Interesting Ian
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That is the correct analogy for anyone to be born and exclaim how improbable it was that he should be born.
But we're not interested in any individual. That individual has to be me.
That is the correct analogy for anyone to be born and exclaim how improbable it was that he should be born.
But we're not interested in any individual. That individual has to be me.
Z
Variable Constant
What I always wonder is, 400,000,000,000 whats?
If I say the chance of flipping a heads on a penny is 1 in 2, that means, simply, one of two results is heads or, more specifically, one in every two tries on average will be heads.
So one of every 400 billion whats results in me being born? 400 billion attempts at my parents to copulate? 400 billion possible created universes? What's the factor here? If it's just something like number of times people copulate without protection during sexual maturity, a 1 in 400 billion chance over the course of human history would result in a fairly high chance of me being born (I'd guess people have copulated more than 400 billion times, easily, over the course of human history).
For example, if you say the chance of rolling a 20 on a d20 is 1 in 20, and you roll the dice 20,000 times, you can expect roughly 1000 successful 20 rolls. So what's the difficulty?
So there it is - 400 billion whats?
If I say the chance of flipping a heads on a penny is 1 in 2, that means, simply, one of two results is heads or, more specifically, one in every two tries on average will be heads.
So one of every 400 billion whats results in me being born? 400 billion attempts at my parents to copulate? 400 billion possible created universes? What's the factor here? If it's just something like number of times people copulate without protection during sexual maturity, a 1 in 400 billion chance over the course of human history would result in a fairly high chance of me being born (I'd guess people have copulated more than 400 billion times, easily, over the course of human history).
For example, if you say the chance of rolling a 20 on a d20 is 1 in 20, and you roll the dice 20,000 times, you can expect roughly 1000 successful 20 rolls. So what's the difficulty?
So there it is - 400 billion whats?
logical muse
LogMu
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Yes, apparently it's true that you once visited a psychic and that she told you those things. And yes, I have heard of other people visiting psychics.
You just don't get it, do you? Whatever individual is under discussion could say the exact same thing.
Blondin
Muse
Someone has to...
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
That's what I said -- there's no contradition. But the others are right. The "I" who was born is just a tiny speck of wall. The dart got thrown and landed on me. Whilst I might be tempted to draw a bullseye around myself and proclaim myself special and a result of God's divine dart-throwing abilities, it just isn't so. Different circumstances would have led to a different "me" proclaiming the very same thing. Maybe that guy would be smart enough not to do it from work. There's nothing fishy about any of it -- enough random processes lead to many outcomes which are seemingly mathematically improbable. In one sense, those outcomes are improbable -- if you sat at the beginning of the process and made a prediction, there's a near-certainty that you'd be wrong. In another sense, some outcome had to occur and the one that did happened to include "me" in it. So yay me.
This sounds like a misunderstanding of a point Richard Dawkins has often made; that in the case of any living individual (of whatever species), we can be 100% confident that his or her parents reproduced successfully at least once- and that the same is true of every ancestor right back through geological time to the earliest protoplasmic globule.
Had there been even one break in that reproductive chain, the individual we know would not exist. Viewed like that, each of us is phenomenally fortunate to be alive.
One might choose to imagine a hyperspace of all the possible people who might have come into being instead, then to calculate the actual number as a fraction of that. It's an illustration of an aspect of evolution, that's all. The lady in the OP has latched onto the idea , adapted it to suit her purpose and simply stuck a nice big number on it
Had there been even one break in that reproductive chain, the individual we know would not exist. Viewed like that, each of us is phenomenally fortunate to be alive.
One might choose to imagine a hyperspace of all the possible people who might have come into being instead, then to calculate the actual number as a fraction of that. It's an illustration of an aspect of evolution, that's all. The lady in the OP has latched onto the idea , adapted it to suit her purpose and simply stuck a nice big number on it
Interesting Ian
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No, you don't get it. That's entirely irrelevant.
Interesting Ian
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No that wouldn't happen because it is so astonishingly unlikely. We have to reject this story of our genesis.
Interesting Ian
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Yes that's right. And that value would be so incredibly close to zero that we need to reject the materialist story of our genesis.
Mojo
Mostly harmless
What makes you think you're special? As far as the impersonal universe, or evolution by natural selection is concerned, any individual would do. It doesn't have to be you; you just got lucky.
Of course it's relevant. I could say the same thing, so could anybody. Taken from the point of view before conception, any given combination of genes is highly unlikely. However, that is because there are very, very many possible viable combinations of genes, and we know that one of them will come to pass. No one combination is any more likely than any other, but one will happen. That's all.
The universe doesn't care about you, or me, or anybody else. I don't care if that makes you feel small, cold or unloved.
Jimbo07
Illuminator
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Perhaps because your consciousness is merely an illusion foisted upon you by your body.
If memories can be destroyed with physical brain damage, perhaps there really is nothing that makes us us.
