Stop Chance! Silence Noise!

Abstract

What one might call the popular French epistemology we shall return later to this strange phenomenon has edified us in recent years with a number of works, certain of which have attained great recognition. I will mention: Chance and Necessity by Jacques Monod, La Mithode (The Method) by Edgar Morin, Entre le cristal et la fumie (Between Crystal and Smoke) by Henri Atlan, and La Nouvelle Alliance (The New Alliance) by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers. * The philosophies underlying these diverse works are themselves diverse, sometimes even in opposition. But curiously, they all have a common trait: all outrageously glorify chance, noise, fluctuation. All make randomness responsible either for the organization of the world (via dissipative structures, according to Prigogine) or for the emergence of life and of thought on Earth (via the synthesis and accidental mutations of DNA, according to Monod). And our friend Michel Serres is also of the band when, in his The Birth of Physics, he becomes the impassioned thurifer of Lucretius' clinamen. I would like to say straight out that this fascination with randomness testifies to an antiscientific attitude par excellence. Moreover, in a large measure, it proceeds from a certain deliberate mental confusion, excusable in writers of literary formation, but difficult to pardon in men of science who in principle have been trained in the rigors of scientific rationality. In effect, what is randomness? One can give only a purely negative definition: a random process is one which cannot be simulated by any mechanism, nor described by any formalism.' To assert that exists is therefore to take the ontological position which consists in affirming that there are natural phenomena which we shall never be able to describe, therefore never understand. This revives the famous Ignorabimus of Du Bois-Reymond; it resuscitates the wave of irrationalism and anti-scientism of the 1880s, the waves of the apostles of the crisis of science: the Boutroux, the Le Roys, ... Is the world subject to a rigorous determinism or is there a chance that is irreducible to any description? Posed in such a manner, obviously, the prob-