Is the World Aleatoric? Or Epistemic?

By Shlomo Maital  

         Question:  What is your view of the world?  Is the world “aleatoric”? Or “epistemic”?

          Sorry for the two-dollar words.  Aleatoric means random, uncertain.  Epistemic means unexpected things occur, but only because we have not yet acquired sufficient knowledge.  In short, is the world inherently random, unpredictable,  or is the world full of the unknown BUT KNOWABLE eventually?

           I spent my life working in Academe.  People I work with are epistemic.  Academics believe that their research will turn the unknown into the knowable. And a great deal of scientific research does that.  One possible (though not inevitable) result, is that those with higher education believe in a distant God, or none at all, as we ourselves become God, in the sense of understanding scientific causality, rather than divine intervention.  Academe is epistemic.

           But what if the world is really aleatoric?  Divinely aleatoric?   That is – events are random, but the Divine hand is present in ways we do not understand, nor will we ever.  This is a variation on purely random, aleatoric world.

            Example?   In 1945 US Secretary of War Henry Stimson persuaded President Harry Truman NOT to bomb Kyoto with the first US atom bomb.  Experts felt that destroying Japan’s cultural capital and historic priceless treasures would strike a war-ending blow.  But as a 19 year old, Stimson had visited Kyoto and loved it.  He argued vehemently in two long meetings with Truman NOT to bomb Kyoto.  Result:  Hiroshima was chosen instead.

             Is this epistemic? Or aleatoric?  Moreover —  US B-29 bombers with the second A-bomb arrived at their second target – and found it covered with clouds.  They had to divert to an alternate:  Nagasaki.  So both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed, and their inhabitants decimated, by a virtually random cause – a trip by a teenager, and the vagaries of weather.  Aleatoric?  Epistemic? 

            Scientists reported yesterday that they have models that can predict crowd movements, that today seem random.  Really?  Will we humans one day know EVERYthing?  Einstein fought quantum mechanics of Bohr, saying God does not play dice with the universe.  Some of us may believe, true – but it LOOKS like he does, and because we will never truly understand divine intervention, we might as well treat the world as divinely aleatoric, with God in the background (e.g. Bette Middler’s wonderful song “God is Watching Us ….At A Distance”.

          What is your own view?

          Incidentally:   Quantum computers are proving many times more powerful than conventional ones, based on the fact that a piece of information (bit) can be either zero, or one, or some probability inbetween, and the probability is an infinite set of fractions… making that ‘bit’ many times more powerful than its being either zero or one (as in conventional computing). 

          Quantum computing uses the aleatoric world in an epistemic manner (we figured out how to USE IT!). 

           A head scratcher.