A Note on Meaningless Coincidence
Note that this note is not to be taken serious because this note itself is nothing but a meaning coincidence. When I say meaningless coincidence, I don’t meant they are entirely pointless. All I mean is that things somehow happen the way they happen.
I didn’t come up with the term “meaning coincidence”. It is an idea from Douglas Adams’s book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. By some meaning coincidence, it concurred with an unnamed idea that have long been swirling around in my mind
Most references to meaning coincidence happen in chapter 4.
The boat zipped and skipped across the sea, the sea that lay between the main islands of the only archipelago of any useful size on the whole planet. Zaphod Beeblebrox was on his way from the tiny spaceport on Easter Island (the name was an entirely meaningless coincidence—in Galacticspeke, easter means small, flat and light-brown) to the Heart of Gold Island, which by another meaningless coincidence was called France.
One of the side effects of work on the Heart of Gold was a whole string of pretty meaningless coincidences.1
Today was the day; today was the day when they would realize what Zaphod had been up to. Today was what Zaphod Beeblebrox’s presidency was all about. Today was also his two-hundredth birthday, but that was just another meaningless coincidence.1
While there are other interesting adjectives that describe coincidence, meaningless appeals to me the most for some meaningless coincidence.
“Some factual information for you. Have you any idea how much damage that bulldozer would suffer if I just let it roll straight over you?”
“How much?” said Arthur.
“None at all,” said Mr. Prosser, and stormed nervously off wondering why his brain was filled with a thousand hairy horsemen all shouting at him.
By a curious coincidence, “None at all” is exactly how much suspicion the ape-descendant Arthur Dent had that one of his closest friends was not descended from an ape, but was in fact from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and not from Guildford as he usually claimed.1
Ford’s father was the only man on the entire planet to survive the Great Collapsing Hrung Disaster, by an extraordinary coincidence that he was never able satisfactorily to explain.1
“Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the nonexistence of God.1
By a totally staggering coincidence, that is also the telephone number of an Islington flat where Arthur once went to a very good party and met a very nice girl whom he totally failed to get off with—she went off with a gate-crasher.1
“But this former self of mine killed himself off, didn’t he, by changing my brain? Okay, that was his choice. This new me has its own choices to make, and by a strange coincidence those choices involve not knowing and not caring about this big number, whatever it is. That’s what he wanted, that’s what he got.1
By a curious coincidence the resulting word perfectly expressed the way Arthur was feeling about things just then.1
By an extraordinary coincidence the following day there were two reports in the paper, one concerning the most astonishing incident with a flying saucer, and the other about a series of unseemly riots in pubs.1
She was also extremely nervous. The manner and timing of its arrival was deeply unsettling. Either it was the most bizarre coincidence or something very peculiar and worrying was going on. She waited a little tensely for the ship’s hatch to open. Her Guide—she thought of it as hers now—was hovering lightly over her right shoulder, its wings barely fluttering.1
You get the idea.
Douglas Adams’s view that things happen because of meaningless coincidence seems to agree with Causualism as a philosophy.
By the way, it is because of these meaningless coincidences that we can exist and experience in a world created by beautiful emergence.