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I think some people will deny its existence, or excuse it as a mental construct, perhaps some kind of failure for us to understand that all is ordered in a precise way.

What do you think?

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I used to be a **** determinist until I learned that the uncertainty principle isn't due to a lack in our ability, but it's a fundamental property of nature itself.

I guess randomness is something happening without cause.

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This is what dictionary has to say:
'proceeding, made, or occurring without definite aim, reason, or pattern: the random selection of numbers.'

Anyway, I see randomness, more often than not, as the result of the complex causal web we have going on right now. Randomness, then, is more about unknown or unexpected causation than anything else. I'll call it a mental construct, and the best example of my point is that things that are often called random aren't random at all.
Like chaotic systems, they seem to act in a random fashion but are actually sensitive to precise initial conditions. Like my book says: chaos=/=randomness, and actually has some underlying mathematics behind it.

On the subject, how can something without a cause? I accept that an acausal event has to have occurred, but I've never read about any mechanisms that might explain it.

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being vague is almost as fun as doing that other thing

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of course randomness exists..in fact it is the "majority"..the matrix within which pattern is embedded.
It is quite necessary, and mutually arises with order. ie order and randomness, as well as determinism/indeterminism are something that are born together as concepts. They define each other. To say one precedes the other, is IMO,  useless, and merely caters to our insistence of linear sequencing of events..which is a function of human symbolic understanding, not representative of nature itself.

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Originally Posted by Gunn Whirrled:
of course randomness exists..in fact it is the "majority"..the matrix within which pattern is embedded.
It is quite necessary, and mutually arises with order. ie order and randomness, as well as determinism/indeterminism are something that are born together as concepts. They define each other. To say one precedes the other, is IMO,  useless, and merely caters to our insistence of linear sequencing of events..which is a function of human symbolic understanding, not representative of nature itself.

I can see how the dichotomy of order/randomness serve to define one another; but is that where we have to stop in the process of pinning randomness down?

Can we zoom in to get maybe some closer parameters as to what randomness is? Someone previously mentioned a distinction between randomness and chaos, speaking of chaos as just a slightly more intricate form of order.  

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Originally Posted by Douglas Peters:
I used to be a **** determinist until I learned that the uncertainty principle isn't due to a lack in our ability, but it's a fundamental property of nature itself.

I guess randomness is something happening without cause.

Well, let's look at the uncertainty principle this way: I am me and not you and you are yourself and since I am not you, I cannot know what it feels like to be you and being not me you cannot know what it is to me exactly, and being myself and not you is my limitation yet only through that limitation I can know what it is to be me because if I added being you to being me that would be not me but may become something else and what I would know then would be knowing something else and not me as I know myself now. So the knowledge of ourselves for both of us is in the mutual denial. Adding one to the other would not give more knowledge and that would be clear imagining that if when I am so glad and elated and I know that I am so ecstatically happy, but just consider that you may well be at the same moment very, very sad and dejected, knowing what it is to be you simultaneously would make the knowledge of what it is to be me impossible because it is not possible to be ecstatically happy and utterly dejected at the same time.
   That is the same limitation as is present in the measurement of quantum states. Yet, note, nothing here indicates that either of our respective states, that of extreme joy and that of extreme pain are uncaused or beyond measure as such. Nothing is random there at all. It's just that your state to be at all must be off limits to me and mine to be felt by me must necessarily be out of bounds to you and that is all there is to it.