Randomness and purpose.

So it be; the world to some is determined. It's like seeing a movie rerun. All causation has been sorted out at the beginning; the big bang contained the device you're reading this post on. Thus there is no complexity, mere play of a script embedded in the DNA of the universe. It unfolds, reality flows, and thus the cycle of (seemingly) endless causation progresses through time.

Other minds revel in the haze of chaos, a fog of randomness sits like a translucent layer over reality, blocking access to Heisenberg and layman alike. The problem intensifies when one tries to look deeper, the inanimate world and it's million minions start playing magic tricks. Reality changes just by the act of observation, I can't photograph the electron, it transforms as I observe it.

Deterministic seers are lucky. They can see connections across time, space and causation. From Nostradamus to the daily horoscope, and karma to afterlife, some people seem to possess the cheatcodes for level 9 of the game. I envy them, they do predict every branch of the fractal which a Julia set will unfold into, given the number of iterations and initial conditions. Similarly they say that all the complexity and seemingly indeterminate consequentiality of the universe is analogously explicable. To make matters worse, they see formulea and connections, they see divine purposes, they see intelligent designs, I still fumble in the dark.

Sometimes I dread, what if they're right, and the world does have a cheatcode. Look at the six numbers which make the universe, life and this speculation possible. The slightest change in them and the universe changes into an incomprehensible, probably impossible mess of mass or energy. As if there is a deep conspiracy in the very existence of existence, I crawl around like a blindworm in Aristotle's cave, assuming to make sense of the fraction of reality that enters through the limitations of the filters of my senses.

Sometimes I am amazed at the certainty of my scientific beliefs; they are indeed transient like all truths, bound to strict conditions, blind to the haze which hides a myriad probabilities. Then I realize that I'm more dogmatic, than the dreamer, who in his somnambulism, embarks on a serendipitous voyage of discovery in a labyrinthine, connected and foreordained world.  

(picture: fractal, Mandelbrot set, made on Fraqtive on Ubuntu 13.04,  film grained in Gimp.)