NATURAL LUCK

One of my favorite writers and thinkers is the late Stanislaw Lem (1921-2006)  A master of "science" fiction with deep philosophical meaning and loads of humorous wisdom.

One of the ways in which he explored human intellectual and technological pretentiousness was to write reviews of non-existent books. One of those collections is entitled "A Perfect Vacuum." 

In that work there is a mock book review dealing with probability, dauntingly entitled De Impossibilitate Vitae (On the Impossibility of Life). It contains a sequence of reasoning about the probability of the birth of the fictional author (Prof. Benedykt Kouska) that never ceases to make me laugh, no matter how many times I read it.

For your delectation I have reproduced it below.

Here is an excerpt from Lem's De Impossibilitate Vitae (On the Impossibility of Life): I have taken the liberty of interspersing amusing illustrations in the text.

A certain army doctor, during the First World War, ejected a nurse from the operating room, for he was in the midst of surgery when she entered by mistake. Had the nurse been better acquainted with the hospital, she would not have mistaken the door to the operating room for the door to the first-aid station, and had she not entered the operating room, the surgeon would not have ejected her; had he not ejected her, his superior, the regiment doctor, would not have brought to his attention his unseemly behavior regarding the lady (for she was a volunteer nurse, a society miss), and had not the superior brought this to his attention, the young surgeon would not have considered it his duty to go and apologize to the nurse, would not have taken her to the cafe, fallen in love with her, and married her, whereby Professor Benedykt Kouska would not have come into the world as the child of this same married couple.

From this it would appear to follow that the probability of the coming into the world of Professor Benedykt Kouska (as a newborn, not as the head of the Analytical Philosophy Department) was set by the probability of the nurse's confusing or not confusing the doors in the given year, month, day, and hour. But it is not that way at all. The young surgeon Kouska did not have, on that day, any operations scheduled; however, his colleague Doctor Popichal, who wished to carry the laundry from the cleaners to his aunt, entered the aunt's house, where because of a blown fuse, the light over the stairwell was not working, because of which he fell off the third step and twisted his ankle; and because of this, Kouska had to take his place in surgery.

Had the fuse not blown, Popichal would not have sprained his ankle, Popichal would have been the one operating and not Kouska, and, being an individual known for his gallantry, he would not have used strong language tho remove the nurse who had entered the operating room by mistake, and, not having insulted her, he would not have seen the need to arrange a tete a tete with her; but tete a tete or no tete a tete, it is absolutely certain in any case that from the possible union of Popichal and the nurse the result would not have been Benedykt Kouska but someone altogether different, with whose chances of coming into the world this study does not concern itself.

Professional statisticians, aware of the complicated state of the things of this world, usually wriggle out of having to deal with the probability of such events as someone's coming into the world. They say, to be rid of you, that what we have here is the coincidence of a great number of divaricate–source causal chains and that consequently the point in space–time in which a given egg merges with a given sperm is indeed determined in principle, in abstracto; however, in concreto one would never be able to accumulate knowledge of sufficient power, that is to say all–embracing, for the practical formulation of any prognosis (with what probability there will be born an individual X of traits Y, or in other words how long people must reproduce before it is certain that a certain individual, of traits Y, will with absolute certainty come into the world) to become feasible. But the impossibility is technical only, not fundamental; it rests in the difficulties of collecting information, and not in the absence in the world  (to hear them talk) of such information to collect. This lie of statistical science Prof. Benedykt Kouska intends to nail and expose.

As we know, the question of Prof. Kouska's being able to be born does not reduce itself merely to the alternative of "right door, wrong door." Not with regard to one coincidence must one reckon the chances of his birth, but with regard to many: the coincidence that the nurse was sent to that hospital and not another; the coincidence that her smile in the shadow cast by her cornet resembled, from a distance, the smile of Mona Lisa; the coincidence, too, that the Archduke Ferdinand was shot in Sarajevo, for had he not been shot, war would not have broken out, and had war not broken out, the young lady would not have become a nurse; moreover, since she came from Olomouc and the surgeon from Moravska Ostrava, they most likely would never have met, neither in a hospital nor anywhere else. One therefore has to take into account the general theory of the ballistics of shooting at archdukes, and since the hitting of the Archduke was conditioned by the motion of his automobile, the theory of the kinematics of automobile models of the year 1914 should also be considered, as well as the psychology of assassins, because not everyone in the place of that Serb would have shot at the Archduke, and even if someone had, he would not have hit, not if his hands were shaking with excitement; the fact, therefore, that the Serb had a steady hand and eye and no tremors also has its place in the probability distribution of the birth of Prof. Kouska. Nor ought one to ignore the overall political situation of Europe in the summer of 1914.

