The Probability of Being

Growing up in the 1950s meant  growing up in a perpetual state of cognitive dissonance. As a student in a Catholic elementary school, we were taught to place a great deal of emphasis on the unique: things that did happen, and/or can happen, only once.

For example, your own birth and death. Jesus’ incarnation and resurrection. The miracle stories that populate scripture and hagiography (the lives of the saints for those of you not blessed with a parochial school education). 

At the same time, we were living in an era that was learning to respect science in a whole new way. Not even Sister Mary Therese could be oblivious to the atom bomb, the suddenly ubiquitous automobile, or most importantly, television.

The tension between these two epistemologies was not spelled out for us. I doubt any of our teachers understood it. We were left to figure it out for ourselves. And so we did; it’s called ‘the 60s’: Rock & Roll, LSD, and ‘Civil War’. 

Even today, we live in the shadow of positivism: “If I can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist; if I can’t repeat it, it didn’t happen!” By extension, if a tree falls in a forest and is only heard once, it never fell. Of course, no one other than A.J. Ayer has ever lived like this. We simply say, “Stuff happens; deal with it!”  

In recent decades, intellectual activity has concentrated on discovering heuristic principles that span different worlds: the mechanical and the biological, the mental and the physical, the very, very small and the very, very large. Let’s just say, “We’re working on it.”

Today, I’d like to suggest that we expand our horizons just a bit. I’d like to replace our either/or ontology (above) with a 6 category scheme based on various probabilities of being:

• The Infinitely Probable (Universal): Things that must exist. Today, it is generally thought that this is the null set (nothing is necessary). However, it has been argued that God, for example, fits in this category. Possibly, the Good. Or Beauty, Truth, Justice, etc. Anyway, P(x) = 1.

• The Indefinitely Probable (Repeatable): Things that have been observed to exist, or that can be inferred to exist from things that have been observed to exist, and that can be made to exist again by faithfully recreating specified initial conditions.  Current thinking puts ‘the emergence of life’ in this category. The physics is deterministic; the math is ‘hyperreal’ (it involves numbers that are larger than any real number but less than infinity). P(x) → 1. 

• The Definitely Probable (Actual): These are things (events) with a well-defined probability of existence (occurrence). The physics is causal, the math is ‘real’, i.e. it involves ‘real’ numbers.  0 < P(x) Ɛ R < 1.

• The Infinitesimally Probable (Unique): Things that may exist but have an infinitesimally (є) small probability of existing, e.g. the specific combination of genes and experiences that constitute the person known as ‘You’. This is the realm of ‘one offs’. The physics is chaotic, the math ‘hyperreal’ (it involves numbers that are smaller than any positive real number but greater than 0). P(x) → 0.

• The Virtually Impossible: Things that are infinitesimally probable but occur more than once. P(x) ≤ є²; ergo, P(x) ≈ 0. I can say with confidence, “There will never be another you,” at least not in finite spacetime.

• The Absolutely Impossible: Things that cannot exist. A squared circle. A particle that goes faster than the speed of light without going backwards in time. These are things that are precluded by the nature of cosmos, language, mathematics, or logic. P(x) = 0. Neither physics nor math apply.

  
  

Young people growing up today are exposed only to the Indefinitely probable (science) and Definitely probable (history). They are at a disadvantage. 70 years ago, our cosmic map was more expansive; it also included the Infinitely Probable (e.g. God) and the Infinitesimally Probable (e.g. miracles). 

Lacking those categories today, our culture has substituted Science Fiction. The Matrix (or the Multiverse) takes the place of God, the Infinitely Probable, while Marvel Superheroes occupy the space once reserved for the miraculous, the Infinitesimally Probable. We are poorer for our progress.

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