RANDOM COINCIDENCE
A friend gave me a book on randomness written by a scientist. My friend and I are both statisticians, so it was an appropriate gift. I accepted it, as I wanted to read the author’s take on the concept, but I stated I personally don’t believe in randomness. He rejected my nonsense, as randomness is one of the cornerstones of statistical methodology. It may be a useful tool in statistics and other scientific venues, but I still don’t believe it exists in reality. I set the book aside and went about my daily business.
One evening I opened my DVD collection of Star Trek: The Next Generation and watched an episode. After thoroughly enjoying the show and scrupulously watching the credits (as I usually do), I decided to start reading the book my friend gave me.
I took one look at the author’s name on the cover and realized I’d just seen it in the credits. I couldn’t quite exactly place where I’d seen the name in the credits. I thought I probably recognized the last name as being the same as one of the production crew or maybe a guest star. But then on the inside I cover I read the author also wrote for some television shows. Star Trek was one of them. Immediately I put that DVD back into the player and fast-forwarded to the credits. Lo and behold, the author co-wrote the episode I watched only moments ago.
Random? Ri-i-i-ght!
Excitedly I dialed my friend on the phone and described the incident, using it as evidence of my claim that randomness is an illusion. Skeptical of its significance, he explained how the mind attaches importance to events agreeing with mysterious beliefs we hold, but simply ignores events failing to support our beliefs. I agreed this phenomenon does occur, but it doesn’t summarily dismiss all such events.
He poo pooed it as mere coincidence. “Coincidence” is another of those concepts I don’t believe in. “Coincidence” describes the action of an event, but not the reason for it occurring; just like “randomness.”
Discounting jokers, there are 52 possible cards in a regular deck. If we arbitrarily pull one out and reveal it, we say we pulled it randomly. That describes the action, but it doesn’t tell us why we pulled that particular card. The way the deck was shuffled, how it was cut, the order of the cards before we touched them, the humidity in the air at that moment causing friction to hold some cards together while allowing others to slide freely, along with a plethora of other reasons account for the alignment of the cards. Since it’s physically impossible to control or describe accurately all the interplay of variables, we just call it “random.”
When we can’t explain something, we give it a name. We pretend the name sufficiently serves as a reason for why the event happened. In essence, we substitute another word to take the place of the word “ignorance.” This substitution process we call “logic.” Satisfied, we move on to the next conundrum perplexing us and find a suitable word to name it as well.
Don’t get me wrong, our ability to used these names helps us develop glorious things; like building towering skyscrapers, creating computers capable of performing millions of calculations per second, and giving us the ability of safely breaking through our atmosphere to explore outer space. But, they don’t tell us why events happen.
Randomness coincides with reasons we just don’t understand yet.
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