Chained

Once, a wise friend of mine insisted on the absence of coincidence. All events, although apparently uncorrelated, hide a deeper meaning, a purpose, an inner goal, a reason for happening. She persisted in telling that the fact that we met was not a coincidence, and that there were reasons for it. And indeed she convinced me. There were reasons. I was walking in that street because I needed to enter a close shop. She was biking on her way to a friend. And it was not a coincidence that we were there at exactly the same time, as it took 5 minutes from the bus stop, and the bus stopped at 14:51, and she, biking at 11km/h from her place, would be there exactly at 14:56. So there was a reason for that meeting! As there's a reason for every coincidence.

Saturday night is the best moment for dispute. So I expressed my coincidence theory to an artist, who agreed on the fact that coincidence it's just an admission of ignorance. When we don't know why things happened, we blame it on casuality. But a world with no casuality is a world without free will. We believe we choose, just because we are too ignorant to admit that we are chosen.

A philosopher from Amsterdam, who just came over for this discussion, introduced us to the indetermination theorem of quantum mechanics. And told us that when I drink a whiskey, there is only a probability that I would get drunk. Only that the indetermination theorem always looked to me like a mathematical trick, like the solution of a sneaky integral (have you noticed that there is always a pi in the denominator?). To me it looks like we represent reality indeterministically because of the limits of our own mathematical tools. Again, it's our ignorance.
At the second whiskey the probability got higher, but no certainty of the event. In a world without free will, we are chained to ourselves, our desperation is useless and our intentions are corrupted. A weight far too heavy for a saturday night in Eindhoven. By coincidence we ended up in a english pub. At the end of the night, the event of drunkness occurred, but it was impossible to determine with high probability at which whiskey it occurred.

We are free.