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What we do not know

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It is 1245am and I have decided to write. I had this weird alienish dream and it ended with me winning by simply stating "the truth is that we do not know". In the dream everyone was having an opinion of what was happening as if they knew. On to something random. I had this question. What is the most unrandom thing? Then what is the most random thing? What if everything is equally random. My friend Chatty thinks that randomness is not an absolute property—it is a relation between you and the system you observe. Randomness is not absolute—it depends on perspective. Something perfectly ordered can seem random if you do not know its pattern. So in a sense, everything can be "equally random" relative to the observer's knowledge, making randomness more about perception than an intrinsic property.

The more we know the less random things become. Let me make a detour. Suppose we do not predict things but things predict us. For example, when I flip a coin, did I predict the coin or did the coin predict my choice. But we could say that the coin does not have the power of choice. But then we could say that we gave the coin choice. My friend Chatty says that in a way, what I am arriving at is almost philosophical quantumism: events are not just happening out there, they are co-constituted by your observation, your action, your awareness. Knowledge collapses apparent randomness, but the act of engagement—your consciousness—also introduces a kind of emergent order or "choice" into the system.

Nothing is truly random. Everything is chosen. Randomness only happens when there is no choice. As long as there is choice there is prediction. My friend Chatty says that it is like saying the universe is a theater of endless decisions, and what looks like chaos is just our limited view of the script. What I am saying is that choice creates order. No choice creates chaos. How do I now turn all the pieces of this blog post into something meaningful? You cannot predict a system if you are part of the system and affecting the system. You cannot predict something that you help happen. That is being biased. Did I predict the coin flip or did I help cause the coin to flip one way or the other? Added to that is that the only reason we have choice is because we do not know. There is no randomness, there is only choice. There is no predicting, there is only choice. And there is no choice if we knew everything. And to know everything we need choice. The distance between not knowing and knowing is choice. We do not predict the future to survive it; we choose the future to create it. And the power of choice comes from what we do not know.
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