The most important questions of life are indeed, for the most part, really only problems of probability.
Interpretation
Life's significant questions often reduce to issues of chance and probability.
Pierre-Simon Laplace highlights that many of the profound questions we face in life are not just philosophical musings but are intricately tied to understanding probabilities and uncertainties. This perspective encourages us to analyze our dilemmas through a lens of chance, emphasizing that much of our decision-making and life experience is shaped by what is likely rather than certain.
In practice
In a discussion on fate vs. free will, this quote can be used to illustrate how chance plays a role in our lives.
Without any doubt, the regularity which astronomy shows us in the movements of the comets takes place in all phenomena. The trajectory of a simple molecule of air or vapour is regulated in a manner as certain as that of the planetary orbits; the only difference between them is that which is contributed by our ignorance. Probability is relative in part to this ignorance, and in part to our knowledge.
It is interesting thus to follow the intellectual truths of analysis in the phenomena of nature. This correspondence, of which the system of the world will offer us numerous examples, makes one of the greatest charms attached to mathematical speculations.
All the effects of Nature are only the mathematical consequences of a small number of immutable laws.
The word 'chance' then expresses only our ignorance of the causes of the phenomena that we observe to occur and to succeed one another in no apparent order. Probability is relative in part to this ignorance, and in part to our knowledge.
Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the beings which compose it, if moreover this intelligence were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in the same formula both the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom; to it nothing would be uncertain, and the future as the past would be present to its eye.
The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness.
And he began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
What a big book, captain, might be made with all that is known!" "And what a much bigger book still with all that is not known!
London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce the serious people, or whether the serious people produce the fogs, I don't know.
Many of us do not believe in any form of idolatry; but they have no right to object when others do it.
Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.
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