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Is “Physical Randomness” Just Indeterminism in Disguise?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

Paul W. Humphreys
Paul W. Humphreys*
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
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Extract

The topic of this session is “physical randomness”. It might be doubted whether such a subject exists, for definitions of randomness have hitherto almost all been mathematical in nature. The only exceptions of which I am aware are the preceding paper by Benioff and a paper by Wesley Salmon. These attempts to inject some empirical content into randomness are highly desirable. But anyone attempting to formulate a physically based definition of randomness should at some point make clear what the connection is (if any) with a more traditional notion of disorder - that of indeterminism. Repeated reference to quantum mechanical examples whenever physical randomness is discussed indicates that a primary motivation for considering physical randomness to be important is because of the current belief that data sequences associated with quantum mechanical experiments are irreducibly random. (As an indication of this, in any situation in which physical randomness is discussed, translate the remarks about quantum phenomena into remarks about coin tossing, and they will lose much of their interest.)

Type
Part III. Physical Randomness
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1978 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1978 , 1978 , pp. 98 - 113
Copyright
Copyright © 1981 Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

The research for this paper was partially supported by NSF grant # S0C77-08837. I should also like to thank Leonard Monk and Zeno Swijtink for helpful discussions.

References

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