Most things of value in life depend on luck. But what is it, exactly, to be lucky?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I think an agent is lucky when he wants<\/em> something (i.e. he has a goal) and then passes through a sort of \u201ctrial\u201d in which getting what he wants is statistically unlikely, or at least not guaranteed. If he passes the trial and gets what he wants, he\u2019s lucky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For example, suppose six people play a game of pure chance (to keep this example simple). In the long run, over repeated plays, each player will win about one sixth of the time. Assuming a player\u2019s goal is to win, winning is lucky. A single win is lucky, and repeated wins are lucky: in the long run, winning more than one sixth of the time is lucky. Because the relevant sense of probability here is statistical<\/em>, we have to imagine repeated events of a similar sort, and what proportion of them would achieve the goal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Three observations can be made here. First, luck depends on having a specific goal<\/em> and a clear reference class<\/em>. The reference class consists of repeated events of a similar sort, a relevant proportion of which achieve the goal. It is often implicit \u2014 in the present example, it consists of plays of the game. Suppose we keep that reference class, but change the goal. Suppose a player just wants to have fun rather than win. If he has fun in two thirds of the games he plays, he\u2019s more often lucky than unlucky, because a higher proportion of the same class of events count as successful given the agent\u2019s specific goal. Being lucky can become so routine that we\u2019re less inclined to call it good luck, and focus instead on the less usual case of being unlucky. But the basic idea is the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Second, an agent can\u2019t be lucky if there is no possibility of his being unlucky<\/em>. If some members of a class of events are lucky, then some other members must count as \u201cunlucky\u201d, or at least as \u201cless lucky\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Third, luck applies to events that are more or less beyond our control<\/em>. Lucky or unlucky events happen<\/em> to agents, rather than being done by agents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If we\u2019re lucky, we\u2019ll inherit good genes from long-lived parents. If we\u2019re lucky, we\u2019ll be engaged in projects in life which go well for us, so that we advance towards our goals. If we\u2019re lucky, our lovers will be faithful and honest. These examples of good luck can only happen to genuine agents who have goals \u2014 real goals that are the objects of genuine desires. They only count as cases of good luck because things might have been different \u2014 there are other cases of the same sorts of events that count as bad luck. And alas, we don\u2019t have much control over them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For most of the course of a normal life, it would be remarkably bad luck to die while asleep. So we\u2019re not much inclined to call it \u201cgood luck\u201d when we simply wake up in the morning as usual. But I think it\u2019s salutary to think that way. In all human life there is an attrition rate. Nowadays, most of us in the West live in unusually safe circumstances (low infant mortality, good health, peace, prosperity) in which we are liable to forget that \u201cin the midst of life we are in death\u201d. An awareness of our own mortality need not be morbid, nor even pessimistic. It can help us get our priorities right. And it serves to remind us that even routine things depend on luck, however secure they may seem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One sort of event often assumed to be \u201clucky\u201d is the emergence of my self<\/em>, starting with conception in the womb. The thought goes something like this: \u201cso many different combinations of sperm and egg might have met at the crucial moment, with different DNA, in which case someone else<\/em> would exist rather than me<\/em> \u2014 how very lucky I am to exist, when it might so easily have been different!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But I think that is a mistaken thought. Furthermore, I think it contributes to bigger philosophical problems concerning personal identity, consciousness, and even bad science.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the moment of conception, the future<\/em> agent who is being conceived is not yet<\/em> an agent. Even if we think of the zygote formed at conception as a \u201cpotential person\u201d, no merely potential<\/em> X is a real<\/em> X, so again no agent actually exists. And where there is no agent, there is no goal of staying alive. Where there is no such goal, there is no proportion of \u201csuccessful\u201d events in which the goal is achieved. So luck as understood here isn\u2019t involved. There were countless other possible outcomes, but the actual outcome was not \u201cunlikely\u201d in the sense that an amazing coincidence occurred. It\u2019s a bit like being allocated a car registration number \u2014 it\u2019s \u201cone in a billion\u201d, but it\u2019s not anything to be surprised about unless you bet beforehand that you would be allocated that very number.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet a widespread sense of perplexity persists, and I think it reveals something significant. It shows how much difficulty we have identifying our selves with physical objects (i.e. functioning brains). Despite near-universal agreement that Descartes\u2019 \u201cimmaterial substance\u201d is a fantasy, we are fixed in our ways, and we retain a habit of supposing that my self (i.e. my mind) existed before the formation of the physical object (i.e. my brain), and was lucky not to have \u201cmissed the boat\u201d. We think of ourselves as \u201catomic\u201d \u2014 i.e. as incapable of being subdivided into smaller parts, and as having an all-or-nothing existence that can\u2019t emerge gradually from something more inchoate<\/em>. Such presuppositions are \u201cburied\u201d, and are brought to light by the current sense of having been lucky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The same sense of perplexity surrounds the so-called \u201chard problem of consciousness\u201d. We find it relatively easy to imagine how some other agent \u2014 even an intelligent robot \u2014 might do all of the things that conscious persons do, yet we find it hard to accept that \u201cI happen to be one of those things, doing what those things do\u201d (as we point to a functioning brain). This is not a problem for science \u2014 it\u2019s a distinctly philosophical problem of personal identity. The deficit is not one of knowledge so much as of the imagination<\/em>. We find it hard to imagine that we are one and the same thing as a physical brain, wondering how \u201cit came to be itself rather than something else\u201d. If that isn\u2019t a downright mistaken<\/em> activity, it\u2019s at least playful<\/em>, like a cat chasing its own tail, imagining a part of itself belongs to something else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The vague idea that \u201catomic\u201d human selves are \u201cqueued up waiting to be conceived\u201d also contributes to bad science. For example, attitudes to the extinction of our own species reveal that we treat non-birth as something like being \u201cdeprived\u201d of birth, which is comparable to death. But this is a mistake. All individuals inevitably die, and all species inevitably come to an end, but these are entirely different<\/em>. The supposition that they are similar misinforms much current thinking on ecology and catastrophism about climate change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Most things of value in life depend on luck. But what is it, exactly, to be lucky? I think an agent is lucky when he wants something (i.e. he has a goal) and then passes through a sort of \u201ctrial\u201d in which getting what he wants is statistically unlikely, or at least not guaranteed. 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