The Edge of Randomness

Up to now I have been trying to capture the elusive notion of chance by looking at binary strings, the most ingenuous image of a succession of sensory events. Since most binary strings cannot be compressed, one would conclude that randomness is pervasive. However, the data streams of our consciousness do, in fact, exhibit some level of coherence. The brain processes sensory images and unravels the masses of data it receives, somehow anchoring our impressions by allowing patterns to emerge from the noise. If what we observe is not entirely random, it doesn’t mean, however, that it is deterministic. It is only that the correlations that appear in space and time lead to recognizable patterns that allow, as the poet Robert Frost puts it, “a temporary stay against confusion.” In the world that we observe there is evidently a tension between order and disorder, between surprise and inevitability.