.

But the marriage in any case did not come about in that year, or in 1915, when the young couple became acquainted in good earnest, for the surgeon was detailed to the fortress of Przemysl. From there he was to travel later to Lwow, where lived the young maiden Marika, whom his parents had chosen to be his wife out of financial considerations. However, as a result of Samsonov's offensive and the movements of the southern flank of the Russian forces. Przemysl was besieged, and before long, instead of repairing to his betrothed in Lwow, the surgeon proceeded into Russian captivity when the fortress fell. Now he remembered the nurse better than he did his fiancée, because the nurse not only was fair but also sang the song "Sleep, Love, in Thy Bed of Flowers" much more sweetly than did Marika, who had an unremoved polyp on her vocal cords and from this a constant hoarseness. Marika was, in fact, to have undergone an operation to remove the polyp in 1914, but the otorhinolaryngologist who was supposed to remove the polyp, having lost a great deal of money in a Lwow casino and being unable to pay off his debt of honor (he was an officer), instead of shooting himself in the head, robbed the regimental till and fled to Italy; this incident caused Marika to conceive a great dislike for otorhinolaryngologists, and before she could decide on another she became betrothed; as a betrothed she was obliged to sing "Sleep, Love, in Thy Bed of Flowers" and her singing, or rather the memory of that hoarse and wheezy voice, in contrast – detrimental to the betrothed – with the pure timbre of the Prague nurse was responsible for the latter's gaining ascendancy, in the minds of the doctor–prisoner Kouska over the image of his fiancée. So that returning to Prague in the year 1919, he did not even think to look up his former fiancée but immediately went to the house in which the nurse was living as a marriageable miss.

The nurse, however, had four different suitors; all four sought her hand in marriage, whereas between her and Kouska there was nothing concrete except for the postcards he had sent her from captivity, and the postcards in themselves, smudged with the stamps of the military censor, could not have been expected to kindle in her heart any lasting feeling. But her first serious suitor was a certain Hamuras, a pilot who did not fly because he always got a hernia when he moved the airplanes rudder bar with his feet, and this because the rudder bars in the airplanes of those days were hard to move – it was, after all, a very primitive era in aviation. Now, Hamuras had been operated on once, but without success, for the hernia recurred, recurred because the doctor performing the operation had made a mistake in the catgut sutures; and the nurse was ashamed to wed the sort of flyer who instead of flying, spent his time either sitting in the reception room of the hospital or searching the newspaper ads for places to obtain a genuine prewar truss, since Hamuras figured that such a truss would enable him to fly after all; on account of the war, however, a good truss was unobtainable.

One should note that at this juncture Prof. Kouska's "to be or not to be" ties in with the history of aviation in general, and with the airplane models used by the Austro – Hungarian Army in particular. Specifically, the birth of Prof. Kouska was positively influenced by the fact that in 1911 the Austro–Hungarian government acquired a French franchise to build monoplanes whose rudder bars were difficult to operate, planes that were to be manufactured by a plant in Wiener- Neustadt, and this in fact took place. Now in the course of the bidding, the French firm Antoinette competed with this plant and its franchise (coming from an American firm, Farman), and that the French firm had a good chance because Maj. General Prchl, of the Imperial Crown Commissariat, would have turned the scales in favor of the French model, because he had a French mistress, the governess of his children, and on the account of this, secretly loved all things French; that of course, would have altered the distribution of chance, since the French machine was a biplane with sweptback ailerons and a rudder blade that had an easily movable control bar, so the bar would not have caused Hamuras his problem, owing to which the nurse might have married him after all. Granted, the plane had a hard–to–work exhaust hammer, and Hamuras had rather delicate shoulders; he even suffered from what is called Schreibkrampf which gave him difficulty signing his name (his full name ran Adolph Alfred von Messen-Weydeneck zu Oryola und Munnesacks, Bron Hamuras). So, then, even without the hernia Hamuras could have, by reason of his weak arms, lost his appeal in the eyes of the nurse.

