What is chance?
A cause without a cause,
the incidence behind all coincidence?
The first creator?
An unbounded origin of possibility
and instigator of change?
The great explainer, needing no explanation
– a coin for the beggar of questions
– the ultimate “God” of the ultimate “gap”?
Mike Laidler
Fine differences
making a difference.
Mother of causality
– of open possibilities.
Unfathomable ‘explanation’
of nature’s resourcefulness.
Certainty of uncertainty
and all it entails.
Mike Laidler
We use the vote to tell our governments what we think, but how do we know what to think? Does making a decision on the basis of the available evidence mean that our reasoning is balanced for us by that evidence? And can we mean what we say or do if the brain makes us do it under the influence of its inputs? In fact, are we just being carried along on a tide of influences that appear to us as our opinions? Is this why our choices get skewed by the facts that happen to grab our attention or the past experiences that bias our views? Then what does this say about voting in democracies that are meant to operate on the balance of public opinion? Are we any better when it comes to collective decision-making?
Can a consensus of opinions draw us nearer to the truth? When confronted with an irresolvable dilemma it might seem reasonable for an individual to commit the choice to the toss of a coin. However, we don’t want to commit to chance important choices on matters of national policy, so we might listen to the debates and take note of the opinion polls giving us a statistical insight into the balance of public opinion? But can we really claim to know the collective mind? Can we rely upon the statistics to give us the facts? Can democratic opinion resolve a dilemma in any event? Is the opinion of the masses any less fickle than the singular decision of a dominating leader?
Does democracy enshrine the sovereignty of the majority over ‘the right thing to do’? Ironically, our dilemmas appear to be most acute when we give ourselves an either/ or predicament. So what can the statistics reveal about issues that split a population down the middle? Suppose there are millions of coins in a bag of national treasures and they happen to tumble out at random. They would tend towards a balance of 50/50, heads and tails, with the trend towards this balance increasing as the number of coins increases – the reason being that the coins don’t know what they are doing. So when our mass choices at elections and referenda tend towards such a balance of opinions, might this not mean that the statistics are indeed telling us something about ourselves – that the balance of collective opinion is no better than chance?
Mike Laidler
’What is a theory of everything?
Based upon the current idiom of science, it is a theory that can capture the whole of existence in a single factual or mathematical proof – as if that fact or equation can stand apart from the realms of theory, and as if reality dictates to theory that everything reduces to that one thing.
What is a theory of chance?
We are surrounded by chance events, which prompts us to ask whether the universe might have started that way. Chance can be seen to operate within certain boundaries to yield uncertain outcomes. For instance, rolling a die can have uncertain outcomes, but they are limited by the nature of the die, which doesn’t look like it got here by chance. Of course there may be additional uncertain consequences, such as an ensuing fight, but these are indirect and tend to remain only notionally connected. Normally, chance and probability are used to calculate the likelihood of an outcome, but that’s not quite the same thing as explaining it; however, other, more fanciful suppositions court the idea that anything can happen by chance – that a rolling rock could in theory turn itself into a die – although fewer still would go so far as to say it is theoretically possible for a rolling rock to turn into a chicken. Yet many hypotheses are promulgated, to varying degrees of nonsense, in the attempt to explain changes we can’t explain except by putting them down to chance – even to the point of decrying the importance of known non-chance events – as if the works of Shakespeare could, in theory, be replicated by placing typewriters in an infinite monkey cage. Other theories place chance at the origin of ‘life, the universe and everything’ – as the essential pre-existing or spontaneously exiting cause, or as a nexus in multiple universes.
If the answer isn’t ‘in the beginning’, where is it?