Of course, I think wandering down these roads is what cause delphi_ote to take off. How many threads have dealt with personality, consciousness, etc.?
Z
Variable Constant
See, it's like this: if I throw a coin into a circle, what's the chance it's gonna land on any side? Well, damn near one. (It might land on the edge...)
If I toss a handful of coins onto the table, with a four-inch circle drawn on it, what's the chance a coin will land in it? Pretty good, probably. Less than the example above, though.
If I toss a handful, what's the chance the coin that lands in the circle is a penny? S'pose it depends on what change I have, but surely much, much smaller than the above.
And that the penny lands face up? Smaller still.
But if I toss the coins, and a penny lands face-up in the circle, is that miraculous? Not overly.
Picture your life as being the result of trillions upon trillions of coin-tosses with millions of available circles. Even though the chance of your series of coins landing where they did may seem infinitessimally small, the chances that coins would land in the circles is still pretty good, comparably speaking.
If I take a deck of cards and toss it towards a seven-card outline, chances are that nothing interesting is going to land. But it is entirely possible that a royal flush will land right in the outlines. The chance may be infinitessimally small, but it might. Now, if those outlines were somehow designed to catch the cards... then something would land in those seven cards. It might be gibberish, or it might be a royal flush, or it might be a straight or a full house... but the chances of any one of them landing is exactly equal to the chance of any other one landing (barring the distribution of cards, of course). The fact that it happens to land as a royal flush is no more nor less significant than the chance it might have landed as crap.
With life, we're dealing with a series of low-probability events manifesting over time. But we're also dealing with an unimaginably vast universe and a nearly incomprehensible amount of time. Chances are, it was bound to have happened. Chances are, it's happened again somewhere.
In a vast universe, any non-zero chance could manifest. In an infinite one, it would have to manifest somewhere.
Here's a real mind-blower, Ian: over the course of time, if we assume infinite time and space, there's bound to be an infinite number of incarnations of 'you' (or, more correctly, someone just like you). Luckily for us, species tend to die off eventually.
If I toss a handful of coins onto the table, with a four-inch circle drawn on it, what's the chance a coin will land in it? Pretty good, probably. Less than the example above, though.
If I toss a handful, what's the chance the coin that lands in the circle is a penny? S'pose it depends on what change I have, but surely much, much smaller than the above.
And that the penny lands face up? Smaller still.
But if I toss the coins, and a penny lands face-up in the circle, is that miraculous? Not overly.
Picture your life as being the result of trillions upon trillions of coin-tosses with millions of available circles. Even though the chance of your series of coins landing where they did may seem infinitessimally small, the chances that coins would land in the circles is still pretty good, comparably speaking.
If I take a deck of cards and toss it towards a seven-card outline, chances are that nothing interesting is going to land. But it is entirely possible that a royal flush will land right in the outlines. The chance may be infinitessimally small, but it might. Now, if those outlines were somehow designed to catch the cards... then something would land in those seven cards. It might be gibberish, or it might be a royal flush, or it might be a straight or a full house... but the chances of any one of them landing is exactly equal to the chance of any other one landing (barring the distribution of cards, of course). The fact that it happens to land as a royal flush is no more nor less significant than the chance it might have landed as crap.
With life, we're dealing with a series of low-probability events manifesting over time. But we're also dealing with an unimaginably vast universe and a nearly incomprehensible amount of time. Chances are, it was bound to have happened. Chances are, it's happened again somewhere.
In a vast universe, any non-zero chance could manifest. In an infinite one, it would have to manifest somewhere.
Here's a real mind-blower, Ian: over the course of time, if we assume infinite time and space, there's bound to be an infinite number of incarnations of 'you' (or, more correctly, someone just like you). Luckily for us, species tend to die off eventually.
answer = # times I was born / # total times I could have been born.
Kinda hard to evaluate.
It would certainly be very , very small if we look at it from the position of "Why ME?"
But that's so only if we had tried to predict ME, from a point 3 billion years ago. We did not. Humans, including you and me, are being born at the moment, because humans only evolved recently and they bonk like bunny rabbits, so there are lots of them appearing. The ME aspect is purely incidental- a trick of self awareness. Had it not been you and me, it would have been someone else, whose self awareness would lead them to ask exactly the same question- "Why ME?"
Nobody asks why the bit of basalt near the golf course at Boyleston quarry just happens to exist here and now. (Except the guy whose ball bounced off it for a hole in one). Certainly it would have been just as improbable seen from 3 Billion years ago as the existence of either of us.
Does this lead us to reject the materialist story for Plate Tectonics?
Bob Klase
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It really seems to me that you need to reject any notion of intelligent thinking.... oh- never mind, you already did.
Angus McPresley
Muse
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No way! There are infinitely many more people who aren't born, than who are.
From this it follows that the odds of being born are effectively zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.[*]
[*] With a tip of the hat to Douglas Adams.
Rasmus
Philosopher
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Show me just 3, and bear in mind that you did say "people".