What Does Randomness Look Like?

A lot life life.

The world would be a different place if I stopped anticipating the end. Not the big end. The small ones. The end of the conversation. The end of the meal. The end of the feeling before the feeling has even started.

I do this thing where I leave before the leaving happens. Not physically. Somewhere inside. I’m already at the door while the room is still warm. I’m already composing the memory while the moment is still here.

I know it's not a rare distress. Most people live it.

But it’s a strange way to live, when you think about it. To be so afraid of not knowing the unknown, that you rehearse the endings in advance, as if knowing how something will feel when it’s over will protect you from feeling it while it’s happening. Like saying “I should get going” twenty minutes before you actually leave, because the leaving is easier if you have already left in your head.

But I don’t think I do it out of fear alone. I think I anticipate the end because it helps me make sense of whatever is happening while it’s happening. If I know how something will end, I can tell myself a story about why it began. The ending gives the middle a shape. Without it, the moment is just a moment, and I have never been good at letting a moment just be.

And I know it's not a rare distress. Most people live it.

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‘Superstition’ in the Pigeon

In 1948, an American psychologist named B.F. Skinner placed pigeons in cages where food was delivered at fixed intervals, regardless of what the pigeons were doing. The pigeons had no control over when the food arrived. But within hours, each one had decided that it did.

One started turning in circles before the food appeared. Another bobbed its head. A third swung like a pendulum. Mr. Skinner called it superstition. He said the pigeon had concluded, with the full conviction of its small and certain brain, that the food was arriving because of what it was doing. They behaved as if there were a causal relation between their behaviour and the food, although no such relation existed.

The food had nothing to do with the rituals. The schedule was fixed before the pigeon entered the cage.

“There are many analogies in human behaviour. Rituals for changing one’s luck at cards are good examples.”¹

We are the pigeons performing rituals in cages we can’t see the edges of, convinced that the food arrived because we turned in a circle.

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The Matrix

What breaks the pattern is the glitch in ‘The Matrix’. Things which don’t follow the order, or at least the defined order. Randomness.

The word “random” itself is born out of the desperate human effort to make sense of everything he couldn’t. The urge to define, to categorise everything which exists, even the things he’ll never understand. Especially the things he’ll never understand.

Apophenia (coined by German psychiatrist Klaus Conrad, 1958) is the tendency to perceive meaningful patterns in random or unrelated data. Its visual cousin is called pareidolia, which only adds evidence. It’s the habit of seeing faces in clouds, in toast, in the grain of wood, in statues that seem to weep.

Apophenia and pareidolia are also the two most important pillars of any living being. Be it humans or pigeons.

In 2004, a woman in Florida sold a grilled cheese sandwich on eBay for $28,000. She had kept the sandwich in a plastic box on her nightstand for ten years because she believed the burn pattern on the bread was the face of the Virgin Mary. An online casino bought it.

On September 21, 1995, before dawn, a worshipper at a temple in south Delhi offered a spoonful of milk to a Ganesha murti (statue). The milk disappeared. By mid-morning, statues across India were drinking. By evening, temples in London, Toronto, Hong Kong, and Nairobi had confirmed the same thing. Lord Ganesha was living his omnipresent life in true sense. Scientists from the Ministry of Science and Technology arrived with coloured milk and demonstrated capillary action. Ten thousand people standing in line at the Vishwa Temple in Southall, London, didn’t care about capillary action. Sitaram Kesri, labour minister in the Narasimha Rao government, quoted internal reports to say that a temple in Jhandewalan Park near the RSS headquarters in Delhi was the epicentre of the miracle. He said it was a ploy by the BJP to gain votes in the ensuing Lok Sabha elections by spreading false rumours.²

I’m not sure what the truth is. But I’m hopeful and honest. And maybe this is what we do. Turn in circles and call it prayer.