It’s likely to be in ‘an end-point’ outside of our reach. That’s why we prefer to look to beginnings – because they seem more accessible and there are still clues to be found, although we tend to treat each discoverable beginning as not the actual beginning of ‘it all’. However, an ‘ultimate beginning’ is not likely to be a repository of everything in any event, simply because of the fact that we can see things changing to become more than they were, and it is happening right before our eyes. So we are witnessing new beginnings all the time and remain challenged by the inexplicable facts of change, which we try to make explicable by looking in vein to ever more distant beginnings for a more ample cause. Meanwhile, theories of beginnings and ends remain highly theoretical – for isn’t every end a new beginning in the bigger picture of a dynamic universe where effects adorn the reality of their causes with something new? Furthermore, the idea of a first cause setting up a consistent chain of events, seems to suggest that ‘the dice were loaded from the start’, unless this consistency is an illusion of our place and time in ‘our universe’ – because the infinite variety of alternatives that are consistent with chance remain hidden from us in an unobservable ‘multiverse’.
Is there a purpose to existence?
This is a question we can feel more at home with, indeed we can also make some firm inroads towards an answer, because we already know there is purpose and meaning in existence, if only by way of our own presence, nature and outlook – and since we happen to be a real part of the universe we bear proof in ourselves of what can transpire. This change in the nature of nature is no less significant in cosmic terms just because we find it happens to be peculiar to us. But questions remain to be answered: where does it all lead and does it end with us? It seems that the answers lie in the bigger picture, where ends turn out to be bigger than beginnings – whereby our sense of meaning and purpose, despite manifesting as a part of us, may in fact be a staging point of a further beginning. (The question of ‘a bigger picture’ has been examined above).
So it may well be the case that we are privy to only a part of the answer, given that it is fair to assume that we exist in a universe that is bigger than us and that the nature of our being owes to more than we bring to it. Nevertheless, we can take comfort from the incompleteness of our situation, in the stark realisation that the purpose in existence is likely to be bigger than all we can make of it, just as the facts are likely to remain bigger than all we can make of them. Thereafter, the main obstacle to our progress is ourselves and our equally deficient observation that reality is confined to the facts of a purposeless nature that fixes the fate of what it all adds up to, which we uphold by promising ourselves that this explanation will win through in the end – as if we can deem ourselves adequate to explain the existence of existence or the extent of its nature and possibilities.
Mike Laidler
We all know what luck is, most of us have seen it in action and some of us may claim to have benefited from it, but it is no ‘it’.
In fact luck doesn’t exist, yet it does. It exists as a state of knowledge about the world and the facts in that world. It exists in the world as known, and in that world we see people being lucky and unlucky to varying degrees. However, knowledge is another ‘none-it’ in existence. Coincidentally, we can talk about what we know, point to the books that have changed what we know, and learn from what we are told. Nevertheless, things are not as they seem – yet so they are, given that the seeming is now a fact in action.
In fact luck, like the knowledge by which we assess it, operates in a metaphysical reality of existence and non-existence – a dual reality where there are both facts and non-facts, according to our comparisons – facts that are so different from one another that they bear no point of comparison, except by way of contrast. So it is also true to say that we make our own luck, knowing that, in truth, there is more to existence than all we can make of it.
In the same vein, there can be more to coincidence than all we can attribute to luck, chance or our knowledge of it, just as there is more to knowledge than all we can know of it at any one time. Perhaps we are ‘lucky’ to be able to know anything at all, given the reality of oblivion and ignorance in which it operates on the way to becoming something more than it was.
And who dares say what is real and not real in the world of coincidence, a world in which opposites come together.
Mike Laidler
Looking at the chances of the universe being the way it is, the supposed possibility that its causes can happen by chance neither explains how chance happens nor how inevitabilities intervene – to establish boundaries of possibility, which delimit what happens next. And there is no calculator in pure unbounded chance for considering the possible range of consequences, including the possibility of chance being overridden by the occurrence of something else – such as the emergence of deliberation and the known non-random results of its calculations.
Nevertheless, we continue to wonder how possibility is possible, even if by chance, as we observe in reality, possibilities for chance that invite us to perceive the outcome as made possible by chance.
© Mike Laidler 2014
Philosophy Alive 