On 12 November 2013 13:03, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > On 11/11/2013 3:39 PM, LizR wrote: > > On 12 November 2013 09:37, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > >> On 11/11/2013 11:21 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote: >> >> You find you every day, according to you, every day should not happen, >> only being 10¹⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰ is likely, it's just >> non-sense, your life is not random sampled, yesterday happen before today >> and before tomorrow. That doesn't make today less likely than tomorrow. >> >> >> Sure, but it makes the interval (0,75) less likely than the interval >> (75, inf). >> >> Unless you're Billy Pilgrim from "Slaughterhouse 5" this argument > doesn't make sense, beause you are forced to sample your days in ascending > order. > > > But what does that have to do with the probabilities? A "sample" is when > I ask myself, how probable is it that my age is what it is today. I don't > have to do this everyday. In fact I'm very unlikely to have done it before > age 4. So I don't see why sequence is determinative. ISTM is only implies > that tomorrow will be less likely than today (since I may not ask tomorrow; > possibly because I'm dead). >
Sequence is determinative because that's how the universe works. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time. That's the second law doing its thing, and unless you've got very good reason to think otherwise, you shouldn't be surprised that it is. All we're saying is that you should be unsurprised to find yourself living your life in ascending order. You have to pass through your current age at some point, unless you die first, and you should expect to do so before you reach a greater age. If at your current age you ask how probable it is that you are your current age, the answer is 1. If you're quantum immortal then you will have the same probability every time you ask yourself that question into the indefinite future. You are always 100% likely to be your present age! > > Suppose you're Benjamin Button. For him would it be OK to say it's > surprising I'm only 75? > I don't know anything about Benjamin Button. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
