Jump to content

Just Because I Am Tired Of Arguing...


Recommended Posts

Interesting question. First to the people who said that he should already be spending time with his family you fail to see that you would have alot more time available if you no longer had to save for a future that isnt there or pay off debt so naturally he would have more time in which he could spend with his family.now to the actual question i would try and complete my list of life goal. In college i made a list of goals i want to complete before i die. Alot of it involves travel but there is alot of other goals like:1. see the world finals of 6 different sports ( cricket,soccer , what ever sport available since they are mostly 4 yr cycles,I hope it is an olympic year) 2. write a book 3. direct a film 4. learn how to do basic gymnastics, fence 5. get a black belt in a martial art 6. perform stand up comedy 7. become a GM of chess( IM would be good too)8. Represent my country in a sport9. Build a computer from scratch (mother board to software) i would more Spend time with the people i like and try to meet some really interesting/famous people. there are other goals but they would take longer to complete then the year ( defend someone on the charge of murder would require a law dregree little lone the experience ect.) Alot if not all of these goals seem not that important but when i made this list i thought 1. there is a heaven and if i make it then i would be on the same par as popes and such and it wouldnt of mattered if i spent my life becomeing pope or performing stand up.( there is no layers to heaven either you make it or you dont) 2. there is nothing and nothing matters . I just think the above things would give me a good deal of pride and such and since you only have a year left the best you can hope for is alot of those emotions. Well thats my 2 cent/Life

Link to post
Share on other sites
  • Replies 54
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

who it might have been is irrelevant because it WAS me. again, i'm not talking about myself as a random sample from a pool of individuals (not talking about "any given hand" in your poker analogy). i'm talking about my birth as a specific unique occurrence that has already happened.think of it from a block-time external perspective. if history is laid out with humanity expanding and colonizing other planets etc and trillions of humans being born, and i specifically must be a *unique* human born to a random set of parents at a random time in human history, how statistically likely is it that i would be born so close to the beginning when only a very small percentage of humans that will ever be born have been born?
I had never considered this before. Very cool.
Link to post
Share on other sites
Very cool.... maybe, but also wrong. There is no statistical signifance to a person being here now, being here now......
You're talking something like the weak Anthropic Principle, right.I'll try to interpret Crow's idea a little for you:Assume that we are God (or an angel or something) and we have a jar of souls. When we take a soul out and put it into our life machine, the soul will randomly go into the body of a baby born at some point in all of human history (we live outside of time, for the record). So, let's say we start with one soul, put it into our life machine, and it becomes a baby at some point in history. Now, let's imagine that we know how long after the emergence of humans this person that we just created lived. Now, also imagine that based on this information, we were attempting to determine how long human beings will last.Assume that a soul has an equal chance of being a human at any time throughout human history (weighted by the amount of humans at that time, of course). Let's try two assumptions:1) Assume that the population of humans is constant throughout all of human history. Based on the one soul we learned about, we would estimate that human kind lives twice as long as the distance into human history that our soul entered (on average). Of course, we are only basing this on one soul, so the statistics are somewhat meaningless.2) Assume human kind grows exponentially in population. We would then expect that our soul entered closer to the end of humanity (since there are more people toward the end of humanity.The real point is that the sample size is too small to have any meaning. One can't learn much about a random variable by only performing one test.This argument is similar to saying that there is only one planet with life on it because in our one sample (ourselves) as well as the sample of the rest of humanity, all of our souls end up on Earth. Of course, this is wrong again due to the Anthropic Principle.
Link to post
Share on other sites

not sure adding the concept of souls as an analogy is helpful lol. i think it's more useful to just say that it's a given that my physical self-awareness WILL be switched on at some random point in human history (otherwise i wouldn't be able to ask the question obviously).for another approach consider the statistical idea broken into 2 scenarios. 1. humanity is peaking now and the majority of people who will live are born now or in the relatively recent past/future. a graph of human population with a horizontal time axis could look like a funnel starting from a point and opening to the right. the opening would be at a relatively narrow angle at first, then becoming angled much wider in the last 200 years or so. the opening then constricts (or closes completely) in the relatively near future. on this graph when my consciousness is switched on at a random place within the funnel, it happens to be at an utterly unremarkable point somewhere in the middle of the widest area. there is nothing special about the timing of my place in human history. i am alive during a stretch of time when the majority of people who will ever live are alive.2. humanity will colonize other planets and greatly expand and exist for millions or billions of years, and the vast, vast majority of people who will live have yet to be born. in this case again think of human population as a graphed right-opening funnel. in this scenario instead of my consciousness happening to switch on at an unremarkable place somewhere in the large middle area the funnel, it happens to do so close enough to the starting point of the funnel that it may as well be AT the starting point. i am alive at a VERY remarkable place in human history. i happen to be among the first < .0001% (or whatever) of humans that will exist.given that i must be born at a random time in either scenario, which is more likely? that it would be at an unremarkable place somewhere in the middle of the funnel, or at the most remarkable place possible - right at the point of the funnel? (i realize there is a lot of room in between the two scenarios, but extremes illustrate the point).as i said i assume there may be reasonably valid philosophical ways to refute this reasoning, but you guys aren't there yet. i don't see how the anthropic principal helps. it only disallows using these ideas to prove anything as absolutes. obviously no matter how unlikely it is, i MAY in fact be one of the first .0001% of humans - the anthropic principal implies someone has to be. however it says nothing about the likelyhood that it is *me* in particular that is. from an external perspective it does not address probability in this case.

Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now

Announcements


×
×
  • Create New...