What are your thoughts about coincidence and luck?

As the title states, do you believe that there's a non-religious factor in your life that has any impact of some sort?

In other words, does luck play a part in life or is everything just a giant coincidence?

I would prefer to believe that everything in life has a reason for it, but there are some things I can't believe. I have my own tales, but they're not very believable.

I like the idea of Laplace's demon: Basically, if a being had all knowledge of the present and past, that being would know what the future was. Throw free will into the equation, and the being knows every possible future, thus allowing for people to make their own decisions but still allowing the being to know the future.

Hell, that already can kind of be done. It's not too hard to predict the way a person will act if you know his/her past and beliefs and such, and equations can tell you what's going to happen in certain situations if you have the right data. Some things actually depend on the ability to know what's going to happen in the future, like space travel. Those scientists have to know how much fuel is needed for certain things, the types of materials needed and how much heat they can stand, the effect weightlessness would have on certain objects, etc.

In short, there is no such thing as luck or coincidence. If you know about angles and trajectory and such, you'll know where your ball will go if you bounce it on the ground. If the ball goes somewhere else, then it's not that physics lied to you; it's that you messed up somehow. From the moment the first thing happened in the universe, there came possibilities that could be traced, and only those possibilities could happen. It continues on that way today and will continue like that for millions of years into the future, and then some. Things happen for a reason, but that reason isn't "God" or "fate." A married couple love each other because they met twenty years before at a concert. They were both there because they liked the band and could go. The man liked the band because of the music, and the woman liked the band because of the lyrics. You can go back further, saying that the man liked the music because his parents had listened to similar things when he was young, blah blah blah, and my point is proven. Nothing mystical, nothing beautiful, no hint that there is some ability known as luck or some divine creator pushing us along; just cold, hard facts and reasons.

Your train of thought seems a bit confusing. I would guess you are describing compatibilism, but the Laplace demon is usually an argument associated with causal determinism - albeit without your addition of the free will argument. Your addition of the free will argument seems frivolous to me though. What you say is true, if a being did hold absolute knowledge of the past and present it would know the future, but if there was free will it would make that knowledge pointless. What you suggest is that the entity would know anything was possible, because there could be any possible combination of choices made by people. To know that anything is possible is hardly impressive - the margin is too wide for the information to be useful.

But then you go on to talk about how predicting how someone will act isn't particularly difficult if you know a lot about them. I would agree with you here, but again this is an argument that fits with causal determinism (also known as hard determinism) rather than compatibilism. The entire field of science revolves around the concept of determinism - every experiment, every hypothesis. Science is all about predicting the future. Every field of science is this way. Psychology is all about predicting the future of human actions.

The thing that I have always wondered most at however, is how do you really define free will? In order for free will to be truly free, it would appear that it has to be random - at least from the view point of someone watching. If I can detect even the slightest pattern and discern your future decisions with it, how can you maintain that you have free choice? But conversely, if your choices are completely random are they really free either? Does a choice that lacks reason still count as a choice? Or is it something more primal?

I think the answer is that free will and determinism are compatible, but not in the way that most people would hope. As I said, a choice that lacks reason cannot truly be called a choice, but a choice with reason is predictable. So we come to the conclusion that choices are predicable. When I think more carefully about exactly what goes into a choice, I realize that the choices we make depend on the external stimuli in our environment. We take everything we know about a situation, and then based on our own knowledge we make the best possible choice that we can. This is true without exception. No one will ever make a choice that they thought at the time to be the wrong choice, choices only ever appear to be wrong in retrospect. The element that can make one choice seem wrong to someone else, or to yourself when looking back, is a difference in knowledge (of which previous experiences are a part).

When we look at it like this, we realize that true free will is the freedom to make poor choices - choices that we know at the moment of decision to be wrong. I know intuitively that people do not have the ability to make these choices. In my entire life, I have never made a choice that I thought to be a terrible idea while ignoring a much more obvious option that was plain to me. When I make this argument some people will say, "what if the obvious choice wasn't obvious to you"?. In this case the terrible choice that you made simply becomes the choice that you thought best at the time, and would only have then seemed a bad choice afterwards.

Earlier I said that I thought free will and determinism were compatible though - just not in the way that most people would envision them. You still have the freedom to make choices, but the results of those choices aren't free. This is because the circumstances of the choice weren't free. I suppose all of that is little more than a technicality, but it does help me see where the sensation of our conciousness fits in. What we perceive as life is our freedom to make the choices, even though we are forced to make our decisions based on circumstances that were fixed (which causes the result to be fixed as well).

Getting back to coincidences and luck though, I don't think there is such a thing as a coincidence. The definition of a coincidence according to answers.com:

1. The state or fact of occupying the same relative position or area in space.
2. A sequence of events that although accidental seems to have been planned or arranged.

I think we are primarily interested in the second definition here. Based on everything I said before, it would appear that everything is a coincidence in some way. But at the same time, nothing can be, because in a world of determinism you cannot consciously plan something. Nothing is planned, because there is no room to make a meaningful choice about planning it. Beyond that, if everything becomes a coincidence then the word loses much of its meaning, because the specific event it refers to becomes very general. To call something a coincidence would be synonymous with saying that it exists.

By the same token, because nothing is planned, even though chance does not exist people get lucky all the time. But just like coincidence, suddenly everything becomes either unlucky, or lucky, so the word loses much of its meaning. Both of these concepts (luck and coincidence) rely heavily on the existence of free will to be meaningful.

I believe we are all just sacks of chemicals, reacting with each other in ways which we cannot fully understand. I don't believe in luck or coincidence. I am not religious. Things happen because that's how the universe was made. Elements and chemicals react, and the cycle continues. I believe we were a fluke, a mistake that made it's way through repeated attempts at smothering what was happening. Emotions are just reactions, and among the strongest are love and hate. They make you feel good and bad, and getting rid of or nurturing those feelings can consequently help someone make their way through an ultimately futile gesture, or to end their own existence according to how either would make them feel. Learning about these actions performed by other people then help us shape how we react to our own daily situations. Other people learn from our own actions. We are waiting to be recycled. Our actions, reactions, our bodies are waiting to leave behind these hyper-styled lives and return to usefulness in the cosmic sense, to fuel and die along with everything else.

If everything happens for a reason, I believe our existence is programmed so we may appreciate what is going on here.