#rationality #epistemology #mathematic #computation
# [[Epistemic status]]
#shower-thought
# Probability is an useful illusion
#to-digest
>Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is,
of course, in a state of sin. For, as has been pointed out several times, **there
is no such thing as a random number-there are only methods to produce
random numbers**, and a strict arithmetical procedure is of course not such a
method. (It is true that a problem we suspect of being solvable by random
methods may be solvable by some rigorously defined sequence, but this is a
deeper mathematical question than we can go into now.)
>~ [[Von Neumann]]
[[Probability]] does not exist in [[Objective reality]] according to the [[The multiverse|many worlds interpretation]], everything happens given everything that happened before, and all possibilities happen, including [[Counterfactual]]s.
But at our ant-[[Philosophy/Rationality/Intelligence|organic intelligence]]-scale, probability is an useful [[Heuristics|heuristic]] because we have limited computations.
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