Chance and free will

To defend free will was not, of course, to insist on the operation of pure chance. Most thinkers still saw objective chance as virtually impossible, and few were prepared to identify the rational will with it. But at least the connotations of chance had changed. Previously it had seemed impiuous to allow chance a role in the world, as if God did not attend to every sparrow. Now chance stood for the incompleteness of mechanical law, for the possibility of non-material causation.

Gerd Gigerenzer et al., The Empire of Chance, section 2.6. This joins the defense of free will laid down by K. Popper as I noticed in this post and this note. See also this post as well as the work on incompleteness by Gregory Chaitlin.

Self-reference, once again, once again

Another comment, this time from the biologist Richard Dawkins, that shows that importance of self-reference:

"Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself."

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Chapter 4, The gene machine.

See this post and this one on self-reference. See also the last line of G. Chaitin quoted in this post.

Self-reference, once again

"The entity being reckoned is fatally entwined with the entity doing the reckoning. As Douglas Hofstadter put it much later, «The thing hinges on getting this halting inspector to try to predict its own behavior when looking at itself trying to predict its own behavior when...» A conundrum that at least smelled similar had lately appeared in physics, too: Werner Heisenberg's new uncertainty principle. When Turing learned about that, he expressed it in terms of self-reference: «It used to be supposed in Science that everything was known about the Universe at any particular moment then we can predict what it will be through all the future... More modern science however has come to the conclusion that when we are dealing with atoms and electrons we are quite unable to know the exact state of them; our instruments being made of atoms and electrons themselves."

James Gleick, The Information, Chapter 7.

I am still surprised that, although Karl Popper has stated the same thing, there seems to have been little exchange of the same idea between these different scholars.

Has the Universe finite or infinite complexity?

"[L]et's now finally discuss whether the physical universe is like π=3.1415926... which only has a finite complexity, namely the size of the smallest program to generate π, or like Ω, which has unadulterared infinite complexity.
Well, if you believe in quantum physics, then Nature plays dice, and that generates complexity, an infinite amount of it, for example, as frozen accidents, mutations that are preserved in our DNA. So at this time most scientists would bet that the universe has infinite complexity, like Ω does. But then the world is incomprehensible, or at least a large part of it will always remain so, the accidental part, all those frozen accidents, the contingent part.
But some people still hope that the world has finite complexity like π it just looks like it has high complexity. If so, then we might eventually be able to comprehend everything, and there is an ultimate TOE [Theory of Everything]! But then you have to believe that quantum mechanics is wrong, as currently practiced, and that all quantum randomness is really only pseudo-randomness, like what you find in the digits of π. You have to believe that the world is actually deterministic, even though our current scientific theories say that it isn't!
[...]Wolfram believes that very simple deterministic algorithms ultimately account for all the apparent complexity we see around us, just like they do in π. He believes that the world looks very complicated, but is actually very simple. There's no randomness, there's only pseudo-randomness. Then nothing is contingent, everything is necessary, everything happens for a reason. [Leibniz!]
[...]
Or perhaps from inside this world we will never be able to tell the difference, only an outside observer could do that."

Gregory Chaitin, Metamath!, Appendix II.

Notice that the last argument has also been mentioned by Karl Popper in his Open Universe (see my review of his book).

The critical reductionist

[W]e may be faced with the possibility that the origin of life (like the origin of the universe) becomes an impenetrable barrier to science, and a residue to all attempts to reduce biology to chemistry and physics. For even though Monod's suggestion of the uniqueness of life's origin is refutable --by attempts at reduction, to be sure-- it would amount, if true, to a denial of any successful reduction. With this suggestion Monod, who is a reductionist for reasons of method, arrives at the position which, I believe, is the one forced upon us all in the light of our earlier discussion of the reduction of chemistry to physics. It is the position of a critical reductionist who continues with attempted reductions even if he despairs of any ultimate success.Yet it is in going forward with attempted reductions, as Monod stresses elsewhere in his book, rather than in any replacement of reductionist methods by 'holistic ones', that our main hope lies --our hope of learning more about old problems, and of discovering new problems which, in turn, may lead to new solutions, to new discoveries.

Karl Poppper, The Open Universe, Scientific reduction and the essential incompleteness of all science.

Randomness cannot be defined

"Borel's conclusion is that there can be no one definitive definition of randomness. You can't define an all-inclusive notion of randomness. Randomness is a slippery concept, there's something paradoxical about it, it's hard to grasp. It's all a matter of deciding how much we want to demand. You have to decide on a cut-off, you have to say «enough,» let's take that to be random."

Gregory Chaitin, Meta Math!, Complexity, randomness and incompleteness.