[MD] Choosing Chance

[Steven Peterson]

>
> Hi Bo, Krimel,
>


> Steve:
> > Do you have any evidence that Pirsig ever toyed with the idea of a
> > Metaphysics of Randomness? If you were referring to this passage
> > below, I think a re-reading will clear up your misconception:
>
> Bo:
> Listen Steve, there are many candidates for "reality", many grand
> concepts that are unassimilable in SOM. Up through the MD there
> have been suggested many "groundstuffs" other than quality, why not
> "randomness".


Steve:
Randomness seems like a particularly bad choice to me as a metaphysical
basis since I see it as an epistemological rather than an ontological
concept. I see it as a term used to say what we know about something rather
than about what something is like. Randomness, as I understand the term, is
used to descibe our ability to make predictions about events rather than a
property of the events themselves. I believe this issue is what concerned
Einstein about Quantum Mechanics. I think he saw it as giving ontological
status to randomness when randomness is a matter of perspective.

For example, when we say that coin flips are random, we aren't saying that
flips have the property of indeterminancy. We are just saying that we cannot
predict what the outcome will be, but we can predict that half the time the
result will be "heads." Of course, if we knew enough about the particular
coin flip, we actually could predict the outcome. Some people have even
trained themselves to reliably flip "heads" by timing the toss and catch.

I think that in the case of Quantum Mechanics, scientists are saying that
not only can we not predict specific outcomes, there is no way that we can
imagine a perspective from which it would ever be possible to make accurate
predictions of specific outcomes. But this "randomness" issue still sounds
like a question about knowledge to me rather than an argument that
randomness should be thought of as the groundstuff of reality. Maybe it's
just my lack of imagination for conceiving of probability in that way. Some
people certainly have that problem with Quality.

"Everything is Quality" feels a lot better to me than "everything is random"
which just sounds to me as equivalent to "some things are predictable but
others are unpredictable from my perspective."

Best,
Steve