Comment by snakeyjake
2 days ago
Low probabilities become certainties with billions of tests per year over hundreds of millions of years.
2 days ago
Low probabilities become certainties with billions of tests per year over hundreds of millions of years.
A common belief, but manifestly false. Probabilities tend to combine exponentially, and that defeats our polynomial universe.
Or, to put it another way, it does not matter how many times you try to roll a million fair dice and get them to all come up six. It doesn't matter if the entire observable universe does nothing but that for the entire time from the start of the universe to the heat death end. It will still never happen.
Probabilities can easily be "larger" than our entire universe considered across both space and time. It isn't even a particularly remarkable thing to encounter such a probability.
> polynomial universe
That's the mistake, right there.
Surely you realize that the universe could well be infinite -- and, to all appearances, is in any case not bounded in time. As such, every low probability thing will "at some point" occur. Thus the repugnant conclusion: Boltzmann Brains. But also Boltzmann planets, Boltzmann galaxies, and whatever else can occur will occur.
"Could well be" is just a "could well be". It is not actually an argument, because there is an infinite range of "could well be". It "could well be" that we exist because the Great Simulator simply put us here, but you can only distinguish between outcomes based on actual observations.
If you want to invoke "well, things just happen because there's so many rolls of the metaphorical dice", your logical number of rolls is determined by the observable universe. When you step into hypotheticals beyond that, you must step into all of them all at once, not just pick one, smoke some hash and goggle at the one possibility you picked out. That's the mistake people make. And there's so many "well, it could be..." that in effect they cancel each other out and you can't do any logic on them.
> every low probability thing will "at some point"
This is the "ergodic hypothesis" and is not necessarily true.
Then "God creating things" will also inevitably occur, right?
1 reply →
>you try to roll a million fair dice and get them to all come up six.
That is not a low probability event; that is an impossibility.
I think the problem here is that you think I am a digital electronic computer. I am not.
I am a human being.
I do not now, have never, and will never care about the technically possible I only care about the actually possible.
As a human, I know that six to the power of one million is impossible. Not to mention that rolling one million dice is absurd.
But as a human I also know that the chemical reaction needed to spark life isn't a six to the power of one million proposition.
I don't know what it is but it ain't that because it's been done, at least once.
edit: It's not absurd, rolling one million dice.
The heaviest verifiable weight ever lifted by a human being is 2422.18kg.
A 4mm die is 0.4g. Conceivably a contraption could be built by which a human could "roll" several million dice using the strength of their entire body.
Now I kinda want that to happen.
> As a human, I know that six to the power of one million is impossible.
This is plain wrong. If you roll a million dice, anything that comes up has the exact same probability. We think all 6 is special because it holds some meaning to us, but it is exactly as likely as any other result. So any result has a probability of 6^1M to happen. And yet, one of those 6^1M configurations will happen with probability 1.
4 replies →
The probability of life and all the steps that lead to it is obviously not more infinitesimal than all potential actions of all the molecules in the universe over time. It happened on Earth and it "only" took 150-650 million years after water formed on the planet. We just don't know how much more likely it is than "so rare we are lucky to be the only ones."
For a gambler, yes, but for a biological system? Stuff falls apart, it's like any progress continually gets wiped.