Not because we are stupid or desperate. But because the alternative is that it means nothing. That the milk disappeared because of surface tension, and the sandwich was just bread, and the good thing that happened last Tuesday wasn’t a reward for one of my deeds, and the bad thing that will happen next month isn’t a punishment for a sin either.

A man is sometimes destroyed not by randomness but by the belief that he can find a pattern in it. The pattern is the painkiller. We would rather be wrong about why than be right about nothing.

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God Doesn’t Play Dice

Einstein believed that randomness was a reflection of human ignorance. “God does not play dice,” he said, and he meant it. He believed there was an order underneath, a hidden set of variables we simply hadn’t discovered yet.

I think otherwise.

With life and age I have started to understand that randomness and irony are a spectator sport. There’s nothing better than witnessing one, provided you aren’t the one living it. Probably because of the chaos and pain involved. It’s probably why they say it, that one man’s misery is a poem for someone else.

But at the very foundation, at the subatomic level, the experiments sided with Niels Bohr, not with Einstein. Unpredictability isn’t a failure of measurement. It’s a property of reality itself.³ You can’t simultaneously know a particle’s position and its momentum. This isn’t a technological limitation. It’s a constitutional feature of the universe. The ‘Floor of Reality’, at its smallest measurable point, doesn’t hold still.

The dice is real

People who helped me arrive at this thought, helped me understand about the rules of ‘spectator sports’.

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Web of Causation

Exceptions are a way of life, and there’s one here too: determinism and unpredictability coexist. A simple pendulum attached to the end of another (double pendulum) will move according to the laws we can write down, but in ways we can’t predict.⁴ The rules are knowable. The outcome isn’t. And somehow everything we have ever built, all the structures, processes and plans around it, sit on top of that Floor, and it holds. Until it doesn’t. We also call it life.

I love planning. I want things in order. I think most people who plan do it because it gives them the illusion that the gap between what they think they want, what they actually want, and what they get can be closed. But the gap doesn't close. It just changes shape. And more often than not, the thing that lives inside that gap, the thing that decides its size, has no reason behind it at all. Peaky Blinders on Netflix has this great line by Thomas Shelby: "I nearly got everything. But nearly doesn't count." How wide that nearly turns out to be is never up to you. It's up to the randomness we were never consulted about.

Again, I know it's not a rare distress. Most people live it.

And, sometimes even the most righteous of the ones. One of the oldest Indian scriptures, The Mahabharata, narrates the tale.

Yudhishthira, the embodiment of dharma, was invited to a game of dice against Shakuni, whose dice were carved from his dead father’s bones and answered only to his hand. What was framed as a game of chance, a random throw, was the most precise execution of revenge in literary history. Randomness, which was supposed to be the engine of Yudhishthira’s narrative, was only following an order defined by Shakuni.

Yudhishthira lost his wealth. His kingdom. His brothers. And, Draupadi.

“We are all in the hands of destiny,” he said, before the last throw.

Without that game, there would be no exile, no Kurukshetra, no Bhagavad Gita. The most important philosophical text in Hindu civilisation exists because of loaded dice in a rigged game played by a man who believed he had no choice.

Randomness turned out to be one of the most necessary stages of history.

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I think about this more than I should. I think about how our entire existence is built on the foundation of that one random event, the one thing which shouldn’t have happened, and yet did. It can’t be explained or reasoned, but just happened. And everything that came after, every kingdom and every exile, followed from there.

I can’t help but wonder sometimes if every random act is an execution strategy by a force we are yet to define. Maybe years from now we’ll understand it, write the laws in which it operates. Or maybe we already are, and don’t know it yet.

Maybe the answer is that there is no answer. Everything is a great complicated Web of Causation, where every event arises from a vast field of interconnected causes. A random quantum event and a deliberate human action are both part of the same Web of Causation. The distinction between “random” and “caused” may be a product of human cognitive limitations, not a feature of reality.⁵

Evolution proves something similar. It’s one of the most random materials ever passed through non-random filters. It brings me back to the question of whether what we call “randomness” and what we call “order” is even the right question or not. It might not be answerable. And maybe that’s the point.

