Philosophy
Out Of The Borders
Randomness as the engine of change How useless is having a goal in order to live responsibly?
by Francesco Ziveri
Making plans to grow, to become a better person, to be successful in life. The notorious
good resolutions. We very hardly stick to them or to any kind of plan. “Where do you see yourself in five years?”: the most difficult question, because one cannot foresee change; in fact, at the core of change lies an unbelievably valuable element: randomness. The world is all that is the case, with no design. If there were no randomness, there would be no change, no evolution, no history, no life. The well-known chances to be seized.
For many of us today it is almost taken for
a brilliant observation the value of randomness in evolution: why does an individual adapts better to the surrounding environment or other factors from the outside world, allowing it to survive and generate offspring to pass on its genes? Because it was born with a random mutation in its genome for which it has, for example, slight“By virtue of a small chance, ly longer legs thanks to which it can run faster a change takes place, evolution from the predator, or sharper claws with which to takes place. And no one could have clasp better its prey, or even a more dense plumforeseen it..” age thanks to which it resists the cold better. By virtue of a small chance, a change takes place, guys locked in laboratories or libraries; it doesn’t evolution takes place. And no one could have seem something about our lives. Evolution, foreseen it. however, concerns us very closely. It was the biggest upheaval in human consciousness in recent centuries, perhaps millennia: there is “Your story, your decisions, your no project, the world just happens. Everything plans will be definitive only once they changes in a sole process, everything changes have already happened; only once they have already slipped into the past..” without anyone having any idea where it is all going, because it is not going anywhere. The absence of a predefined project and direction (which means, among other things, the end of Why does this concern us closely? In addition every God omniscient and creator), however, is to the obvious scientific knowledge reasons, taking charge of the role of randomness in change based on a central element: randomness. has brought this disruptive element into our In The Origin of Species, Darwin does not talk being-in-the-world structures: you will never be about genetics because he did not know it yet, able to have definitive projects; your story, your but he discovers with surprising clarity and with decisions, your plans will be definitive only once granted, we rarely stop to think about it because at school - since we are children - we are taught as if it were a dogma; as if it were something that, after all, is about science, books, strange
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