The beauty of randomness

by | Friday, August 18, 2017

I have always been intrigued by the idea of how truly random our lives really are. Seemingly minor events can trigger effects, rippling through our lives, effects becoming causes, leading to profound changes and transformations. Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Sound of Thunder” builds on this idea, where the inadvertent death of a butterfly, back in the age of dinosaurs, leads to profound changes in human history.

A similar idea can be seen in the “What if…” genre of historical fiction. The question, “What if the Axis powers had won the war?” leads to Phillip Dick’s novel “The Man in the High Castle.” The question “What if the reformation had never happened?” leads to Kingsley Amis’ novel “The Alteration.” (Incidentally, something interesting I discovered while writing this post was that Amis’ novel mentions an alternate-history novel titled “The Man in the High Castle” by someone called Phillip K. Dick!). This is also the idea behind the film “Sliding doors” though the ending of the film left a lot to be desired (at least in my opinion).

This interest in the the contingent nature of our lives led me to finding other examples (from fiction and film) that aim to capture this idea in powerful and interesting ways. The greatest example of this idea is the novel “Chain of Chance” by Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem [Review | Wikipedia page]. Framed as a detective novel or a murder mystery, the novel is actually a philosophical rumination on the role of randomness in our lives and how we seek to find pattern and design even when no such thing exists. As Lem writes:

There’s no such thing as a mysterious event. It all depends on the magnitude of the set. . . Out of the realm of infinite possibilities. . . you chose a certain fraction of cases that exhibited a multifactorial similarity. We now live in such a dense world of random chance, in a molecular and chaotic gas whose ‘improbabilities’ are amazing only to the individual human atoms.

Some of the other examples I have collected from films are included below. One that I could not include is from the film Run Lola Run—partly because I could not find a clip that would capture the ideas since these ideas permeate the entire film. So without further ado, here are my selections that capture the randomness of life, as we know it.

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One of my favorite clips is from the 1995 movie City of Lost Children [Wikipedia page]. See the key clip below:

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Another great example comes from the 2008 film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button [Wikipedia page]

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Finally, a short film called Spin that speaks of some of the same issue, in a very different manner.

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A few randomly selected blog posts…

Best practice v.s. PGP

Best practice v.s. PGP

I was recently in a discussion with members of the AACTE committee on Innovation and Technology about the term "best practice." This search for best practice (or practices) is something one hears about all the time in educational (and ed tech) circles. We want to list...

Creativity in teaching, a workshop

The Office Faculty and Organizational Development at MSU conducts an annual Spring Institute on College Teaching and Learning every summer. The past week was their 15th such event (details here) and I was asked to conduct a workshop on Creative Teaching. I was...

New media, new genres

There is an interesting article in today's NYTimes titled Content and its discontents by Virginia Heffernan. In this article she makes the argument the new digital, online media require new ways of representing information, new ways of thinking about how ideas are...

Update III

David Jiles Ph.D.'s book is no longer available on the Lulu.com website. Another example of delete and hope the world will forget that I didn't do my homework. See here and here for more on this issue.

Pragmatic yet hopeful: Talking creativity with Barbara Kerr

Pragmatic yet hopeful: Talking creativity with Barbara Kerr

Dr. Barbara Kerr is Distinguished Professor of Counseling Psychology, and is co-director of the Center for Creativity and Entrepreneurship in Education at the University of Kansas. She utilizes innovative counseling and therapy approaches to better understand the...

Oh Wow! Oh Wow! Oh Wow!

Much has been written about Steve Jobs in the past few weeks since his passing but the best piece I have come across is the eulogy by his sister Mona Simpson. Mona Simpson is an author and professor of writing and delivered this eulogy on Oct. 16 at his memorial...

The political psychology of images

Browsing through Nikita Prokhorov's website (see this posting about Nikita's new blog about the process of creating ambigrams) led me to a fascinating article about how symbols and the historical weight they can carry. I think a similar issue comes up regarding the...

The incredible drowning man (returns)

It's good to be back at Twente, meeting old friends and making some new ones. I had a pretty light day yesterday, which was good because I had gone around 30 hours without any sleep. After checking into the hotel and getting a short but much needed nap, I took a walk...

Palindromic poetry in prison, introducing Sandra Gould Ford

Those who follow this blog know that I love visual wordplay. This is most commonly seen in my ambigram work but another area where I have spent some time is in writing palindromic poetry. I wrote a whole series of poems when I was in graduate school at Illinois and...

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