Probability

Is there such thing as coincidence? I mean is it possible that something happen without any purpose or significance?

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Suppose you and I are in the same room and we're bored. We start flipping coins. I flip twice; so do you. I get "Heads; Tails," so do you. Sounds like a meaningless coincidence to me. In fact, it would take a lot of argument to make the case that it was anything other than meaningless.

Surely what's just been described is possible, and so meaningless coincidences are possible. But surely it's also the sort of thing that's actually happened countless times, and so meaningless coincidences are more than just possible.

The more interesting question is whether anything has purpose or significance apart from the purpose or significance that creatures like us give it. Put another way, the question is whether there's any significance inherent in the universe itself. Many religious believers would say yes, though they would trace the meaning back to the intentions of God. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist, believed in meaningful coincidences that he called "synchronicity." His account of them (as I understand it) made a connection between the outer occurrences and our minds, but it was a connection that didn't amount merely to our imposing meaning on things. And certain sorts of magical views of the world also involve what might be counted as meaningful coincidences.

If there's anything that's common to views called "naturalistic," it's that there's no meaning in things apart from the meaning that derives from the beliefs, purposes, intentions, etc. of creatures with minds. But supposing naturalism is correct, why are there so many cases of strange coincidence?

The answer is that with enough chance events, the chances are very high that the unlikely will happen. We can make do with a simple illustration. Many people have idled time away flipping a coin repeatedly. For any given sequence of ten flips, the chance that all ten outcomes will be "heads" is only about one in a thousand. But untold thousands of people have made this experiment, and so the rules of probability alone make it virtually certain that some of them will see ten heads in a row.

More generally, with enough things happening, the chances are overwhelming that there will be lots of individually improbable coincidences, even though it may not be possible to say which ones in advance. The naturalist's claim is that the level of apparently meaningful coincidences is well within what we'd expect by chance alone, and although it's not easy to make that thought entirely precise, its spirit is plausible enough to be worth taking quite seriously, I think.

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