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On January 05 2013 12:13 sam!zdat wrote:Show nested quote +On January 05 2013 12:09 Reason wrote:
you'd have to flip a coin for longer than the universe has been around
crucial observation, good work. most people don't think about time Show nested quote +On January 05 2013 11:52 sam!zdat wrote:
How can I help? I believe that probability is ontologically meaningless. It's just a useful lie. You don't believe that. I absolutely do. edit: I don't believe there is actually any such thing as randomness. Only things that appear to be random, and because of computational intractability cannot be proved either way.
Why do you think this way?
When I think about it.... I'm familiar that every human made "random" thing isn't really random, it's just some kind of complex process that appears to be random.
Is this what you think is in fact true of everything?
Try to define random for me :O
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Well i can appreciate some absurd jokes but when you are writing fucking absurd plays there is something really wrong about it. That's like eating a burger with gold cutlery lol. I seriously believe that absurdism is the lowest kind of humor.
The worst thing is that when you are 16-17 you have no idea about the meaning of the words culture and art and hence you have to study this crap and write about it like if it is amazing. That's why it is degrading: you can feel it is garbage but if you have to study it in class it must be good right ? Deep stuff uh ? Must think extra hard uh ? Oh and i forget it is super fun too. You only understand why it is truly awful when you start to read some serious philosophy. If i could come back in time i would put my "litterature teacher" to shame and make her reconsider her miserable existence lol.
edit: Just to be clear Beckett is by far the worst kind of absurd humor i had to endure. At least Jarry usually uses some forms of mockery (a way better source of humor !) in his Ubu and Apollinaire probably lost it when he went to war so i can't really blame him lol.
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On January 05 2013 13:05 Boblion wrote:
Well i can appreciate some absurd jokes but when you are writing fucking absurd plays there is something really wrong about it. That's like eating a burger with gold cutlery lol. I seriously believe that absurdism is the lowest kind of humor.
The worst thing is that when you are 16-17 you have no idea about the meaning of the words culture and art and hence you have to study this crap and write about it like if it is amazing. That's why it is degrading: you can feel it is garbage but if you have to study it in class it must be good right ? Deep stuff uh ? Must think extra hard uh ? Oh and i forget it is super fun too. You only understand why it is truly awful when you start to read some serious philosophy. If i could come back in time i would put my "litterature teacher" to shame and make her reconsider her miserable existence lol.
so much hate, just because you can't appreciate it doesn't mean it's garbage. and the bold part doesn't put you in good light, the angry kid in you seems to have forgot to grow up for some parts.
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Hate is one of the main sources of humor 
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idk I think beckett is pretty crucial if you want to understand things
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Reason, the reason I don't believe in randomness is that I can't really figure out what that would be. So I can't define it for you. Can you?
I hold with Einstein that "God does not play dice"
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Well the problem of Beckett is that his works are nihilistic. The only thing it will make you understand is that everything is pointless and futile, or that there is nothing to understand. And then you end up like Kukaracha and you start to ask some dumb questions all the time lol.
I don't really believe in randomness too btw.
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I have to be a nihilist to enjoy reading a literary document par excellence of a man's personal encounter with the abyss of the Sublime?
edit: I mean of course enjoy is a strong word when it comes to Beckett. Appreciate.
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His Sublime seems like a vacuum to me :p
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yeah man it's the fucking abyss
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The real abyss is way more exciting tho. There are plenty of cool fishes. Don't know if i would call them sublime but a TV documentary about those life forms would be definitly more exciting for me than the tribulations of Vladimir and Estragon.
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idk man, I think that deep ocean stuff is only called 'the abyss' by metaphorical comparison to the actual abyss
edit: but yeah that shit's dope
edit: one of the main things about beckett is that you read it and then realize that there was absolutely no point in reading that, but parts of it were really cool
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Right time to draw up some conclusions for your thread instead of waffling on about Beckett and Absurdism.
Random is basically pure chance/no pattern. Sticking to coins, if you flip a coin 100 times, though heavily geared towards 50 heads flips & 50 tails flips, due to the undeniable ontological reality that is probability, most of the time it won't actually be 50/50.
If you flipped 100 coins 100 times and averaged all the results it would probably be pretty damn close to: 100*50 heads and 100*50 tails.
