‘Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them.’
I tripped over that from Pascal after breakfast and had to think about it all morning. There’s a lot written about moral luck — a philosophical industry owed to Williams and Nagel. We think we should morally evaluate people only on the basis of what is within their control, but in fact we assess each other on the basis of factors that depend on luck all the time. (Compare our treatment of murderers with attempted murderers who were unlucky enough to equip themselves with faulty guns.)
Pascal is on about epistemic luck, but not the sort that gets a few philosophical headlines having to do wtih lucky routes to the truth. I think he means that sometimes thoughts just pop into our heads and pop out again. It can’t just be chance, can it? Isn’t there something going on in there, something blank to us but nevertheless ours? Certainly, as Pasteur put it, chance favours the prepared mind. But is that it? We read up, then cross our fingers and hope for some lucky mental voodoo to kick in.
Maybe parallel thoughts to those we have about moral luck lead to a slightly odd conclusion. We shouldn’t give someone credit for a Eureka moment, a flash of inspiration, a brilliant but unbidden thought. We should treat such people as merely lucky. It’s not just Archimedes, by the way. Such mighty inventions as Cartesian co-ordinates, Post-It-Notes and Velcro are, so legend has it, owed to chance leaps of thought. Should we praise Descartes? Or just count him lucky?
I have to go along with Pasteur. Do you really think Descartes was sitting around watching Skooby Doo when the idea for his coordinates occurred to him? His brain was undoubtly clogged with information and possibilities related to graphical representations.
From the shear numbers of people around now, of course the occasional bright idea, on the level of a post-it will occur.
Hello Ralph. The story goes that RD was lying around in bed watching a fly buz around the room when thoughts about its location relative to three walls intruded. No idea if that’s true, though.
Even if RD was lying in bed at the time and his conscious mind wasn’t doing much, perhaps he deserves credit as the possessor of an effective unconscious mind?
Likewise, in a moral luck example, if you try to shoot the President, but miss due to bad luck, we can still hold you responsible for, you know, pointing a gun at him, or intending to shoot him.
Hi James,
Neat idea, the fly in the corner of a ceiling. The thought bothered me since I always assumed Des would only have conceived the 2D coordinate system. It really makes more sense (to me;)the number line probably had been already thought of and used, so adding the second dimension would have been the natural next step, though a monumentally big one since it immediately led to the formulation of the calculus, which without cartesian coordinates would have been possible but a heck of a lot more difficult to visualize.
Anyway, Des was a formidable mathematician in contact with other mathematicians of his time, and the coordinate systems were probably of interest to others besides him.
Just picking up from Pasteur: Chance may be responsible for the tangles of thoughts and ideas that randomly thread through our brains, but it’s human ingenuity that chooses the relevant few and weaves them into a coherent pattern to produce a Eureka out of an otherwise clot of useless information.
After all, the components of infinite genius moments are everywhere for the taking - so every human is potentially a genius. But the rudiments of genius do not make genius per se. The genius quality lies in the process of selectively aggregating the key parts and discarding irrelevance (which is an art in itself).
I’m not sure where that leaves discoveries like Kekule’s benzene ring structure which he envisioned in a dream. Perhaps dreams are part of that assembling process, and to some extent are within human conscious or unconscious control.
How does one “hold on” to a thought? I think that Pascal is (nod to John Lennon) talking about “trying to shovel smoke with a pitchfork in the wind.” Thoughts in general tend to have an elusive quality. We need to set up frameworks (material and otherwise) to put thoughts in place such that they can be properly utilized at later dates. All sorts of external factors are needed for a thought to “stick.” I think that Pascal might be trying to make the point that thoughts either pop into existence or come to a head as waves in a sea of chance. They have their formation, moment, and aftermath.
Michael RE the moral luck question: We do hold the unlucky murder responsible, but just not as much as the lucky one. That’s weird, isn’t it, if luck is outside our control?
Hadn’t thought about benzene…I’ll add that to the list.
Evan D, you’ve made me think of the other side of Pascal’s point, which I neglected in the post. That we don’t get to choose which thoughts arrive and which thoughts go. It’s the going that’s more annoying to me. We don’t even get to pick what we keep.
It has been found that, throughout history, there have been many inventions and ideas whose credit we give to only one person, when there are others completely unrelated who had the same accomplishments around the same time. The credit usually goes just to whoever is more famous. The way science and mathematics progress suggest that, indeed, it has not as much to do with the person, and more to do with the times. In a somewhat Jungian way, this could be because society progresses as a collective whole and these thoughts are floating in the same ether from which everyone draws there thoughts. So at periods of great invention and “eureka moments”, one could say that it was doomed to happen to someone.
As far as whether or not we should be giving credit, assuming what I have said is correct, we might not want to. If it was just luck, then we shouldn’t credit one person when they are neither the only of the their time nor the only person who would create whatever. But, credit could be motivation, I suppose.
I agree with the last comments made about collective thoughts. Much as we like to think our ideas may be original, it is the expression of them that is unique. I think I read somewhere about ‘morphic resonance’, coined by Rupert Sheldrake. His idea didnt become very well known but many before him (including myself) were aware that new ideas tend to pop up in different places but in a similiar time frame, a kind of cosmic coincidence. Scientists are already capturing the strange phenomenon of 2 particles being one that is in 2 places at once. Rather like a wave effect ideas gather pace and become expressed in a different location but linked in some way or other. As for whether the great inventors were worthy of the praise they receive, well, history is full of examples of people taking the credit for ideas and inventions that were no doubt brought about by other individuals who happened not to belong to the establishment and therefore gained no credit.