Chance (philosophy)

The word chance in philosophy means a complex of causes that produces an indeterministic process with indeterministic effects, therefore not-necessary, not-deterministic contingency. The ancient concept of chance as not existences of causes is nowadays obsolete and yet not able to be proposed. In the 20th century subatomic physics, cosmology and biology studied and pointed out many case of indeterministic process concerning the birth of universe, its phenomenology, subatomic particles behaviour, genetic mutation and so on.

History of concept

Ancient Greece

The first concept of chance in philosophy appeared in the Atomism of Leucippus, often confused with that of Democritus, though, in fact, the last studies show many differences between the two. The first assertion about chance is the of Leucippus fragment that says:

"Ό τυίνυν κόσμος συνέστη περικεκλασμένωι σχήματι έσχηματισμένος τόν τρόπον τοϋτον· τών άτόμων σωμάτων άπρονόητον καί τυχαίαν εχόντων τήν κίνησιν συνεχώς τε καί τάχιστα κινουμένων"

"The cosmos, then, became like a spherical form in this way: the atoms being submitted to a casual and unpredictable movement, quickly and incessantly".^[1]

To many earlier Greek philosophers chance did not exist. To Aristotle on the other hand, both tyche (luck) and automaton (chance) are everyday phenomena. However, for Aristotle chance events were not uncaused, they were simply the effect of the concurrence of two causal sequences. Thus a stone falling that happens to hit a tree is a chance event, although the falling of the stone and the growing of the tree are both determined events. Aristotle (Phisics, II, 5) had two concepts of chance, both causes of effects that happen incidentally, but differentiated. They are the Tyche (or "luck"), operates in the human mind by gods, and Automaton (or "chance") operates in the realm of nature.

Modernity

In 1729 appears the so called Testament of Jean Meslier in that we can read:

"The matter, by virtue of its own active force, moves and acts in blind manner".^[2]

Soon after Julien Offroy de la Mettrie in his L'Homme Machine. (1748, anon.) wrote:

"Perhaps, the cause of man existence is just in existence itself? Perhaps he is by chance thrown in some point of this terrestrial surface without any how and why".

In his Anti-Sénèque [Traité de la vie heureuse, par Sénèque, avec un Discours du traducteur sur le même sujet, 1750] we read:

"Then, the chance had thrown us in life".^[3]

In the 19th century the French Philosopher Antoine-Augustin Cournot theorized chance in a new way, as series of not-linear causes. He wrote in Essai sur les fondements de nos connaissances (1851):

"It is not because of rarity that the chance is actual. On the contrary, it is because the chance them produces among many possible others."^[4]

Starting from 1927 the chance became object of philosophical thought strictly bonded with discoveries of subatomic physics and evolutionist biology.

Ontological meaning of chance

When we speak of chance in ontology it means that the physical and biological becoming is not only made by linear systems of causes but also by not-linear ones, which we call traditionally chance. Actually when we speak of chance we refer an effect (or a complex of effects) produced by not-coordinate and entangled causes. The result of chance brings the ontological "new" in a scenery made by necessitaded "olds". So, necessity (by means of evolutive selection) makes definite and stable such "new" that becomes, as persistent thing, system or process, an "old" among others "old".

Science

Physics

Chance is a factor to cause mutations in normal becoming of matter which produce new parts or systems in it. That means in universe not whole is determined by necessity and the belief in the absolute domination of the necessity theorized by determinism is false. Indeterminism, while admitting whether necessity or chance, denies the absolute cogency in the cosmos reality. Was the Principle of uncertainty put forward by Werner Heisenberg in 1927 that the indeterminism in the subatomic world has received its final ratification.

Chance in subatomic world happens because it is fundamentally indeterministic, because of dualism in particle-wave nature of particles. That means subatomic particles exist both as a corpuscular reality corpuscular (with a mass, an electromagnetic charge, a spin) and as waves, as perceived by de Broglie since 1924 and subsequently confirmed by experiments.

