The Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume argued that there is no real chance in the world and that our ignorance has the same effect. Hume was attempting to demonstrate that all events are predetermined – while we cannot predict what will happen, it nevertheless occurs due to a chain of causality. In other words, our lack of knowledge or understanding about the events creates an illusion of randomness or uncertainty.

Hume challenged traditional philosophical views on the existence of free-will by claiming that humans have no control over their own fate. He believed that all physical events follow cause-and-effect relationships, therefore every event must have a cause and be determined by something else before it can occur. Because we are unaware of these causes and connections between them, we mistakenly think that some outcomes arise randomly without any external influence. This is how Hume explains why human beings often feel like they are making choices out of spontaneity when really, everything was already decided for them beforehand; he calls this ‘the problem of preestablished harmony’.