[Merged] Immortality & Bayesian Statistics

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Akhenaten said:
Why has the expression "not playing with a full deck" become lodged in my consciousness?
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Akhenaten,
- Sorry.
- But that was too good a straight line to ignore... Maybe, you aren't playing with a full deck?
 
Jabba said:
Pixel,
- Correct.
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So the scientific consensus predicts lots of "decks full of aces" now as a result of events unfolding according to the laws of nature, and lots of "decks full of aces" is exactly what we have. So how is this evidence against the scientific consensus?
 
Jabba said:
Agatha,
- I contend that such poses serious reservations to the current, consensus, scientific position that each "self" is the result of entirely specific physical events and will exist for one finite life at most. Given that hypothesis, you shouldn't be here -- and especially, you shouldn't be here now.
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Your conclusion doesn't even attempt to follow your premises.

We're all special snowflakes (as indeed are real snowflakes) but just because something is very improbable does not mean it's impossible, and most importantly it does not mean that an impossible event is now likely. Nothing in your paragraph above specifies why I (or you, or anyone else) shouldn't be here, let alone why I shouldn't be here now.

Consider a beach, with billions of grains of sand. What is the chance that any one particular grain of sand ended up on that beach and no other, not swept away to the sea, not caught up in a dog's paw or a child's sandal and walked into a house? Very, very small. Really, infinitesimal but not zero.

Now one day on that beach, and a small child (let's call her Sally) plays on the beach and scoops up that grain of sand with thousands of others in her hand. After a good washing, just one grain of sand is left clinging to her wrist. Before all that happened, what was the chance of it being that particular grain of sand? Really, really tiny. Smaller than the chance above, but still not zero.

After it happened, the chance of that grain of sand being the one left on her wrist is 1.

We are no different from those grains of sand before we were born. Lots of random and semi-random events happened to create each one of us, but the same is true of everybody on the planet, all of us exist now, those who existed in the past as well as those who will exist in the future.

Nothing there has anything to do with our consciousnesses surviving the physical death of the brain. Your conclusions simply don't follow from your arguments.

Something (x) which has a very, very tiny probability of happening (though not zero probability) before it happens, which then happens, does not mean we can pick an impossible event (z) and suggest that because x happened and it was unlikely, z must therefore become not-impossible.
 
Jabba said:
- I can see now that a deck full of aces is misleading. I should have used a deck full of fives, or a deck full of eights -- or whatever.
- It's the cards all carrying the same number that would begin to suggest that this was not a normal deck. Them being all aces is basically irrelevant.
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But how is that analogous to humans evolving consciousness?
 
Jabba said:
Agatha said:
the probability of drawing any four cards from a fair deck if the card is replaced and the pack shuffled after each drawing remains at (1/52)^4
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But in the scenario he's describing, he's simply getting four cards in a row with the same face value. In which case, the odds of this happening are (1./13)^4 or 1 in 28,561,
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He specified AS, AD, AS, AH. But now, for some reason, it's a handful of fives, or eights. Why the face value of the card matters is yet to be determined; I don't think Jabba has explained why AS, AD, AS, AH is different from 5S, 5D, 5S, 5H.
 
Slowvehicle said:
Brian-M said:
I believe he specified 4 different aces...
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What he actually said was:

You sit down at the table and turn over the first card. It's an ace of spades. You place the ace back in the deck, shuffle the cards and once again, turn over the first card. This time, it's the ace of diamonds. Hmm. So, you try the same thing again. This time, you get the ace of spades again.
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That's only three different aces, he got the ace of spades twice.
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Slowvehicle said:
You are correct, and I have missed that all along. as I calculate, all that would do is change the stipulated hand...not the odds. Not so? 1/52^4?
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I took that to mean any combination of aces, not the specific combination in the example.

And even if he meant that exact same hand in that exact same order, it might be (1/54)^4 if the jokers are still in the pack. :)
 
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Brian-M said:
I took that to mean any combination of aces, not the specific combination in the example.

And even if he meant that exact same hand in that exact same order, it might be (1/54)^4 if the jokers are still in the pack. :)
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I am not so much disagreeing with you, as with what I suspect is Mr. Savage's premise, which seems to be that statistics proves 'god'. I guess...
 
Brian-M said:
I took that to mean any combination of aces, not the specific combination in the example.

And even if he meant that exact same hand in that exact same order, it might be (1/54)^4 if the jokers are still in the pack. :)
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I notice he's not rushing to clarify precisely what he meant...
 
Jabba said:
Toontown,
- Interesting point.
- I used to write unpublished science fiction short stories. An unwritten idea I had was about "civilization" after science proves immortality.
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Already been done by John Wyndham in Trouble With Lichen, and no doubt other authors too.
 
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