[ExI] Belief in maths (was mind body dualism).

Mike Dougherty msd001 at gmail.com
Fri Jul 9 02:47:29 UTC 2010


2010/7/8 Robert Picone <rpicone at gmail.com>:
> At 1/2^98 (or 1 in 317 billion billion billion, (317 octillion?)), the odds
> of the next flip killing the observer are much much greater than the odds of
> it being a series of fair flips, the odds of any event that has ever
> occurred in the history of the universe reoccurring are much much greater
> than the chances of it being a series of fair coin flips..  Even though the
> chance is indeed nonzero, as with many other elements of this discussion,
> there is no reasonable reason to treat it any different than if it were
> zero.

how many consecutive fair flips does it take to make you suspicious?
three, five, 10?

Suppose the phenomenon is a sun dog on a spring morning.  How many
times do you have to see one before you realize what is happening?
What if you have no knowledge of the refractive index of water vapor
in the earth's atmosphere - what do you think is happening without
this crucial piece of information?  I think there are more phenomenon
in this category than in the obvious fair coin category.  I am curious
how the smart people on this list reflect on their own means of
knowing the truths they so reasonably believe  (or conversely how to
treat doubts so small that they are no different from not existing)

But maybe this is the minutiae of how a brain works and can't easily
be examined without feedback destroying the observation?




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