I can’t decide if this is the most comforting idea I have ever encountered or the most terrifying one.

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The Brain Wants to Have Fun

In life, we make goals, set milestones and timers around them. I support it. Following a structure, a process, these are important virtues, I agree. But it’s funny how it’s always a heavy dose of randomness that teaches us the importance of these virtues in the first place. Like how nobody thinks about breathing until they can’t. And then in between, as life keeps happening, a tiny dose of it is all you need to remind yourself why the structure was worth building.

The reason is simple and for once, the term “it’s not you” makes sense. It’s the brain’s problem because it rewards surprise more than it rewards pleasure. And I think about that more often than a person probably should.

Researchers once dispensed juice and water to participants at unpredictable intervals. What they found was that the brain’s ‘reward pathways’ fired harder for the unpredictability than for the taste. It didn’t matter whether the participants liked the fluid. What mattered was that they couldn’t predict when it would arrive.⁶

This is why slot machines hold people longer than vending machines. The vending machine gives you what you chose. The slot machine gives you what it decides. And the act of not knowing, the gap between pulling the lever and watching the wheels stop, is where the dopamine lives.

Follow a process long enough and the process becomes invisible. The brain adjusts and suddenly the tenth Tuesday of writing on schedule doesn’t feel like the first. Something in you starts looking for the interruption, the thing you didn’t plan, the sentence that arrives from a direction you weren’t watching.

It happens in ways I’m yet to find words for, but it happens. And sometimes it just fits. Maybe just like how adding random noise into a system actually improves the detection of weak signals that were too faint to register in silence.⁷ And hopefully there’ll come a day when the brain is evolved to exploit randomness as a feature, not merely tolerate it as a bug.

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Submit — to a Cause Without a Meaning

I wasn’t going to publish this week. I had “other” things to write. That was the problem. A blog sitting in drafts. A video script with a deadline long gone. The newsletter, the book, the plan, the process. Everything was assigned a shape before I touched it. And somewhere inside all of that, the writing had stopped feeling like writing and started feeling like filling.

So I didn’t write. I sat. I opened a blank page with no topic and no goal and let whatever came, come.

It’s a different feeling, writing like this. Writing with a goal, a topic, a defined pattern, a blog, a video, a chapter, all of that is good. It’s part of the process, part of the bigger thing you are building. I’m not arguing against it.

But writing for randomness, flowing just because it felt like flowing, not knowing what the next sentence will be until your hand writes it, that’s a different animal. More than the act of writing alone, it’s this feeling which makes the art worth it for an artist. The door you didn’t know was in the wall. The feeling of almost being somewhere you have been before, except you have not been there. You only feel like you have. And the feeling is better than the place.

Maybe submitting not to a goal but to a cause without meaning can be the most honest thing a person does. Let’s do it once in a while.

It either works or I’m just convincing myself of my Floor of Reality. Both can be true.

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A Few Lines, by Randomness

There was a warmth in the darkness
and I did not question it.
Breezes came and went like breath.
The sun was not up. That must be why.

But that’s all right.
A man can sit in the dark a long time
if he isn’t in a hurry to understand it.
It takes something away, the rush to understand,
to name, to add a meaning,
as if the feeling wasn’t enough on its own.
We live in the illusion that things need
our permission to exist, to happen.

It felt close to home
or what I remembered of home
which isn’t much,
just the feeling of almost being there.

Something rose in me.
Not a memory. The shape a memory leaves
after the memory is gone.
What I must have felt as a child,
before I learned the word for it
and the word made it smaller.

The sky was dark and missing its stars.
The sun was about to be up. That must be why.
We do this, explain the dark
so we can stand to be in it.

There’s always a gap.
Between you and the thing you want.
About one hand wide.
You could close it
but you won’t.
You never do.

Quite closely far.

That warmth. The stupid things
I used to think and feel as a child.
Before I knew they were everything.

