Author: Wylie Garvin
Date: 14:44:47 02/03/02
Go up one level in this thread
On February 03, 2002 at 13:37:15, Roy Eassa wrote: >On February 02, 2002 at 19:24:18, pavel wrote: > >>On February 02, 2002 at 18:49:58, Roy Eassa wrote: >> >>>On February 02, 2002 at 00:59:52, Dann Corbit wrote: >>> >>>>All events have some randomness associated with them. A light switch -- we flip >>>>it on and the light goes on (maybe). Maybe the switch goes bad (quite unlikely, >>>>but I had it happen in my house). Maybe the bulb burns out or is burned out. >>>>Maybe the power goes off right at that instant. Probably -- it goes on. But >>>>before the event has occurred or not occurred we really don't know which it will >>>>be (or something else altogether unplanned: There is no lightbulb in the >>>>socket). >>>> >>>>Not only do I think that our events are not predetermined, I think that >>>>(paraphrasing a wise saying): >>>>"Unforseen circumstances happen to us all." >>> >>> >>>Many of the people with whom I interact react to any low-probability event with >>>statements like "that's proof that God exists!" or "that's a real miracle!" I >>>sometimes say something like "since trillions of events occur every day, even >>>one-in-a-billion events are not infrequent," but of course I am wasting my >>>breath. Once a person is beyond a certain age, they are not likely (there I go >>>again) to begin seeing things in a probabilistic way. >> >> >>A-h! >>I guess I am not old enough ;) >> >>pavs > > >Can't be too _young_. The point was that most people become more-or-less >permanently set in their basic views by young adulthood, after which they're >unlikely to change. You know, I find it simpler to think of the world as a set of infinitely many universe states connected together in an infinite-branching tree (i.e. there are infinitely many parallel universes that exist, but at any given instant each of them could just be represented by one of the universe states). This takes the element of "probability" out of it completely; *all* possible events happen simultaneously, but just in different universes. =) Another advantage of this approach is that it's easier to rationalize a hard-determinist's "pre-determined" view of everything...so I disagree with pavs because I do think all events are pre-determined. But I also think we have free will.. ;) I don't think there's any conflict there, because EVEN IF every possible event is pre-determined, we will NEVER have complete information about what is going to happen, so we will always have the (illusion of?) the ability to influence outcomes. So if there are infinitely many universes, then why do we feel like we're only in one universe? I suppose that's an artifact of the way we experience consciousness; certainly, there could be a large (infinite) set of infintesimally different universes which we could not tell the difference between (from our tiny human point of view), so who is to say we are actually experiencing only one of these and not some huge (infinite) number of them simultaneously? For the same reason we only experience time in one direction (because of entropy), I would suppose we only experience it along one "path" through the state tree. I am confident that there are an infinite number of other Wylies experiencing an infinite number of other paths. After all, *something* has to account for quantum interference effects, and parallel universes seems to be the simplest explanation to me. And I always try and prefer the simplest explanation. Sorry for mindless rambling. If there are any physicists here I have probably offended them, apologies. <g!> wylie
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