I think we’ve done pretty good, for pure coincidence. I may still make the occasional grammatical slipup, but this is not even my native language.
Language - who’d have thought? From an explosion of raw energy to me sitting here typing about it - what are the chances of such an outcome? I’d bet money on this horse.
What I’m saying is - if this is possible from that, what is possible from this? Hard to grasp. Impossible to grasp. It’s a shame I’m not going to be around for another billion years or so. I should be able to find a way for that to be possible. I’m part of nature. I’m supposed to be inventive enough. Seriously, all philosophies wisdom that death is part of life and a source of great sweet richness aside, if you could live to be a billion, would you want it? I mean who cares about the Sun eating the Earth by that time. You’re gonna die anyway.
It’s just cowardice that we’ve not invented that potion. I’m not falling for this story of being grateful for what I am anymore. If the uiverse had been grateful for what it was when it was a giant blorb, I’d sure as hell not be grateful to it.
I read a story about a Kaukasian tribe where people generally lived to be around 250 years old. When they heard about the ‘proper’ average age, they started dying earlier. We should probably revise our standards.
I answered a question on Yahoo! Answers quite recently, to the extent of “Who wants to live forever?”. It appears most people, of the people who answered that question of course (which were quite a lot), did not want to live much longer than a century or so, because then they’d lose all their friends and they’d be “all alone”. Of course, when you live that long, even though there may be younger people around, those will not be able to relate to you a lot (though it may be asked whether one’s natural contemporaries are). It creates a pathos of distance, to speak with Nietzsche. And distance, or solitude, is more horrible to these people than death (which is in line with Nietzsche’s saying that solitude really probes whether one is made for life or for death).
I believe the notion that exceptional longevity would be deleterious to mental well-being or lead to social isolation is quite flawed unless of course that notion is applied to the individual alone. As the surrounding populace began to exceed 100, so too would all lineages fall in line.
Even in the event of an individual “out-living all he knows” or those with whom he grew up, assuming fantastic health and a continued social vigor, there is simply no reason new friends cannot be made, one’s great-grands cannot become one’s new family.
It is called… Change. Loss. New birth. And each of these challenges is part and parcel of any lifetime, no matter its longevity.
No, the chances of this outcome are one in an infinite number. The key is to remember that it’s not amazing it happenedthisway, because it had to happen some way.
We’re all alone anyways. I would love to live to the ripe old age of 1,000,000,000 years. Assuming I was in vigorous health- not a broken down old man doomed to spend 999,999,950 years in a nursing home.
BTW, the sun should have at least a couple billion years of useful (to us) life still.
Dork, people are expressing chance here, I believe, as a percentage of likelihood, not debating the likelihood itself. Therefore, it must be expressed as a percentage unless you want to change the fundamentals of our discussion. And that percentage of course is the full 100%. The fact that “it happened some way” merely proves space-time came into existence “some way” and reflects no likelihood on anything else.
GuyNamedJohn, I disagree. The chances of things turning out this way, even as a percentage, is ridiculously small. There was no 100% chance it would turn out this way. I understand that it IS this way, but it could have been an infinite number of other ways. Simply because it already happened doesn’t change the likelihood of it happening.
Let’s suppose you are flipping a coin. There is 50% chance it is heads, and 50% chance it is tails. If it lands on heads, you cannot say that it was a 100% chance it would land on heads, simply because we know the results of the coin flip. The odds were always 50/50, they don’t change once the result materializes.
Then that is where we can disagree. The fact that an event has actualized forever changes its potential of happening. In the coin-toss example, the materialization altars the potential: What has now become (100%) is no longer in the realm of chance (<100%).
But in that case you could argue that beforehand, the chance is allready 100%, but you simply don’t know it yet.
Change is a weird thing. A friend of mine is amazing with dice - we were playing Risk once, and he said; shit, I feel a bad streak coming, this is going to be scary - and he rolled three ones for eleven cosecutive times.
But of course that’s not pure chance.
By the way, I think the fact that statistics are so neat and clean - of 1000 tosses almost exactly half will be heads - means that there really is no such thing as randomness. all is orderly in the end, only it apears random because it’s fragmented. If there really would be randomness it would be as likely to throw 1000 out of 1000 times heads as it would to be throw 500 out of 1000 heads.
everything didn’t have a start, and it won’t have an end. The only factor in my novice mind could have been sometime in the infinite lifespan of the universe is, maybe, newton’s basic laws for how objects behave, which arranged things in the only way they possible; this way.
It seemed like a good idea while I was writting it, but after I finished and reread it, it seemed like jibberish. Does anyone know what I’m talking about?
I think the mistake being made is the subjective/objective confusion.
Subjectively, we percieve chance and odds and randomness, and there are endless examples of this.
Objectively, everything is as it should be. When you flip that coin, an infinite history of physics is being acted out. The outcome can no more be altered than the (objective) laws of physics themselves. This is a hard concept to grasp: the movement of the coin, connected via physics, to the big bang and beyond.
It is the objective perspective that sees things as unalterable.
So I would say that those arguing that the odds are “100%” are speaking about objective reality, and those saying that the odds are “0.01-to-the-negative-trillionth-power” are speaking about our subjective perception of reality. Both are correct within their context!
Then this would be different than discussing odds or probability. Odds and probability don’t change. Just because an outcome is actualized doesn’t change the odds or probability of it happening.
I am responding to what the chances of this happening are. For the odds, probability, or chance of the outcome being what it has become, it is an almost infinite number.
I am talking about odds and probability in the mathematical sense of the word, which I guess would be objective membrain.