(assuming a fair coin)
Anyway the point is the distribution, the particular order in which these outcomes arrive are.... "random". There isn't some higher power or some absolutely kickass coinflipper exerting influence over whether it's a heads or a tails on any given flip, it's purely random whether the next flip is a heads or a tails even though we can be relatively certain they will flip roughly equally over time.
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I have to uninteresting things to add to this thread.
One is that probability is the most broing maths subject.
Two is that sam!zdat, you need to study a lot of quantic theory. I'm pretty sure your teachers would become crazy.
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Hey all! I'd like to preface my response by saying that I've never studied philosophy before, so please don't take me too seriously because I just wanted to post my thoughts and dive right into the discussion.
Well, I think that because the question was directed at the sleeping beauty, the answer does not matter. I mean, if the beauty has no memory of Monday because her memory was erased or because she slept through it, then there can be no answer that she can give right? She will have no proof, and should she decide to give an answer, it'd almost be as if she was acting as the coin itself. If she says the coin was tails, then the coin must be tails to her. But I'm only assuming that the philosopher does not give her any further hints. So I guess this is a little like sollipsism, but what do I know anyway?
This problem feels a little bit like the whole "if a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" problem, where the sound the tree makes is the tea session on Monday. We don't know whether it was, but we do know the end result - the tree fell. The beauty woke up on Tuesday.
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On January 06 2013 00:38 Azera wrote:
Hey all! I'd like to preface my response by saying that I've never studied philosophy before, so please don't take me too seriously because I just wanted to post my thoughts and dive right into the discussion.
Well, I think that because the question was directed at the sleeping beauty, the answer does not matter. I mean, if the beauty has no memory of Monday because her memory was erased or because she slept through it, then there can be no answer that she can give right? She will have no proof, and should she decide to give an answer, it'd almost be as if she was acting as the coin itself. If she says the coin was tails, then the coin must be tails to her. But I'm only assuming that the philosopher does not give her any further hints. So I guess this is a little like sollipsism, but what do I know anyway?
This problem feels a little bit like the whole "if a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" problem, where the sound the tree makes is the tea session on Monday. We don't know whether it was, but we do know the end result - the tree fell. The beauty woke up on Tuesday.
She is being asked to assess the statement and indicate how likely it is to be correct or incorrect.
It may be Monday when she is being asked the question, and her guess does not dictate what actually happened when the coin was flipped.
Yes if a tree falls and no one hears it it does make a sound, because that's how physics works.
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Ah! I didn't read the problem well enough. The chances of it being Monday makes the problem even more of a doozy.
Is there actually an answer to this or not?
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On January 05 2013 12:09 Reason wrote:
The answer is, there are infinitely more combinations of heads and tails than there are strings of just heads or just tails, therefore the probability of rolling just heads or tails for a century is so absurdly low that we're talking about you'd have to flip a coin for longer than the universe has been around to get that kind of a spree, that's why.
[...]
See how the second group got much bigger proportionally at 3 tosses? It's even more so at 4, then 5....
We call this exponential.
Alright, but what troubles me with the exponential factor is that it leads to infinity, which doesn't seem to make sense in my mind.
Just like that imaginary monkey will plagiarize Shakespeare some day, we can say that a series of 52594876 tails in a row is bound to happen. So how is it less likely to happen now than later? Isn't life itself an unlikely and yet very present occurrance?
And what is a probability anyway? Does it make any sense if we consider time as linear? And isn't the law of large numbers a weird conclusion? I'm not discussing the validity of it, but I'm struggling to understand what a probability is exactly.
On a sidenote, I may be confused but I think that it should be the most common state of a curious, sincere man, and I may seem childish but I'm really just asking questions (which is, in my books, a quality at all "abstract" times).
I just don't understand very well why people get angry at my curiosity, although they worship thinkers who are by definition people who ask questions too. Certainties can only get you so far, intelectually speaking - although it is probably a confidence boost and a valuable shortcut, true.
On January 06 2013 01:04 Reason wrote:
Yes if a tree falls and no one hears it it does make a sound, because that's how physics works.
It depends of our observation. If the phenomenon is perceived (but not heard), we can surely make a claim that there was a sound; however, if no one is around at all, then the tree doesn't exist by default, following the same pragmatic course of thought that leads to use the laws of physics as a conclusion.
(Because for any conceivable object, it seems that we consider by default that it does not exist until something else indicates that it does.)