But there popped up in the governess's path a certain two–bit tenor from an operetta, with remarkable speed he gave her a baby, Lieutenant General Prchl drove her from his door, lost his affection for all things French and the army stayed with the Farman franchise held by the company from Wiener-Neustadt. The tenor the governess met at the Ring when she went there with General Prchl's oldest daughters – the youngest had the whooping cough, so they were trying to keep the healthy children away from the sick one – and if it had not been for that whooping cough brought in by that acquaintance of the Prchl's cook, a man who carried coffee to a smoking room and was wont to drop in on the Prchls in the morning, that is, drop in on their cook, there would have been no illness, no taking of the children to the Ring, no meeting the tenor, no infidelity; and thereby Antoinette would have won out in the bidding after all. But Hamuras was jilted, married the daughter of a purveyor by appointment to His Majesty the King, and had three children by her, one of which he had without the hernia.

There was nothing wrong with the nurse's second suitor, Captain Misnia, but he went to the Italian front and came down with rheumatism (this was in the winter, in the Alps). As for the cause of his demise, accounts differ; the captain was taking a steam bath, a .22–caliber shell hit the building, the captain went flying out naked straight into the snow, the snow took care of his rheumatism, they say, but he got pneumonia. However, had Prof. Fleming discovered his penicillin not in 1941 but, say in1910, then Misnia would have been pulled out of the pneumonia and returned to Prague as a convalescent, and the chances of Prof. Kouska coming into the world would have been, by that, greatly diminished. And so the calendar of discoveries in the field of antibacterial drugs played a large role in the rise of B. Kouska.

The third suitor was a respectable wholesale dealer, but the young lady did not care for him. The fourth was about to marry her for certain, but it did not work out on account of a beer. This last beau had enormous debts and hoped to pay them off out of the dowry; he also had an unusually checkered past. The family went, along with the young lady and her suitor, to a Red Cross raffle, but Hungarian veal birds were served for lunch, and the father of the young lady developed a terrific thirst, so he left the pavilion where they all were listening to the military bands and had a mug of beer on draft, in the course of which he ran into an old schoolmate who was just then leaving the raffle grounds, and had it not been for the beer they would certainly not have come together; this schoolmate knew, through his sister–in–law, the entire past of the young lady's suitor and was not averse to telling her father everything and in full detail. It appears he also embellished a little here and there; in any event, the father returned most agitated, and the engagement, having been all but made official, fell irretrievably to pieces. Yet had the father not eaten Hungarian veal birds, he would not have felt a thirst, would not have stepped out for a beer, would not have met his old school mate, would not have learned of the debts of the suitor; the engagement would have gone through, and, seeing it would have been an engagement in wartime, the wedding also would have followed in short order. An excessive amount of paprika in the veal birds on May 19,1916, thus saved the life of Professor. B. Kouska.

As for Kouska the surgeon, he returns from captivity in the rank of battalion doctor and proceeded to enter the lists of courtship. Evil tongues informed him of the suitors, and particularly of the late Captain Misnia, R.I.P., who presumably had achieved a more-then–passing acquaintance with the young lady, though at the same time she had been answering the postcards from the prisoner of war. Being by nature fairly impetuous, the surgeon Kouska was prepared to break off the engagement already made, particularly since he had received several letters which the young lady had written to Misnia (God knows how they ended up in the hands of a malicious person in Prague), along with an anonymous letter explaining how he, Kouska, had been serving the young lady as a fifth wheel, that is, kept in reserve as a stand–by. The breaking off of the engagement did not come about, due to a conversation the surgeon had with his grandfather, who had really been a father to him from childhood because the surgeon's own father, a profligate and ne'er–do–well, had not raised him at all. The grandfather was an old man of unusually progressive views, and he considered that a young girl's head was easily turned, especially when the turner wore a uniform and pleaded the soldier's death that could befall him at any moment.

Kouska thus married the young lady. If however, he had had a grandfather of other persuasions, or if the old liberal had passed away before his 80th year, the marriage most certainly would not have taken place. The grandfather, it is true, led an exceedingly healthy mode of life and rigorously took the water cure prescribed by Father Kneipp; but to what extent the ice–cold shower each morning, lengthening the grandfather's life, increased the chances of Professor B. Kouska's coming into the world, it is impossible to determine. The father of surgeon Kouska, a disciple of misogyny, would definitely not have interceded in behalf of the maligned maiden; but he had no influence over his son from the time when, having made the acquaintance of Mr. Serge Mdivani, he became the latter's secretary, went with him to Monte Carlo, and came back believing in a system of breaking the bank in roulette shown him by a certain widow–countess; thanks to the system he lost his entire fortune, was placed under custody, and had to give up his son into the care of his own father. Yet had the surgeon's father not succumbed to the demon of gambling, his father would then not have disowned him, and–again–the coming to pass of Professor Kouska would not have come to pass.