According to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, it is impossbile to know simultaneously the values of position and energy of subatomic particles, not because of ignorance but because they are indeterministic and because the chance that makes a particle sometimes a corp other times a wave. Electrons, for instance, can be described as energy in the form of waves, but no single wave is in a definite place of certain area of the atom site. As a wave can be described only through a function, the totality of functions involves uncertainty about place and momentum. This "unpredictability" is corresponding to the indeterminacy of the cosmos itself.

The particle physicist and discoverer of the quark Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel prize in 1969, wrote that if we are not able to make predictions about the behavior of an atomic nucleus, imagine how much more fundamentally unpredictable the entire universe's behavior is, even with the unified theory of elementary particles and knowing the initial state of the universe itself. Above and beyond these simple principles presumably, any alternative history of the universe depends on the results of an unimaginably large number of accidents (of chance events).^[5]

Biology

After his researches between 1955 and 1960 about genetic mutations the biologist Jacques Monod (earning the Nobel Prize in 1965) became to fix indeterminacy of them, already implicit in Darwin. In the essay Chance and Necessity (1970) Monod confirmed alterations in DNA to be by chance and that only chance is bringing newness in biological world. It, absolutely free but blind, is at the root of the stupendous edifice of evolution and only conceivable cause to be compatible with the biologic reality which we show with observation and experience. "^[6] The acquirement of chance rôle had soon after numerous confirmation increasing its evidence also whether in genetics or in molecular biology.

Remarkable confirmation of the chance as biological evolution factor was also confirmed by Japanese theoretical population geneticist Motoo Kimura. In fact, evolution uses random opportunity to produce newness and chance is already aging to molecular level as he explains in 1968 publishing The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution.^[7] Kimura proved that the genetic drift is the main force changing allele frequencies.^[8] The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution focuses that "at the molecular level most evolutionary change is caused by random drift of gene mutants that are equivalent in the face of selection.^[9]

Molecular complexity

The chemist Ilya Prigogine is a best known researcher and scholar about indeterministic complexity for his definition of dissipative structures^[10] and their role in thermodynamic systems far from equilibrium, a discovery that won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977. Dissipative structure theory led to pioneering research in self-organizing systems, as well as philosophical inquiries into the formation of complexity on biological entities and the quest for a creative and irreversible role of time in the natural sciences. The core of Prigogine’s complexity is the role of chance in evolution of natural systems.

Prigogine also was working on the mathematical role of indeterminism in nonlinear systems on both the classical and quantum level. In his 1997 book, The End of Certainty,^[11] Prigogine contends that determinism is no longer a viable scientific belief. "The more we know about our universe, the more difficult it becomes to believe in determinism. The world determinism is therefore only a “belief” that want deny the chance relity and role with an ideologic approach and determinism loses its explanatory power in the face of irreversibility and instability.

Notes

1. ^ H.Diels-W.Kranz Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Berlin Weidmann 1952, 24, I, 1
2. ^ J.Meslier, The testament.
3. ^ J.O.de La Mettrie, Anti-Sénèque
4. ^ A.A.Cournot, Essai sur les fondements de nos connaissances et sur les caractères de la critique philosophique, § 32.
5. ^ M.Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar (2nd Part, Chapter 10)
6. ^ Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology by Jacques Monod, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1971, pp. 104-115
7. ^ Kimura, Motoo (1968). "Evolutionary rate at the molecular level" (PDF). Nature 217 (5129): 624–626. doi:10.1038/217624a0. PMID 5637732. http://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/evolution/public/papers/kimura1968/kimura1968.pdf. 
8. ^ T.Ohta and J.Gillespie, Development of neutral and nearly neutral theories (Theoretical Population Biology, vol. 49. pp128–142
9. ^ M. Kimura, The neutral theory of molecular evolution, (The Science, No. 1, 1980, p.34)
10. ^ I.Prigogine-I.Stengers, La nouvelle alliance,Paris, Gallimard, 1986
11. ^ La Fin des certitudes, ed. Odile Jacob, 1996