Suppose someone -- let's call him Peter -- were kidnapped, and the kidnapper is a psychopath and sets up some explosion device that is tied to Peter. The device is programmed to shortly generate 10 random numbers. If the numbers so generated are anything apart from 10 zeros, it will instantaneously explode, and hence kill Peter.
So Peter thinks, well this is it then. The chance of me surviving is 1/10^10 or 1 in 10 billion. However, much to his delight, the contraption duly displays the 10 zeros!
So he says to the psychopath "you had me worried there, you must have programmed it to display 10 zeros!".
The psychopath responds, "no no, not at all! It was completely random and you're just incredibly lucky. Don't forget, if it had been any other combination of numbers, you would be dead and wouldn't be here to think about it. You can only live in a world, and hence contemplate your situation, where 10 zeros come up.
Of course, this sounds preposterous and we would surely conclude the psychopath is lying. But does his argument have merit?
This is not just an idle question. It has direct applicability to the fine-tuning of the physical constants of our Universe. Or indeed the fact we were actually born rather than any of the countless potential human beings that could have been born in our place. Or the fact that the human race came into being due to all the improbable events that were required e.g. the meteor impact 66 million years ago etc.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Whodunit
People constantly boast about anticipating the "big reveals" or "whodunnits" in novels and films. But, these big reveals...
-
Just reading the following article: 20 years ago, we were all set for a Y2K disaster that wasn’t Article says: Patti Duncan stockpiled ...
-
Many philosophers and scientists have some truly bizarre beliefs. The denial of consciousness (as we understand this term) is the most bizar...
-
Ugh . . I had an important email that someone had sent me, so I foolishly imagined that selecting the archive option would ensure I don'...
-
So Liz Truss has announced her resignation as PM. The shortest serving PM ever -- just 44 days as PM. And something I predicted before sh...
-
I bought the Lenovo D32-45 PC Monitor 10 days ago (it's not available on Amazon). It cost £169.00 which I believe is about the cheapest...
-
All aspects of consciousness -- whether pains, perceptual experiences, thoughts and so on -- can be changed, attenuated, modulated, even ...
-
According to this article Greenland is the country with the world's highest suicide rate. From 1900-1930 Greenland had a suicide rate ...
-
I was just thinking. Suppose we could go into the future exactly 1 million years from now. What would we see? I would speculate that our t...
-
There's 2 possibilities: a) This is the only life there is. When we die we simply cease to exist. Our lives and the Universe are, in a...
-
Someone on twitter/X asked the following question: A mathematician emerges from a cave, hands you the photo below, and asks "Will a c...
No comments:
Post a Comment