The factor that tipped the scales in favor of the professor's birth was Mr. Serge vel Sergius Mdivani. Sick of his estate in Bosnia, and of his wife and mother–in-law, he engaged Kouska (the surgeon's father) as his secretary and took off with him for the waters, because Kouska the father knew languages and was a man of the world, whereas Mdivani, notwithstanding his first name, new no language besides Croatian. But had Mr. Mdivani in his youth been better looked after by his father, then instead of chasing after the chambermaids he would have studied his languages, would not have needed a translator, would not have taken the father of Kouska to the waters, the latter would not have returned from Monte Carlo as a gambler, and thereupon would not have been cursed and cast out by his father, who, not taking the surgeon under his wing as a child would not have instilled liberal principles in him, the surgeon would have broken off with the young lady, and – once more – Prof. Benedyct Kouska would not have made his appearance in this world. 

Now, Mr. Mdivani's father was not disposed to keep an eye on the progress of his son's education when the latter was supposed to be studying languages, because this son, by his looks, reminded him of a certain dignitary of the church concerning whom Mr. Mdivani senior harbored the suspicion that he, the dignitary, was the true father of little Sergius. Feeling, therefore, a subconscious dislike for little Sergius, he neglected him; as a result of this neglect Sergius did not learn, as he should have, his languages. 

The question of the identity of the boy's father was in fact complicated, because even the mother of little Sergius was not certain whether he was the son of her husband or of the parish priest, and she did not know for sure whose son he was because she believed in stares that affected the unborn. She believed in stares that affected the unborn because her authority in all things was her Gypsy grandmother. We are now speaking, it should be noted, of the relation between the grandmother of the mother of little Sergius Mdivani and the chances of the birth of Professor Benedyct Kouska. Mdivani was born in the year 1861, his mother in 1832, and the Gypsy grandmother in 1798. So, then, matters that transpired in Bosnia and Herzegovina toward the close of the 18th century – in other words, 130 years before the birth of Prof. Kouska – exerted a very real influence on the probability distribution of his coming into the world. 

But neither did the Gypsy grandmother appear in a void. She did not wish to marry an Orthodox Croat, particularly since at that time all Yugoslavia was under the Turkish Yoke, and marriage to a giaour would bode no good for her. But the Gypsy maid had an uncle much older than she; he had fought under Napoleon; it was said that he had taken part in the retreat of the grand Army from the environs of Moscow. In any case, from his soldiering under the Emperor of the French he returned home with the conviction that interdenominational differences were of no great matter, for he had had a close look at the differences of war, therefore he encouraged his niece to marry the Croat, for, though a giaour, it was a good and comely youth. In marrying the Croat, the grandmother on Mr. Mdivani's mother's side thus increased the chance of Professor Kouska's birth.

As for the uncle, he would not have fought under Napoleon had he not been living during the Italian campaign in the region of the Apennines, wither he was sent by his master, a sheep farmer with a consignment of sheepskin coats. He was waylaid by a mounted patrol of the Imperial Guard and given the choice of enlisting or becoming a camp follower; he preferred to bear arms. Now, if the Gypsy uncle's master had not raised sheep, or if, raising them, he had not made sheepskin coats, for which there was a demand in Italy, and if he had not sent this uncle to Italy with the coats, then the mounted patrol would not have seized the Gypsy uncle, whereupon, not fighting his way across Europe, this uncle, his conservative opinions intact, would not have encouraged his niece to marry the Croat. And therewith the mother of little Sergius, having no Gypsy grandmother and consequently not believing in stares that affected the unborn would not have thought that merely from watching the parish priest spread his arms as he sang in a bass at the altar one could bear a son – the spit and image of the priest; and so, her conscience completely clear, she would not have feared her husband, she would have defended herself against the charge of infidelity, the husband no longer seeing evil in the looks of little Sergius, would have minded the boys education, Sergius would have learned his languages, would not have needed anyone as a translator, whereat the father of Kouska the surgeon would not have gone off with him to the waters, would not have become a gambler and a wastrel, would (being a misogynist) have urged his surgeon son to throw over the young lady for her dalliance with the late Capt. Misnia R.I.P., as a result of which there would have been, again, no Professor B Kouska in the world. 

