The Power of the Unplanned

I have often held the view that the most important events of our lives may not be the result of our carefully laid out plans or projects but simply happen on their own due largely to chance or randomness or luck or bad luck as the case may be. This is in direct contrast to the Buddhist view that the operation of the laws of cause and effect is relentlessly deterministic and that such law may apply even across the boundaries of life and death in the form of karma such that the good or bad karma carried down from the balance sheet of our previous life may continue to affect our present life. I can well understand the kind of mentality which leads one to think so. What is the alternative? If life is completely unpredictable, if no definite effect will arise from certain specific causes, what is the the point of planning and what is the merit for having deciding upon doing what is considered good and avoiding what is considered evil? What is the point of having good intention and doing so-called good deeds?

There is of course a certain predictability in life. This is especially so with regard to the physical world. Indeed, that is the whole basis upon which our scientific laws is built. Pierre-Simon Laplace in the 19th century wrote: "If an intelligence, at a given instant, knew all the forces that animate nature and the position of each constituent being; if, moreover, this intelligence were sufficiently great to submit these data to analysis, it could embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies in the universe and those of the smallest atoms: to this intelligence nothing would be uncertain, and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes." But the question is, can we possibly know all the prior conditions and have all the relevant data at the point at which we must make up our mind whether and if so, what to do at a specific point in time at a specific place under certain specific circumstances before we make a choice and select a particular option out of a number of possible options?

Even in a sphere which we normally think of as subject to predictable laws as in physics, the laws may sometimes be restricted to probabilities and what is certain is only the overall global result but not the behavior of individual atoms, particles or molecules e.g. even though we know the laws of thermo-dynamics and we know how gas will behave under specific conditions of volume, temperature and presure under Boyle's law we have no way of predicting the path which an individual gas molecule will move in a confined space or how dyes may move in a liquid although we know that eventually the color of the liquid with the relevant dye will be uniform. Likewise, although we can predict along what orbits electrons will move around the nucleus of particular types of atoms, we have no way of knowing where an electron will be at a specific point in time in that orbit. We will only know its position in space if we collapse the relevant probability wave equations governing its behavior when we measure it with our measuring instrument but even then, we shall never know its force or momentum because the more certain we are of its position, the less uncertain we shall be with regard to its momentum. If we want to know its momentum, we cannot find out its position and if we want to know its position, we cannot know its momentum. This is Heisenberg's Principle of Quantum Indeterminacy. In an analogous way, although we know how things may turn out generally with regard to a particular groups of people or phenomena or events in such social sciences as economics, sociology or the voting behavior of specific groups in politics, we have no way of knowing when or how exactly an individual will do or how exactly an event will occur. We do not all behave as the statistically "average" or "normal" person in any community!

Edward Lorenz discovered to his surprise in the 1960s, while fiddling with certain weather data in his computer prediction model of how the long term weather might be like if he were to change various specific parameters, that by cutting the last three of the six digits after the decimal places of particular sets of weather data and then ran his data through his computer, he would obtain widly different results. This is called by the colorful name of "the butterfly effect" or sensitivity of particular long term complex systems to changes in certain relevant initial conditions: the way or how Monarch butterflies in Mexico migrate to the north America may affect weather conditions in Africa causing draughts or floods in particular years. In actual life, the butterfly effect, coupled with the operation of random or chance events will often produce results considered wholly disproportionate to the triviality of the random factor.

In his book "The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives", Leonard Mlodinow (09) spells out in detail the power of randomness in our lives. In the last chapter, chapter 10, he offers us a few interesting insights:

1. Society is not govenred by definite and fundamental laws the way physics is and people may often act not rationally and thus will frequently act against their own long term or even short term best interest.

2. Even if we could uncover the laws of human behavior, it is impossible to know or control precisely the circumstances of life because we simply do not have precise information on all the relevant data we require to make a decision or to make a prediction.

3. Even if we are in possession of all the relevant data, it is highly doubtful if we can do all the necessary computations necessary because there are so many variables and unpredictable factors. Nobel laureate Max Born wrote: "Chance is a more fundamental conception than causality.".Thus altough statistical regularities can be found in social data, the future of particular individuals is impossible to predict eg. our jobs, our friends, our finances.

4. After the event, we can usually tell why particular events happened but seldom before. e.g the Asssistant Head of the main unit of Army Intelligence Lieutenant Colonel Goerge W Bicknell told his boss in Hawaii about to go to dinner with the head of the of the army's Hawaiian Department the intercepted and decoded telegraphic information regarding unusual movements and the inferences drawn thereon that some Japanese military operation was imminent but his report was brushed aside in less than 5 minutes. As a result the Japanese were successful in Pearl Harbor.But at that time, there were so many intelligence reports some true and some probably true and some false. There is a cliché: hindsight is always 20/20 or as the Chinese would say, it is easy to be the Hung Ming after the event.

5. How people behave in the past may often be a poor guide on how people may behave in future e.g stock market, chess. People systemmatically fail to see the role of chance in the success of ventures and in the success of people e.g Bill Miller, Stanley O'Neal in the stock market, the success of Bill Gates, Bruce Willis, Donald Trump ( a two time bankrupt). In history, it is often debatable whether the historical forces made Napoleon a hero of the French Revolution or Napoleon made revolutionary changes in European history. Mlodlinow questions: Does Bill Gates earn $100 per second because he is god-like or is he god-like because he earns $100 per second?

6. Our society can be quick to make wealthy people into heroes and poor ones into goats. It can be a mistake to assign brilliance in proportion to wealth. Mdloinow says: "We cannot see a person's potential, only his or her result, so we often misjudge people by thinking that the results must reflect the person". Michael Lerner studied society's attitude to the poor and concluded that "for the sake of their sanity,"  people overestimate the degree to which ability can be inferred from success. We thus tend to see movie stars as more talented than aspiring stars and believe that the richest people must also be the smartest and we miss the effects of randomness in life because when we see the world, we tend to see what we expect to see as found by David L Rosenhan who introduced certain actors as "psychotic patients" to various psychiatric hospitals  who upon admission ceased to display the relevant symptoms. However, they continued to be treated as "psychotic" by the nurses. He concludes: " once a person is abnormal, all of his other behaviors and characteristics are colored by that label.". Because of this, marketing people exploit this tendency by making people "look successful" e.g displaying all kinds of certificates on the wall, wearing a robe etc. This is dramatically shown by a vodka advertisement when it is associated with an image of success when by definition there cannot be any difference between "different vodkas" so as to make people pay much more for the same thing. By a double blind experiment, it is found that the cheapest brand Smirnoff came out on top! Similar results is obtained by the popular novelist Stephen King himself, who deliberately wrote under a different pseudonym Richard Bachmann. Sales dropped abruptly until it was announced that in was in fact written by him!