What is the role of chance in the universe? How does chance create the complex life we see all around us?

We all know the basic rules of life: eat, sleep, procreate, love, age, whither and die. We also know how family, friendships and relationships enrich that life. These local connections form our world, much more than kings, queens or national leaders do. Our patterns of behaviour, coupled with our inner circle, influences what we do, where we go, who we trust and what we know. These familiar principles govern all our lives. They make us tick and shape our destiny. 

But there’s also another factor that plays a huge role in our lives – chance. Fresh encounters, new insights, opened doors: spontaneity, unpredictability, this is what stands out above the humdrum of daily life. Chance is what philosophers and theologians throughout the ages have written countless eulogies about.

Aristotle said chance is a cause we cannot find a specific effect for. Thomas Aquinas equated chance with divine providence. What was random or fortuitous from a human perspective, he said, was actually part of God’s plan.

Then came a scientific age with the laws of classical mechanics, the laws of motion, thermodynamics, electrodynamics and evolution. This brought with it the idea of determinism: the doctrine that all events, including human actions are the result of existing causes. Chance had little place in the universe. Life was just a giant clockwork machine. 

Quantum physics changed all of that. At the quantum level, matter is indeterminate and probabilistic. Fundamentally, there is irreducible chance in the universe. This is ok for subatomic particles, but what happens at larger scales? Where does chance fit into the world all around us?

Complexity, as chance is known, emerges in all chaotic systems from the weather, to whirlpools or planetary behaviour, and even single-celled bacteria. It is the defining feature of all living systems and even artificial intelligence too. 

Artificial Intelligence’s are completely interconnected, dynamic and independent feedback networks that self-learn. You create a feedback network, then add a little bit of random noise and AIs don’t only learn, they learn how to learn. Consciousness works in this way too. Take some neural networks, provide some local rules, mix in a dollop of chance, and something profound emerges. No one knows why.

All complex ecosystems evolve with the same governing principles. There are no hierarchical leaders controlling what happens, just a sufficient number of local networks that can communicate with each other, feedback loops where information can be fed back into the network, and a degree of randomness. It makes everything work, from ant colonies, to bee hives, AIs and human brains. What begins as numbers, geometries, computational models and even games, ends up being fate, purpose, life, death and even God.

It’s fair to ask, where does this complexity come from? If this is the mystery of life solved, then how has it possibly evolved from mere blind forces? Or maybe the question is, why has it evolved? After all, science tells us what things do, but not what they are. The mass or charge of a subatomic particle tells you what it does and how it behaves, but the real nature of the object is still elusive.

You can of course believe it is the blind forces of evolution randomly making beings more and more complex, that the whole myriad of life on Earth is just down to nothing more than chance. You might believe that the universe appeared from nothing, in a split-second, accidentally, for no reason. That it inflated into billions of light years of matter, and self-organised into galaxies, filaments, black holes, stars, and planets, by a cosmic fluke. That the base chemicals to create complex life were just randomly circulating around the universe, which just happened to overcome all the myriad of equally improbable chance events on their journey to create living, thinking beings. Maybe it is all chance, good fortune, or simply luck. 

All I do know is that if human beings can use the power of chance to engineer artificial life that can write novels, paint pictures and make music that is so good we can’t tell it apart from our own, then it’s perfectly possible that the chance that made our universe was engineered too, only by someone who is much better at playing the game than we are.