But now observe. So far we have examined the probability spectrum of the birth of Prof. Kouska on the assumption that both his facultative parents existed, and we reduced the probability of that birth only by introducing very small, perfectly credible changes in the behavior of the father or mother of Prof. Kouska, changes brought about by the actions of third parties (Gen. Samsonov, the Gypsy grandmother, the mother of Mdivani, Baron Hamuras, the French governess of Major General Prchl, Emperor Francis Joseph I, the Archduke Ferdinand, the Wright brothers, the surgeon for the Baron's hernia, Marika's otorhinolaryngologist, etc.). But surely the very same type of analysis can be applied to the chances of the coming into the world of the young lady who as a nurse married the surgeon Kouska, or for that matter to the surgeon himself. Billions, trillions of circumstances had to occur as they did occur for the young lady to come into the world and for the future surgeon Kouska to come into the world. And in an analogous fashion, innumerable multitudes of occurrences conditioned the coming into the world of their parents, grandparents, great–grandparents, etc. It would seem to require no argumentation that, for example, had the tailor Vlastimil Kouska, born in 1673, not come into the world, there could not have been, by virtue of that, his son, or his grandson, or his great–grandson, or thus the great–grandfather of Kouska the surgeon, or thus Kouska the surgeon himself, or indeed Professor Benedyct.

But the same reasoning holds for those ancestors of the line of the Kouskas and the line of the nurse who were not at all human yet, being creatures who led a quadrumanous and arboreal existence in the Eolithic, when the first Paleopithecanthropus, having overtaken one of those quadrumanes and perceiving that it was a female with which he had to deal, possessed her beneath the eucalyptus tree that grew in the place where today stands the Mala Strana in Prague. As a result of the mixing of the chromosomes of that lubricious Paleopithecanthropus and that quadrumanous protohuman primatrice, there arose that type of meiosis and that linkage of gene loci which, transmitted through the next thirty thousand generations, produced on the visage of the young lady nurse that very smile, faintly reminiscent of the smile of Mona Lisa, from the canvas of Leonardo, which so enchanted the young surgeon Kouska. 

But this same eucalyptus could have grown, could it not, four meters away, in which case the quadrumanness, fleeing from the Paleopithecanthropus that pursued her would not have stumbled on the tree's thick root and gone sprawling, and therewith, clambering up the tree in time, would not have got pregnant, and if she had not got pregnant, then transpiring a bit differently, Hannibal's crossing of the Alps, the Crusades, the Hundred Years' War, the taking by the Turks of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Moscow campaign of Napoleon, as well as several dozen trillion like events, undergoing minimal changes, would have led to a situation in which no wise could Professor Benedyct Kouska any longer have been born, from which we can see that the range of the chances of his existence contains within it a subclass of probabilities that comprises the distribution of all the eucalyptus trees that grew in the location of modern–day Prague roughly 349,000 years ago. 

Now, those eucalyptuses grew there because, while fleeing from saber–tooth tigers, great herds of weakened mammoths had eaten their fill of eucalyptus flowers and then, suffering indigestion from them (the flower sorely stings the pallet), had drunk copious quantities of water from the Vltava; that water having at that time purgative properties, cause them to evacuate en masse, thanks to which eucalyptus seeds were planted where previously eucalypti had never been; but had the water not been sulfurized by the influx of a mountain tributary of the then Vltava, the mammoths, not getting the runs from it, would not have occasioned the growing of the eucalyptus grove on the site of what is now Prague, the quadrumanal female would not have gone sprawling in her flight from the Paleopithecanthropus, and there would not have arisen that gene locus which imparted to the face of the young lady the Mona Lisa–like smile that captivated the young surgeon; and so, but for the diarrhea of the mammoths, Professor Benedyct Kouska also would have not come into the world. 

It should be noted, moreover, that the water of the Vltava, underwent sulfurization approximately two and a half million years B.C., this on account of a displacement in the main geosyncline of the tectonic formation that was then giving rise to the center of the Tatra Mountains; this formation caused the expulsion of sulfurous gases from the marlacious strata of the Lower Jurassic, because in the region of the Dinaric Alps there was an earthquake, which was caused by a meteor that had a mass on the order of a million tons; this meteor came from a swarm of Leonids, and had it fallen not in the Dinaric Alps but a little farther on, the geosyncline would not have buckled, the sulfurous deposit would not have reached the air and sulfurized the Vltava, and the Vltava would not have caused the diarrhea of the mammoths, from which what one can see that had a meteor not fallen 2.5 million years ago on the Dinaric Alps, Professor Kouska then, too, could not have been born.

END OF EXCERPT

And that is a taste of Lem, a writer and philosopher most suited for our time and for the unforeseeable future. He is held in the highest regard by Daniel Young, the designer of LUCKISM®. Is this not an overwhelmingly persuasive demonstration of the importance of luck in life?

END