And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
Genesis 3:4-5 [1]
The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as a limited whole.
The feeling of the world as a limited whole is the mystical feeling.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.45 [2]
I've been thinking a lot about the power of "randomness" in gaming. It's interesting to look at videos of speedrunners playing a game like Final Fantasy VII and almost totally removing the "randomness" to "random encounters," since they've found ways to manipulate the RNG of the game very precisely with indications like the number of their steps. Lots of games with "randomness" are like this. Why? Because a computer can't truly be "random." It has to have some inputs that result in some outputs. So they have to tie it to something weird and unpredictable that the player will do, usually, like how many steps their character has taken. That kind of RNG is not true "randomness." It just masquerades as randomness since it hides the bits that are doing the determining. Speedrunners uncover the veil of this and it's pretty uncanny.
To get "real" randomness, atmospheric noise is generally used for things where the stakes have to be higher, like generating encrypted keys or getting unbiased samples for surveys. But make no mistake: The only difference between using atmospheric noise and using a pattern of movement of a character in a game is that we understand enough to manipulate and predict the latter very well. Atmospheric noise is no less "deterministic." It's just that "predicting" the behavior of every molecule in the atmosphere means that it is almost impossible to imagine ever truly predicting in a feasible way. But in theory, an infinitely-powerful LLM could potentially be able to make atmospheric noise as "solved" as the movements of characters in Final Fantasy VII.
The thought of this is deeply unnerving, because as humans we have a great spiritual need to experience randomness. But as shown, "random" really means "decided by things that are beyond our scope of understanding." This is the impulse that all spirituality and religion evolves from. Because it is a recognition of a scientific truth: We are "controlled" by things we do not have the power to understand. And that sense of wonder and mystery is the source of all beauty and power.
One of my fears of AI is that it will strip the veil off more and more things. There will be great joys in the mastery we attain over more and more of the world and the greater understanding we have of the workings of our universe. But I fear that for every revelation about the nature of dark matter, there will be a Final Fantasy VII that is no longer fun to play because it has been "solved" by having everything unpredictable is removed. Maybe only an AI can "understand" it now, but I wouldn't be surprised if our minds become more and more integrated with AIs and we all start to view the speedrunner's gaze as the ultimate endpoint of what playing a game should like.
It is hard to find a way to fight against this force that doesn't sound like "become stupider." And I don't support censorship even against what might be considered genuine cognito-hazards. But we need to protect our sources of mystery from a force that wants to calculate, mesaure, and control anything and everything. I don't have the answer, but it's one I think we all need to consider.
1. King James Bible, Genesis: Chapter 3, p. 12-13
2. Ludwig Wittgenstein [trans. David Pears & Brian McGuinness], Tractatus Logico Philosophicus 6.45