Can all things be random?
The last summer I was reading this book: The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics
The book was dealing mainly with the complexity of economic systems. It actually tried to introduce a new field of economic analysis Complexity Economics, that is inspired by the recent trend of complexity science and has strong roots into the theory of evolution.
One very interesting idea that caught my attention was that of causality and expertise in the field of economics and business. In fact, what caught my attention was the implications that this idea could have in the general field of epistimology, both from a philosophical-theoritical point of view, and in a more applied setting. But, let me first introduce you to the whole concept.
What Eric Beinhocker says in the book is this: many experts are not experts, but just lucky. What makes look like experts, is the fact that they get it right. But getting it right, has nothing to do with knowing why you’re right or being right for the right reasons.
Let’s say that there are a 100 companies in the stock-market and there are a 100 stockbrokers. Each one of them chooses a stock at random and bets on it. It is inevitable that some of the stocks will go well and some won’t. Those stockbrokers who made the right choices are considered experts, even though the chose it at random. You think that this is far from reality but read this first: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/indexes-beat-most-actively-managed. Actually, this has also been argued by Nassim Nicolas Taleb in his book The Black Swan.
What is very interesting about this whole idea, is how it could be applied to virtually anything. Surely, there are statistical tests that allow us to derive probabilities and degrees of confidence about our assumptions, but I mostly want to make a philosophical argument here. What if, the whole world was nothing sort of a bunch of random coincidences that we thought were making sense, just because our brains try to make sense out of everything (Split Brains, Consciousness and Michael Gazzaniga) ?
Maybe this sounds a lot like epiphenomenalism applied in a causality. Epiphenomenalism is the belief that mental states are by-producs of physical ones without any causal relation. Maybe, the world could be described by a set of random physical states with no causal relation between them, that are epiphenomena to some underlying structure that generates them.
However, while something could be created entirely at random, it doesn’t mean it was created this way. Actually, this might be a problem of the generative approach of doing social science that Joshua M. Epstein has advocated. That is, the impossibility to know for sure which initial conditions lead to a final state by reverse engineering the final state . In Encefalus, I covered a similar problem in http://encefalus.com/philosophical/truth-pure-computational-models-social-life/ which you might want to take a look at.
But, maybe this argument is going out of control 
. Anyway, it’s something that I’ll try to keep in my mind while doing my research, especially science focused on the generative approach. Chance is a powerful force, not to be ignored.