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On January 06 2013 01:34 Kukaracha wrote:Show nested quote +On January 05 2013 12:09 Reason wrote:
The answer is, there are infinitely more combinations of heads and tails than there are strings of just heads or just tails, therefore the probability of rolling just heads or tails for a century is so absurdly low that we're talking about you'd have to flip a coin for longer than the universe has been around to get that kind of a spree, that's why.
[...]
See how the second group got much bigger proportionally at 3 tosses? It's even more so at 4, then 5....
We call this exponential. Alright, but what troubles me with the exponential factor is that it leads to infinity, which doesn't seem to make sense in my mind. Just like that imaginary monkey will plagiarize Shakespeare some day, we can say that a series of 52594876 tails in a row is bound to happen. So how is it less likely to happen now than later? Isn't life itself an unlikely and yet very present occurrance? And what is a probability anyway? Does it make any sense if we consider time as linear? And isn't the law of large numbers a weird conclusion? I'm not discussing the validity of it, but I'm struggling to understand what a probability is exactly. On a sidenote, I may be confused but I think that it should be the most common state of a curious, sincere man, and I may seem childish but I'm really just asking questions (which is, in my books, a quality at all "abstract" times). I just don't understand very well why people get angry at my curiosity, although they worship thinkers who are by definition people who ask questions too. Certainties can only get you so far, intelectually speaking - although it is probably a confidence boost and a valuable shortcut, true. Show nested quote +On January 06 2013 01:04 Reason wrote:
Yes if a tree falls and no one hears it it does make a sound, because that's how physics works. It depends of our observation. If the phenomenon is perceived (but not heard), we can surely make a claim that there was a sound; however, if no one is around at all, then the tree doesn't exist by default, following the same pragmatic course of thought that leads to use the laws of physics as a conclusion. (Because for any conceivable object, it seems that we consider by default that it does not exist until something else indicates that it does.)
Yes, life is extremely unlikely by our understanding but due to the size and age of the universe and from our limited understanding of it it seems reasonable there is actually a lot of life out there, unforunately possibly farther away than we will ever reach. To answer this sort of thing more precisely we need more information and better technology, and prior to actual verification I suppose we could never be certain.
It's just as likely for 52594876 tails to happen at any given time as it is to happen at another time, but it's a very unlikely occurrence. The thing with a coin is because it's 50/50 for each increasing flip in the series there are only two possible strings of outcomes that are pure tails or pure heads, and an exponentially increasing number of heads and tails combinations. We can say eventually one million tails in a row will be flipped for certain if : someone is endlessly flipping a coin and the universe lasts forever. The problem is someone isn't endlessly flipping a coin and the universe probably won't last forever.
That said, again, I could start flipping a coin right now and flip a million tails in a row, but it's so infinitely unlikely and statistics and probability when dealing with complex things like this (for example if a coin has two sides that are both heads we can say it's 100% certain that we'll never flip tails, but most of the time statistics and probabilities are used for more complicated questions, in fact that's pretty much the only time they're used and the very reason they were invented because you don't need maths to tell you that, it's common sense) can only tell you that say in a million years flipping the coin once per second the chances of flipping a million tails in a row would be something absurd like 0.0000000000000001%. I've just pulled those numbers out of my hat and in fact it's probably much, much less likely even than that.
Sorry, I wasn't really paying much attention to your comments and didn't mean to be offensive by calling you confused, I thought you were just asking deliberately difficult and (to me) nonsensical questions in order to confuse Boblion to amuse yourself. If you were being genuine you have my sincerest apology.
If no one's around then the tree still exists because you are referring to it. You've already stated that there's a tree.
You can't say "there's a tree in a forest but there's no one in the universe left alive to see it, therefore it doesn't exist" because you've already stated that it does.
Our extensive yet incomplete understanding of physics allows to make the statement "if there is a tree and it did fall, when it fell it made a sound" simply because that's the way the universe has been found to work.
You could I suppose say that since we don't have a complete understanding (and possibly never will) of how the universe works that we can only be 99.999999999% certain that the tree makes a sound when it falls, but every single piece of data we've ever accumulated indictates that it does and we've never found any data to the contrary, you could only claim a lack of absolute certainty as a result of absolute understanding, but it wouldn't really be useful in any way to do this.
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On January 06 2013 01:34 Kukaracha wrote:
Just like that imaginary monkey will plagiarize Shakespeare some day,
It probably won't, because the universe isn't big enough.
The library of Babel is way, way, way, way, way, way, way bigger than the universe.
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EPT
