RoboTimbo
Hostile Nanobacon
You shouldn't have any problem putting it into your own words then, as you've been asked numerous times.
This is an outright lie.
Proof of Immortality, VII
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This is an outright lie.
Jabba
Philosopher
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- Nowhere do I imply that time travel is possible -- that's where you're making a mistake.
- "Likelihood" can take something that has already happened and ask how it relates to the hypothesis being re-evaluated. If the hypothesis rules out the possibility of what just happened, we know that the hypothesis is wrong. My claim is that my current existence is almost ruled out by OOFLam, and therefore, almost proves that OOFLam is wrong.
RoboTimbo
Hostile Nanobacon
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The Sparrow
Graduate Poster
LOL Almost = virtually. But it is underlined!!!
Belz...
Fiend God
You could not possibly be born before your parents were born, or after they died. That narrows it down somewhat, doesn't it?
That makes no sense. Even if you were right, improbable things happen all the time.
But you're NOT RIGHT. Your existence has a likelihood of 1.
halleyscomet
Penultimate Amazing
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More to the point, can your mathematics explain this guy?
I looked at the pixels. This video is every bit as authentic and as the Shroud of Turin.
godless dave
Great Dalmuti
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You implied that time travel was possible when you said that now isn't necessarily now.
Maybe I misunderstood. Maybe you mean that you had an equal chance of existing 12 billion years ago as you had of existing right now. Is that what you meant?
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
"Now" is implicitly an evenly-distributed random variable in your model. That would only be valid if time travel were possible so that you could go to any time period in history and say "This is now." But you can't. Since you can't do that, "now" is not modeled correctly in your proof.
And you have been told what's wrong with that claim. You admit you can't fix it. You've further admitted that you are not emotionally prepared to see your proof fail. This is what everyone but you can see.
jond
Illuminator
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Once again: why does OOFLam almost rule out your current existence? OOFLam means that your current existence is explained by the existence of your body—your self is not a separate thing, it is merely a process in your brain. However unlikely your body’s existence may be, it is equally unlikely if you also add a soul, which is itself unlikely.
Jabba
Philosopher
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- Mmm. I see your point.
- I certainly don't claim that time travel is impossible...
- Quantum Mechanics and Relativity, both suggest that time is not what we think it is. Anyway, I don't currently have an opinion on whether or not time travel is possible...
- But mostly -- and this is the part that seems so hard to communicate -- in our situation, "likelihood" asks about the odds of an event occurring if a particular hypothesis is true. And, if OOFLam is true, the odds of my current existence is extremely small -- and consequently, my current existence casts doubts upon OOFLam.
godless dave
Great Dalmuti
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That is not hard to communicate. I understand it.
Are you saying that if OOFLam is true, you had an equal chance of existing 12 billion years ago as you had of existing right now?
abaddon
Penultimate Amazing
Well no, not really. At what point is your existence as likely in 100,042 BCE to 101,142 BCE? How exactly is that equally likely?
Of course you will ignore this as usual. Because to have no clue.
Thermal
August Member
The odds are 1 of your existence. Small number, granted. The odds of everything's' current existence could be viewed as small if you were trying to forecast it from the beginning of time and space, assuming chaos theory. Or the odds would be 1, given enough information about causes and effects. I can't get past this fundamental point in your claim. You acknowledge that it is the weakest link, but it's a show-stopper.
Belz...
Fiend God
Your use of "current", like your use of "now", is just nonsense. The cause-and-effect conditions required for your existence could only exist right before your conception. They could not exist 7 million years ago.
There is nothing surprising about that.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
No, you don't see the point. The point is not whether time travel is possible. The point is not whether some fringe reading of theoretical physics might suggest it is.
The point is that your question, the way you've formulated it, requires you to be able to time-travel. You've modeled "now" as random variable with uniform density. The only way "now" could be uniformly distributed is if you were somehow able to time-travel to the arrest of Jesus, the Wars of the Roses, or the American civil war and -- along with those now-mentioning authors I cited -- claim those time periods as "now" equally with today. But you cannot. When you say "now" it means a time when you can say now. That's limited to your lifetime, and for any practical purpose is limited to the instant you say it; the "now" you invoked three days ago has already passed into then. "Now" is not the kind of thing you've modeled it as in your math.
Now if you had said, "What is the likelihood, given the century 1942-2042, that some arbitrarily-selected time point would fall into it," you'd have a better-formed question. Or at least a question with a better chance of producing the predetermined teensy number you're trying so hard to backfill against. But you aren't selecting an arbitrary time point. You're choosing a time point that, when you talk about it in your proof, can never be anything other than in your lifetime -- and in fact never anything other that some very brief period of time within your life span that centers around when you utter it; the "now" you were talking about at the beginning of your argument a few days ago has passed into "then." My birthday was Sunday. Today I can't say "Now is my umpteenth birthday" because it isn't. So "now" can't be an arbitrary time point. And so you can't model it as a random variable with uniform distribution, which would be the only way you could talk about probability as 1 divided by the number of time points that exist in all of 14 billion years. Given the criteria that attach to the concept of now, and the cause-and-effect principles that others have pointed out applies to how you're using it, the distribution cannot be uniform.
In your model, neither the century nor the time point is chosen arbitrarily. You chose them according to criteria that you enforced upon the selection, like pawing through the raffle barrel and "selecting" the ticket according to whether it had your number on it. In fact, you reveal that you chose them according to the same criterion -- your lifetime. The Texas sharpshooter fallacy illustrates the importance of order of conditioning. If event A is "a successful shot" and event B is "this circle is the target," then the likelihood of a successful shot, given that the circle is the target, is 1 if event B is derived from event A -- that is, if the target is defined as whatever is the outcome of the shot. The same is ostensibly true if A and B are both conditioned on a common variable X. If A follows inevitably from X and B follows inevitably from X, and X is asserted, there's no meaningful independence between A and B. (There may be if X is not asserted.) Your proof requires there to be such independence between A and B if its goal is to arrive at a teensy number. But paradoxically it's required to be tautological in order to have the conceptual A-and-B relationship you require for your proof. Regardless of how you've stated your proof, it boils down to "What is the likelihood, given the period of Jabba's lifetime, that a time point Jabba can call 'now' will fall into that that period." You're trying very hard to equivocate up a disguise for that tautology, but you aren't succeeding. The likelihood, given the century of your life, that some arbitrarily-chosen time point will fall into it is quite small, but also quite irrelevant since an arbitrarily-chosen time point by definition has no conceptual connection to anything. You have to make up your mind between the irrelevant teensy number or the conceptually useful tautology. You can't just pick the best bits of each.
No, Jabba. There is no "communication problem." You keep pretending that your critics don't understand your argument and/or don't understand logic and statistics. Consequently your ability to "win" arguments by making up things and invoking common fallacies that your opponents or an audience won't catch is severely limited here, just as it became equally limited with the statistics form you visited. And it appears you don't know any other methods of debate besides that. Sadly this doesn't stop you from gaslighting in the fading hope that you can bluff your critics into thinking your proof only looks like it fails only because they aren't smart enough or "holistic" enough to get it.
You have been told exhaustively why your proof for the above statement is not valid. You have confessed that you cannot address those reasons. You have further confessed that your reason for believing the conclusion is emotional.
Jabba
Philosopher
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- No.
- I'm saying that if time consists of 14 billion years, and I live to be 100, the likelihood of now corresponding with the time of my existence is 1/140,000,000 -- and that likelihood pretty much assures that OOFLam is wrong.
godless dave
Great Dalmuti
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That would only be true if you had an equal chance of existing at each point in that whole 14 billion year period, which you just told me you weren't saying.
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