Comment by jerf

Comment by jerf 2 days ago

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.

A_D_E_P_T 2 days ago

> 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.

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jerf 21 hours ago

"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.

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Y_Y 2 days ago

> every low probability thing will "at some point"
This is the "ergodic hypothesis" and is not necessarily true.

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prmph 2 days ago

Then "God creating things" will also inevitably occur, right?

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- p_j_w 2 days ago
  
  It depends on the definition of God.
  
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snakeyjake 2 days ago

>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.

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tsimionescu 2 days ago

> 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.

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- snakeyjake 2 days ago
  
  [flagged]
  
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  tsimionescu a day ago
  
  I'm not saying that we'll see the all six combination if we actually threw a million dice. I'm saying that if we throw a million dice, we'll see some combination, and that should be just as amazing as the all six combination, because, whatever it is, it was monumentally unlucky to happen.
  My only point is that there is no way to say "events with probability < X are impossible in real life", for X > 0. For any probability value, it's trivial to construct an experiment that will be guaranteed to have an outcome whose probability is that low.
  
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daveguy 2 days ago

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."

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