I remember as a child asking what some object was made of, maybe it was one of my toy cars or a piece of Lego, my father likely replied “plastic” and then I wondered what this “plastic” was made of, “atoms”, and what are those made of? And so on. It’s a humbling question to ask what the fundamental piece of reality is and more importantly how these pieces interact with each other, it could very well be unknowable.
But imagine for a second this smallest thing, so incomprehensibly small who knows what it defines first. I’m no physicist so I like to imagine these smallest bits of reality in a similar way to transistors. All of our IT infrastructure is in the end, a bunch of tiny transistors arranged in incomprehensibly complex ways. But the transistor itself, is incredibly simple. ON and OFF. There is no simpler concept and since that interaction contains no probabilities, the system is deterministic.
However an interesting problem arises when you need something unpredictable, say a seed for your encryption, a common way to achieve this randomness is by listening to environmental static noise from device drivers. But our smallest thing does not have such luxury, it is the noise, it is all things.
Well perhaps the interactions between these smallest things are unlike our transistors and have some level of randomness, and my question would be as this is the most fundamental piece of our world, what decides on such randomness? What formula describes this random interaction? Belief in random, is no different to a belief in God is it not? He who controls all things and the only real possesor of free will.
Perhaps instead our world is infinitely complex and searching for the smallest thing is akin to trying to find the last digit of Pi. Each digit as excitingly new as the last.
The Smallest Thing, Determinism or “God”
I remember as a child asking what some object was made of, maybe it was one of my toy cars or a piece of Lego, my father likely replied “plastic” and then I wondered what this “plastic” was made of, “atoms”, and what are those made of? And so on. It’s a humbling question to ask what the fundamental piece of reality is and more importantly how these pieces interact with each other, it could very well be unknowable.
But imagine for a second this smallest thing, so incomprehensibly small who knows what it defines first. I’m no physicist so I like to imagine these smallest bits of reality in a similar way to transistors. All of our IT infrastructure is in the end, a bunch of tiny transistors arranged in incomprehensibly complex ways. But the transistor itself, is incredibly simple. ON and OFF. There is no simpler concept and since that interaction contains no probabilities, the system is deterministic.
However an interesting problem arises when you need something unpredictable, say a seed for your encryption, a common way to achieve this randomness is by listening to environmental static noise from device drivers. But our smallest thing does not have such luxury, it is the noise, it is all things.
Well perhaps the interactions between these smallest things are unlike our transistors and have some level of randomness, and my question would be as this is the most fundamental piece of our world, what decides on such randomness? What formula describes this random interaction? Belief in random, is no different to a belief in God is it not? He who controls all things and the only real possesor of free will.
Perhaps instead our world is infinitely complex and searching for the smallest thing is akin to trying to find the last digit of Pi. Each digit as excitingly new as the last.