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Every thoughtful penny believer must sometime pause to ponder the great questions with which we are presented by our penny faith: How came this lucky penny here in my path for me to find? Does it come to me (and I to it) by mere accident, by random chance? Or, could it be that my finding of this penny necessarily had to be, that it was determined by a complex web of inexorably linked events? And just what do I mean by luck, anyway?
The penny philosopher must reject the confused usage of chance and luck as synonyms in common speech. As, for example, when one individual's number happens to come up as the lottery winner, this is commonly referred to as lucky, even though it is obviously unlucky for the thousands of people who bought losing tickets. Here the words lucky and unlucky are simply being substituted for the words winning and losing. Barring an equipment failure, in a lottery some number must come up and, if the number of possible combinations does not exceed the number of lottery tickets sold, some one must win. The individual who wins does so by chance alone (setting aside the possibility that he found a lucky penny on his way to buy his ticket).
Consider the difference in meaning when we say that to find a penny is lucky. Clearly it is not because we are now one cent richer. Rather, it is because the found penny exerts an influence on subsequent events, warping them, however subtly, toward a more positive outcome, as represented in the schema below.
Non-penny philosophers have reasoned at great length (and with considerable tedium) on the topic of causation, whether it entails a deterministic universe in which every event is necessitated by preceding events, and if so what scope is allowed to human freedom in such a system.
Never mind about free will. More crucially, in such a universe luck has no meaning. If every event is necessitated by a stream of precedent causes and consequences, then—as with the example of a lottery winner—the word luck would be merely a label for the pleasantness or unpleasantness of predetermined events. It could not be a force acting on the world to bend events from a mostly unpleasant to a slightly more pleasant conformation.
We know that deliberately searching for a penny will drain it of its luck. An accident, a happenstance, is required to imbue the penny with the luck force. Thus, although other events may be causatively predetermined, the finding of a lucky penny cannot be, or else would not be lucky. Luck is not chance, yet requires chance as a precondition.
To propose that there is any change in subsequent events as a result of the penny finding implies that the universe is not a closed system (however chaotic) after all. If a penny must be found by chance, and if (as represented in the schema above), a slight change-for-the-better in the system results, then that slight change-for-the-better must be a necessary consequence of the penny finding. This is so even though the penny finder does not know what the change will be and may even fail to recognize it when it occurs. The following schema presents a fuller representation of the relations existing between the forces of necessity, chance, and luck.
Luck thus mediates between chance and necessity, and so must be included in any thoughtful or complete attempt to account, not only for pennies, but for human freedom and creativity.
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