Recently, I had a long conversation with my good friend Dave Falcone. Dave is a professor of psychology at LaSalle University, and it was his developmental psychology course that I took as a high school senior (as part of a program in which high school students could take a few courses at a local college) that was my first psychology course. As history had it, I ended up becoming a psychology professor myself, and we get together from time to time to discuss a variety of issues, usually at local restaurant Cocos, on 8th street in the heart of the jewelry district in Philadelphia.
Our conversations ramble as good conversations should, from topic to topic ranging from the politics of academia to Emerson's concept of nature. The other day, our discussion somehow stumbled upon the question of what is chance.
Chance is hard to define, and determining what exactly chance means is no easy task. To some, chance is an extension of the idea of probability - which is the idea of the likelihood that an event occurs. For instance, I am fairly sure that with all I know about probability, that the sun will rise tomorrow. How do I know this? Well, because the sun has risen today, and it did yesterday, and it did every day I personally remember, and historical records show no day that the sun didn't rise, so I am fairly sure that the sun will rise tomorrow, and in fact, if I had to bet my meager life savings on it, I would bet that the sun will in fact rise tomorrow. I will also bet that I will wake up tomorrow, in part because I am relatively young and healthy, and have no reason to suspect that when I lay myself to sleep, that my life and soul will keep. But, one of my favorite lines is from the movie Breaker Morant, in which a character to be executed the following day exclaims, "Live every day as if it were to be your last, for you're bound to be right some day." Someday, perhaps when I am older and my heart weaker, I will reassess the probability of waking up tomorrow.
What is all of this based on? Well, a considerable amount is due to empirical experience. I have a number of friends my age, and thus far, only a small number have died in their sleep. At 70 or 80, I will have a much larger number. But although probability has a lot to do with chance, it isn't exactly synonymous with chance. The other notion of chance has to do with randomness.
I take a die and roll it. As it flies through space, turning and moving, forces that go well beyond my understanding interact with the die and work on it, moving it left and right, spinning and bouncing against tables and walls, ultimately resulting in a 4 or a 3 or a 6. So, there is an element of what we call randomness in the process.
But is it really randomness? I once met a man in Chicago who told me he mastered the art of flipping coins. He could flip ten fair coins in a row and every time get a heads up. I bet him five bucks he couldn't, then gave him a coin from my pocket and watched him flip not 10 in a row, but 25. Understand: the guy wasn't fooling me with a two headed coin - I checked each time. Rather, he mastered his finger motions and hand movements so that the coin would flip in the air a specific number of times before he would catch it, revealing the face of good old George Washington.
From one perspective, chance is a force in the universe that somehow acts on coins and dice that are flying in the air. It is chance that, at the last moment, makes the coin end up tails or end up giving you a 5. But another perspective on chance - one that I probably subscribe to - is that chance is simply another term for ignorance. Ignorance of the myriad forces that interact with objects like coins and dice, such as air resistance, the coefficient of friction encountered by the object as it strikes the ground - that, if fully understood, could result in knowing the result of a chance event before its outcome. Like the guy I met in Chicago - he understood perfectly how to flip a coin in the air at just the right speed to have it every time end up as a head toss. After many years of practicing, over and over, the flipping of coins, he was able to remove the randomness, the ignorance of outcomes - and win five bucks in the process.
But another perspective exists, one that I do not subscribe to, but I have no way of disproving, is that chance is an actual force in the universe that interacts with objects like flipping coins and dice, and at the right moment, provides the right nudge to make the die end up as a 2 or the coin as a tail. I have no reason to suspect that this force actually exists out there, and that it only acts when a person is flipping a coin to determine who answers first at a presidential debate, or what team faces what direction in a football match.
But it is possible. It is possible that with all of our knowledge, we will never be able to predict coin tosses because so many degrees of freedom exist in the world - the slight imperfections in the minting of the coin, or the roughness of a particular edge of a particular coin. To be fair, my Chicago friend was not able to make the coin end up heads when he wasn't controlling the situation. For instance, I had him flip the coin onto the table, not using his hand to catch it, resulting in a meager 6 heads and 4 tails. Not to be a nerd, but using the binomial approximation, there is an 89 percent change that someone would flip 6 or more heads out of 10. But maybe, given enough time, and enough practice, this guy could learn the affordances of the table well enough that he could master the art of flipping coins onto it.
As for me, I don't believe we are allotted enough nights in our lives to spend them trying to master the art of flipping coins. There are other tasks well worth exploring, and hopefully you will engage in them. After all, my Chicago friend only made 5 bucks in the process. Anymore, that's hardly even a beer.
