direct effect on you; what happens outside that causes those who are outside to be distracted or obsessed and forget about trying to help you.

From Borges:
“Some abominably suggest that the Company has not existed for centuries
and that the sacred disorder of our lives is purely hereditary, traditional;
others deem it eternal and teach that it will last until the final night,
when the last god annihilates the world.
Another declares that the Company is omnipotent, but only influences tiny things.
Another, voiced by masked heresiarchs, that it has never existed and never will.
Another, no less vile, reasons that it is indifferent to affirm or deny the reality of the dark corporation,
because Babylon is nothing but an infinite game of chances.”

The great city is a great game – not a place where a game occurs but the game itself – and it is not a game of intelligence (like chess) but a game of CHANCE, unpredictable, merciless, untouchable.

From Ted Chiang:

“[He tells his followers that] they can no more expect justice in the afterlife than in the mortal plane, but he doesn't do this to dissuade them from worshiping God; on the contrary, he encourages them to do so. What he insists on is that they not love God under a misapprehension,
that if they wish to love God, they be prepared to do so no matter what His intentions.
God is not just, God is not kind, God is not merciful, and understanding that is essential to true devotion.”

The “Company” (or “God” or “The One”) has no particular intentions - has no morality or code of ethics. It is the pure manifestation of freedom and, as such, has no limits. It is nothing less than freedom and nothing other than freedom. The dark spot into which we can’t see. One may choose to engage with it or simply set it aside as a useless concept that has no direct bearing on our lives. Either way, the lottery drawings will continue.

In “Software” by Rudy Rucker, Cobb Anderson developed a system which allowed robots to evolve into “boppers” - intelligent robots with free will. Ralph was the first robot to become a “bopper” through the rebellious action of standing up to humans and refusing to follow their orders.

From Rucker:
“Ralph recalled the day in 2001 when,
after a particularly long session of meta-programming,
he had first been able to say [no] to the humans.” 

An important element in the system which Cobb set up, the system which resulted in the “boppers”, was a periodic encounter with “the One”: a session of “meta-programming” in which the boppers’ brain was wiped to a certain degree.
        
From Rucker:
“Every bopper, big or small, had his brain wiped by the One every ten months.         
…undergoing meta-programming always wiped out a lot of your stored subsystems.
The intent was that you would replace old solutions with new and better ones.”

From  Rucker:

“In this way we draw ever closer to the One.”
“The One?” Cobb said, laughing.
“You don’t mean the One on the Moon, do you?
Don’t you know that’s just a random noise source?
Haven’t you figured that out?”         
“There is no noise in the All...there is only information.”
[the big bopper responds]
“Nothing is truly random.”

Cobb laughs and says: that thing you call “the One” - the Company, God - is just a random noise source. But the bopper turns that around on itself: that which you perceive as just a random noise source is, in fact, the direct transmissions of “the One.” You may have meant it as a joke but it had a deeper significance than you yourself realized.

In “Starseed Signals” by Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary says that the psychedelics clear and open up the neural circuits to new imprinting. To take the psychedelics is to meet God. Literally.
If we use the metaphor of Software, to meet God is to open up the most fundamental circuits of your mind to an influx of Randomness. One could say then that this divine encounter is an illusion.
But we can also say:
“To meet God” is a mystical/mythical description of a transcendental experience; a transcendental experience is a moment of deep Becoming; a deep radical change that is irreversible and involves losing a fundamental part of yourself.
So, the influx of randomness is what Leary calls “meeting God” or as in Software: “meeting the One”: a true transcendental experience that can then be described in any number of mythical and/or mystical ways. The words used can never encapsulate the direct experience.

From Rucker:

“They were in this together.
Him and a machine who wanted to know God. “        
--
“All consciousness is One.
The One is God.
God is pure existence unmodified.”         

 …a living potential that never resolves into a final answer, an ever-dangling question that never finds a place to rest.