Review of The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

I just finished listening to an audiobook by Leonard Mlodinow titled "The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives". It is an interesting book on how our lives is rule by chance. If one thinks about how the random events happen in their lives, for example, my parents were both from rural towns in the South, NC and VA but met in New York at the Savoy Ballroom and I am here writing about it. As for whoever wrote Ecclesiastes(if you agree with Bart Ehrman's Forged:Why the Author's of the Bible Are not who we think they are:) he states, Ecclesiastes was not written by Solomon, but a forgery, however the alleged forger got one thought right when he wrote in Ecclesiastes 9:11 "I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all." (NIV) This is probably the best one sentence summary of a book. I think the best part of the book was his advise for overcoming confirmation bias in Chapter 9 in which he states: 1. Understand that random events too produces patterns 2. Question your perceptions and theories 3. Look for evidence that we are wrong, as we spend time looking for evidence we are right. He states in his conclusion "What I've learned, above all, is to keep marching forward because the best news is that since chance does play a role, one important factor in success is under our control: the number of at bats, the number of chances taken, the number of opportunities seized. For even a coin weighted toward failure will sometimes land on success. Or as the IBM pioneer Thomas Watson said, "If you want to succeed, double your failure rate."The anonymous author of Ecclesiastes 9:10 states something similar "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the grave, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom. " This book made me ask the questions, does randomness rules or are things determined? Or Is determinism an illusion and randomness reality? or Do things start off random and then determinism kicks in? Think about it.

The Grand Design and the World as Will and Idea

I have read several reviews of the Audio Book I have listen to this week, it is by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow it is titled "The Grand Design". A lot of people are critical of it because they're advocating the M-Theory, which are a "whole family of different theories, each of which is a good description of observations only in some range of physical situations". From the reviews and from listening to the book, I understand that he's saying we live in a universe that is one of many universes called a multiple-universe or multiverse, in which there could be 10 to the 500 power of universes, that is a 1 with 500 zeros, and thus it is inevitable that we happen to live in a solar system that is one of hundreds of billions of solar systems just in the Milky Way galaxy alone; and our galaxy is one among hundreds of billions of galaxies and we live in a solar system in which the laws of physics and the anthropic principle (weak and strong) are so that life is possible at least on our planet. Another interesting concept that was brought out was what they called Model-Dependent Realism. "These examples bring us to a conclusion: There is no picture- or theory-independent concept of reality. Instead we adopt a view that we call model-dependent realism: the idea that a physical theory or world picture is a model (generally of a mathematical nature) and a set of rules that connect the elements of the model to observations. This provides a framework with which to interpret modern science. Read more: http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2017262,00.html#ixzz11PWjFEFU. As I read the reviews and listened to the Audio book, I thought about Schopenhauer's classic, The World as Will and Idea or Representation and Alan Watts' the Way of Zen, that you cannot separate the subject (observer) from the object (the observed), For example, the World as Will and Idea, in which we are non-dual objectification of Will as Helen Zimmern states it "Schopenhauer endeavours to define this Substance itself, and declares it to be a Will. From the idea of Will, action is inseparable; and the existence of the phenomenal world is, according to him, sufficiently explained by regarding it as the result of the craving of the eternal Will, the substratum of all existence, to manifest itself in an external form. This Will, in a word, is a will to live." Alan Watts calls the Will Mind (citta) is the "what" that cannot be defined but gives objectification to every thing it classifies. In other words, every thing in the universe is a non-dual substance that objectifies itself in what we call matter in the three dimensions of space and time. Think about it...
Black Socrates