[flockonus]

Random is a very interesting concept. In relation to nature we seem to use "random" as anything we can't or are currently unable to model.

To call something random doesn't mean it's impossible to model, in fact all sorts of natural facts seemed random one day before being covered by a model. One very relatable example example is the motion of stars in the the night sky, which seemed random for ages, until the Copernican revolution.

The fact we have access to random() function in programming seems to trip many people. random() is a particular model implementation of random, but stuff in nature isn't random().

My point is, using "just random" to do work in any scientific explanation is a clutch.

[Maxatar]

In science randomness is usually used to abstract over a large number of possible paths that result in some outcome without having to reason individually about any specific path or all such paths.

It does not have to mean something inherently non-deterministic or something that can't be modelled, although it certainly is the case that if something is inherently non-deterministic then it would necessarily have to be modelled randomly. Modelling things as a random process is very useful even in cases where the underlying phenomenon has a fully understood and deterministic model; a simple example of this would be chess. It's an entirely deterministic game with perfect information that is fully understood, but nevertheless all the best chess engines model positions probabilistically and use randomness as part of their search.

[srean]

> Modelling things as a random process is very useful even in cases where the underlying phenomenon has a fully understood and deterministic model

Output of of a pseudorandom generater is a good example.

[staticassertion]

There's disagreement on this. You seem to just be saying that brute facts or brute contingencies don't exist, but I suspect most scientists would disagree with that.

[Nevermark]

I am not sure why you are being downvoted.

The use of "random" as explanation or characterization in science has certainly spanned everything from "we don't know", to "there is inherent indivisible physical randomness".

And I would agree, in the latter case it is a crutch. A postulate that something gets decided by no mechanisms whatsoever (randomness obeying a distribution still leaves the unexplained "choice").

It is remarkable that people still suggest the latter, when the theory, both in theory and experiment, doesn't require a physical choice at all (even if we experience a choice, that experience is explained without the universe making a choice).

[staticassertion]

It is not incomplete to say that something does not require explanation, nor is it saying it's "magic". It is a cost that your model might incur, that's it.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.15776

In this paper a plurality of physicists stated that they felt that the initial conditions of the universe are brute facts that warrant no further explanation. This is not "our model doesn't yet account for it", it's "there is no explanation to be given".

[anon291]

I'm not sure that's true. Randomness has a well-defined meaning for me: unable to be computed by a finite program. The vast majority of real numbers are thus composed of truly random digits. Suppose the universe has a constant that is a real number. The overwhelmingly vast majority of real numbers are non-computable and cannot be described by a finite descrition of any kind. Thus, if the universe were simply sampling numbers from this real constant (or simply the answer to the math is this real constant as it is undergoing some dynamics), then the numbers would appear random because the true underlying constant is non-computable, and thus appears random.

There is no possible finite way to describe if this were the case or not.