[bradfordarner]

> If you throw a bag of a trillion^trillion^trillion particles into a purely self contained environment (i.e. the Universe), and let it stir for a while - whatever is going on - at least from a materialist perspective - is random.

This seems to lead to a meaningless/useless definition paradox. 'Randomness' comes to mean everything and nothing. This is one of the things that led me away from an interest in the materialist/physicalist position. Like you said elsewhere, it seems hard to swallow the idea that all that we can achieve in defining 'randomness' is a negative definition. Personally, I find it problematic that materialism has no positive definition of what 'randomness' is and does not seem capable of offering a meaningful/useful definition.

[SomeStupidPoint]

Sort of by definition, you can't fully describe a random process. (A little fiddling actually turns that in to a pretty good definition of what a random process is, but that gets really technical, really quick.)

I doubt you'll find any better usage of randomness in other fields, and in many ways, "random" is used to censor things our theories can't represent, and wrap them in stochastic approximators. This is useful, because we can then use the stochastic models as a bound on the possible outcomes caused by things we can't model (for various reasons). This let's us calculate useful predictions involving things we don't or can't know.

I don't think randomness is a negative definition, just that our primary usage of the concept is boxing up unmodelable things.

[jjaredsimpson]

Are you saying you think dualism has some persuasive explanatory power?