The Stochastic Man
by Robert Silverberg
It is remarkable that a science which began with the consideration of games of chance should have become the most important object of human knowledge… The most important questions of life are, for the most part, really only problems of probability.
Once a man learns to see, he finds himself alone in the world with nothing but folly.
1
We are born by accident into a purely random universe. Our lives are determined by entirely fortuitous combinations of genes. Whatever happens happens by chance. The concepts of cause and effect are fallacies. There are only seeming causes leading to apparent effects. Since nothing truly follows from anything else, we swim each day through seas of chaos, and nothing is predictable, not even the events of the very next instant.
Do you believe that?
If you do, I pity you, because yours must be a bleak and terrifying and comfortless life.
I think I once believed something very much like that, when I was about seventeen and the world seemed hostile and incomprehensible. I think I once believed that the universe is a gigantic dice game, without purpose or pattern, into which we foolish mortals interpose the comforting notion of causality for the sake of supporting our precarious, fragile sanity. I think I once felt that in this random, capricious cosmos we’re lucky to survive from hour to hour, let alone from year to year, because at any moment, without warning or reason, the sun might go nova or the world turn into a great blob of petroleum jelly. Faith and good works are insufficient, indeed irrelevant; anything might befall anyone at any time; therefore live for the moment and take no heed of tomorrow, for it takes no heed of you.