The challenge of change.

This chapter introduces the theme of the book (i.e., the challenge of chance) and includes brief surveys of the individual chapters. The collapse of cohesion is one of the features that characterize chance. By sheer accident, or so it seems, something breaks the typical regularity of the natural world, like a comet disrupting the solar system. At a human scale, we find examples like unexpectedly bumping into an old friend, or losing a loved one in an accident. Such (seemingly) random phenomena appear arbitrary; they disrupt our lives and frustrate our human need for logic and meaning. The ensuing feelings of uncertainty and apprehensiveness, in turn, trigger us to search for explanations that will help restore order and normal patterns of cause and effect. In a word, we are challenged by chance, and we have been so at least since antiquity. How do we respond to such challenges? For thousands of years people have tried to decide whether chance is a fundamental and irreducible phenomenon, i.e. certain events are not caused—they just happen, or whether chance is merely a reflection of our ignorance. Either way, we find the experience of chance hard to deal with. Humans constantly try to understand random phenomena and prefer explanations that (re)install meaning. The question, then, is whether this search for explanation and meaning has succeeded, or, at least, has a fighting chance (sic) to succeed. This question is more subtle than it appears, since with his revolutionary claim that the universe is necessarily the way it is and yet has no goal, Spinoza cut the thread connecting explanation and purpose. Even necessity was subsequently K. Landsman (&) Faculty of Science, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] E. van Wolde Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] N. ter Berg Radboud Honours Academy, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands © The Author(s) 2016 K. Landsman and E. van Wolde (eds.), The Challenge of Chance, The Frontiers Collection, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-26300-7_1 1 challenged by Darwin’s theory of evolution in the 19th century, followed by quantum theory in the 20th, in both of which chance plays a fundamental role. Insult following injury, from Hume and Kant onwards even the causal patterns that permeate traditional science began to be questioned. From Aristotle to the 18th century, natural philosophy had seen these patterns as real, our role being limited to discovering them. Now, however, causality was claimed to be a mere by-product of our subjective need for rules, patterns, and meaning, which eventually led Bertrand Russell to his witticism that causality is “a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.” The overall picture was summarized by the chilling words of Physics Nobel Laureate and popular science writer Steven Weinberg: “The more the universe appears comprehensible, the more it also appears pointless.” However, he immediately qualified this pessimistic view (quoted from his popular account of the Big Bang entitled The First Three Minutes) in the following way: “But if there is no solace in the fruits of our research, there is at least some consolation in the research itself. Men and women are not content to comfort themselves with tales of gods and giants, or to confine their thoughts to the daily affairs of life; they also build telescopes and satellites and accelerators, and sit at their desks for endless hours working out the meaning of the data they gather. The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.” This effort to understand includes the present book, which complements the excellent interdisciplinary books on chance that have already appeared over the last decades, both at a scholarly and a popular level. By incorporating a wide range of historical and contemporary sciences, the studies presented here allow us to develop a transdisciplinary perspective on chance. Thus our multidisciplinary approach, in which a team of authors explores the issue of chance in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, economics, game theory, statistics, physics, theology, neuropsychology, genetics, ecology, history, law, and linguistics, makes us aware of shared insights in these distinct disciplines. Let us first give a short survey of the articles originating in these various disciplines, to conclude with a few thoughts towards a transdisciplinary perspective on chance. See, for example, G. Gigerenzer et al. (eds.), The Empire of Chance (Cambridge University Press, 1989), L. Krüger et al., The Probabilistic Revolution, Vols. 1, 2 (MIT Press, 1990), I. Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge University Press, 1990), I. Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed. 2006), S. Kern, A Cultural History of Causality (Princeton University Press, 2004), P. Vogt, Kontingenz und Zufall: eine Ideenund Begriffgeschichte (Akademie-Verlag, 2011). E.g., N.N. Taleb, Fooled by Randomness (Penguin, 2004), W. Poundstone, Fortune’s Formula (HIll and Wang, 2005), K. Mainzer, Der kreative Zufall (C.H. Beck, 2007), N. Silver, The Signal and the Noise: The Art and Science of Prediction (Penguin, 2012), D. Hand, The Improbability Principle (Bantam Press, 2014). 2 K. Landsman et al.