Warmth. Home. Content. A sky with all its stars.

But just so close.

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Do too many words die helping a handful to come alive?
There's no answer to this, or a correct answer to be precise.
But there's no logic to it as well, or a sane logic to be precise.
I believe most of the world is like this.
Everything that comes in it.

The conversations we have at 2 am that disappear by morning.
The people who stay long enough to change you and then don't stay.
The draft before the draft before the poem.
All of it — Necessary, temporary and never thanked.

We live in the survival of things.
We see the flower, not the seasons it took
to learn how to open.
We read the line, not the fifty that were written
and crossed out so this one could breathe.

Maybe that's just how it works —
the world doesn't waste, it composts,
it turns the dead things into soil
for the things that get to live.

But you feel it sometimes.
The weight of everything that didn't make it.
The almost-thoughts. The nearly-people.
The warmth that was there and then wasn't
and nobody noticed because something else
took its place and we called that enough.

There's no logic to it.
Or a sane logic to be precise.
Most of the world is like this.
Everything that comes in it.
Everything that leaves without asking.

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Delivered by Randomness

How random can algorithms be? Not random enough to suggest some of the other stuff I’m working on, but random enough, once in a while, to slip something through the pattern that has no business being there. And sometimes that’s better than anything you asked for. And hopefully one day some of my work will be the answer to it.

And till such time it isn’t, some not so random efforts to push some of my other content, some more of my gyan: The Tale of Tail End — Tim Urban calculated that by the time you graduate high school and leave home, you have already spent 93 per cent of your total in-person time with your parents. It felt like something worth sharing in the spirit of this post, because randomness gave you that 93 per cent in bulk and is now dispensing the rest in drops, and nobody asked you about the ratio.

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Some great music and storytelling which I would like to pass along too, without invitation.

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What to Read on This

A lot of people have talked a lot about Dostoevsky’s The Gambler and Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus, which both provide real context to the topic of randomness and the meaning it carries. But I would rather recommend something different instead.

Two short stories by the champion theologian of randomness. Jorge Luis Borges.

The Garden of Forking Paths (1941): A novel within the story in which every possible outcome of every event happens simultaneously. Time doesn’t flow. It branches. Every fork leads to every possible future. Mr. Borges wrote this before physicists proposed the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. He thought he was writing fiction. But the universe didn’t bother making the distinction.

The Lottery in Babylon: A society that gradually surrenders all its decisions to an all-powerful lottery. At first it’s voluntary. Then compulsory. Then indistinguishable from the texture of reality itself. The story discusses the possibility that the lottery has always existed, that it’s identical with reality, that there’s no difference between a random universe and one governed by an omnipotent, inscrutable Company.

This might be the whole thing. Not that life is random, but that it’s random and we choose anyway. Not because we have figured it out, but because choosing is the only thing that belongs to us in a world where almost nothing else does.

The pigeon in the cage turns in a circle. The food arrives. The pigeon doesn’t know why.

Neither do we. And we keep turning.

If you enjoy what I write, there are many random ways to show it. You could start by liking, sharing, commenting, and subscribing to my Substack.

And some not so random ways too…

1. Skinner, B.F. (1948). “Superstition in the Pigeon.” Journal of Experimental Psychology.

2. The Ganesha milk miracle of September 1995 remains one of the largest claimed mass miracle events in modern history. (Wikipedia)

3. Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, 1927.

4. The double pendulum experiment. A pendulum with a second joint, governed by perfectly known equations, produces motion that is entirely unpredictable.

5. Buddhism's dependent origination (Pratityasamutpada) holds that every event arises from a vast field of interconnected causes.

6. Berns, G.S., McClure, S.M., Pagnoni, G., & Montague, P.R. (2001). "Predictability Modulates Human Brain Response to Reward." Journal of Neuroscience.

7. Stochastic resonance, first discovered in a study of Earth's ice ages, now demonstrated in neurons, electronic sensors, and biological systems.