[_ Old Earth _] What is Luck Anyway

[Drew]

Since the notion of "luck" or "random chance" is so central to discussions about creation / evolution, I thought I would solicit your thoughts about this topic.

I think "luck" is an elusive concept to pin down. Unexamined, its meaning seems clear - there are processes at work in our universe whose outcome can only be described probabilistically. Anyone familar with quantum mechanics will have been exposed to this idea.

But is "luck" a concept that actually makes sense to us, or is it a kind of "place-holder", a substitute for some more definitive concept that we have yet to discover.

Consider a coin flip or the roll of a dice. I suspect that all will agree that the outcome is actually not a matter of luck. Rather it is a matter of knowing all the physics and initial conditions. If we knew "all the facts" we could predict with certainty the coin will come up heads or that the dice roll will result in a "5".

I do have a suspicion that there really is no such thing as luck. In other words, a process that appears to involve luck or probability really does not - its just that we cannot understand the process well enough to describe it in terms that do not appeal to a probabilistic element. Perhaps we will never be able to characterise certain processes without having to invoke a probabilistic element - we may be conceptually limited.

I know that you quantum mechanical types (Quath!) will probably ( :P ) claim that Einstein was indeed wrong when he claimed that "God does not play dice with the Universe" and I know that the prevailing view is that Einstein was wrong about this. I guess that I am implicitly supporting the presently discredited "hidden variables" position.

Anyhoo....my sense is that our notion of luck is similar to our notion of an uncaused cause. We kind of insert these concepts into our models of the World in order to make things work. Yet we feel uncomfortable with such "solutions".

Here is one example of what is troubling to me about the concept of luck as it used. I think that most people accept that the initial conditions of our universe had to be very special in order for there to be any structure at all in our Universe (I believe people like Hawking and Penrose make such arguments). Some people think this shows the hand of God, others chalk it up to "luck". My question for the pro-luck camp: Can you even legitimately use this concept to explain the initial conditions of our universe without necessarily hypothesizing the existence of other universes where the initial conditions did not "work out". In other words, is not luck a concept that cannot be legitimately used when talking about a single universe? Luck seems to demand a population of alternatives that are actual if you will. You can only say that you were lucky in winning a lottery if there are real losers - if there were not millions of losers, there could not even be a single person who gets millions of dollars. Not sure that this is clear or makes sense, but I will stop here...

 

[Quath]

I wanted to believe in hidden variable theory as well. I liked the idea that world was deterministic. However, experimental evidence pushes strongly againt it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_paradox is a prety good website for this issue.

As for luck, I would say that either one universe is possible or an infinite number are possible. If it is one, then we would be "lucky." However, if that one did not produce us, then noone would be there to contemplte the "unluckiness" of it.

I personally think there are an infinite number. Either in parallel (separate universes) or a cyclic universe. In such a case, if we can exist, then we have to exist and there is no luck whatsoever.

But I think the luck question can be pushed onto Christianity as well. Was it luck that God existed? Could a different Creator have existed? Say one that didn't like to make planets or create things? Or one that created humans that did not want to sin but had free will? Or one that created the universe and god bored and went to sleep? Or one that was unable to think? Or one that was not powerful enough to make a universe?

I guess the difference is that physics is ok with an infinite number of universes, but religion is not comfortable with an infinite number of gods.

Quath

 

[Drew]

I am sympathetic to the view that our deployment of the concept of luck reflects a fundamental conceptual limitation - the inability of our limited mind to generate the "right concept" - one that does not seem so suspicously contrived as the notion of luck.

Consider a pencil balanced exactly on its tip. Which direction will it fall? Well let's suppose that the actual direction that the pencil falls is determined by minute local wind currents (movement of air in the vicinity of the pencil). If we had all the "facts" about the air pressure in the room (and beyond), we could determine what direction the pencil will fall. But what if we did not have the concept of wind - possibly because the concept is beyond even the "in principle" reach of our minds. Then the pencil would fall in what would appear to be random directions (as the experiment is repeated over and over). We would use the construct of "luck" as an explanation when, in point of fact, there is "deterministic" explanation based on the concept of wind (a concept that we do not know about).

So I wonder if "luck" is not a "stop-gap" concept used when we do not have the right concepts....

 

[SyntaxVorlon]

Since we're all almost impossibly improbable anyway, why bother worrying about luck? Our existence is one of the infinite set of possible ways in which the history of occurances could have played out. No more or less likely than anything else.