the perfect system of the unrandom machine

fate part trois

if a butterfly flapping its wings in new york could cause a tsunami at cape town, i would be most interested to know the chain of events at all points in between. but as a human being with finite understanding, i can only perceive a finite number of events. yet from point one to point two there are an infinite number of points, and also events that play a nonzero part in the gestalt of things.

i am interested to know all these points, because then i could truly understand what is happening. many times we observe the events of the world only in digestible blocks: we acknowledge only the occurences that make the larger impacts, and we attribute consequences to those causes, arbitrarily rejecting the rest as not nearly as important. we create a system of understanding called determinism that draws arrows between two adjacent points on the fabric of spacetime. today i realise that determinism is not a system of truth but a truth simulator: subscribe to the theory of cause and effect, and most of the time your results will be satisfactory. then some other times, your results fail due to an innocent misattribution of a single arrow.

but like any simulator, the results are only as trustworthy as the algorithm. unfortunately there is no way to understand truth, only to approximate it.

suppose i found the most impressive computer that could fathom more event points than any other. suppose it was then given the most complex and encompassing deterministic algorithm ever written. this computer could likely predict the outcome of a lottery ball machine. it would observe the dimensions of the ball container, the air density, the mass of the balls, the coefficients of friction, the viscosity of the air, the humidity in it. a hundred thousand time-variant variables for a billion points in time linked by multiple partial differential equations sloshing around in the brain of this supercomputer. for all intents and purposes, any so-called random event becomes simply a series of steps that this computer could print out on a sheet of paper. this computer would outlaw the concept of probability.

if we could observe all things, and knowing the interrelations between these things, and if we could process that infinite amount of information instantaneously, we would become the unrandom machine. but because we cannot observe all things, because we cannot process an infinite amount of information instantaneously, because event relationships can only be speculated, we will likely never attain the state of unrandom perception.

but how good would it be if i could become an unrandom machine. at the cost of my humanity and capacity for surprise and therefore delight in life, i could know all outcomes, and prove to those who believe in fate that their outcomes are always changing, that they are simply willing victims of the imperfect system known as probability.