The claim that ideas become more probable because people can invent them fast was nonsense when you first posted it, and it;s still nonsense now. I have proven that. Repeating the same erroneous assertion doesn’t make it any less silly.
If you can quote a single example where I quoted you out of context, then please do so.
And you are right, the idea that ideas become more probable because people can invent them fast is still just as silly.
Absolute bollocks. You clearly do not understand probability at all. I used an extreme example to help you understand, and you still don;t get it.
Let’s use a simple, fixed probability: 0.5. 50/50. 1/2. That is a fixed, finite probability.
So, since we have a finite probability, you can tell me at what number of trials (ie planets) that probability will equal 1. You claimed that the event occurs an infinite number of times, so it must at some point reach unity. So tell me, at what value this occurs?
Of course you can not do so, because it never even approaches unity. The value, while provably finite, only ever approaches unity, it never reaches unity.
Therefore it is incorrect to claim that such an event *will *or *must *occur an infinite number of times, despite having a finite, fixed probability.
QED.
I await your mathematical demstration that this is incorrect, or a cite to support your claim.
Because you told us several times that there is no evidence. I am not quoting you out of context,here is your entire paragraph:
“So, show me where I said that the evidence supports the conclusion that extraterrestrial life exists?”
So you tried to weasel away from this position by claiming that you never said that the evidence supports the conclusion that extraterrestrial life exists.
That is what so hard. Your position is so riddled with errors and you weasel so much that you end up explicitly denying a position, then embracing it, then denying it. That is what makes it so hard. Nobody understands what your position is.
Now that you are once again claiming that the evidence exists, i will simply repeat the rebuttal that I used the first time you made that claim. The rebuttal that you tired to refute by claiming that you never said there was any evidence for such a conclusion:
By such standards of “evidence” the Earth was visited by ancient astronauts.
Grasping at straws is not evidence.
You said three things in the post that kicked off this nonsense. All three of them have now been proven to be nonsense.
The two highlighted sections are mutually contradictory. A highly evolved entity cannot be primitive, and a primitive entity can not be highly evolved. Used correctly the two terms are mutually contradictory. Used incorrectly this statement is meaningless..
Either way, the statement is incorrect.
No, it doesn’t. This is a total non-sequitur.
Of course I do recognise the difference. If you can provide any evidence at all to the contrary then please do so. If you cannot, then please can the strawmen.
As I clearly and explicitly stated at length, it is Half Man Half Wit’s argument that can not make such a distinction, not mine.
Of course I do not accept it. That is total non-sequitur. Probability is totally unrelated to the number of competing hypotheses.
Since you have twice claimed that that p increases as the number of competing hypotheses increases, please provide evidence for this claim.
No, it does not. This just a bald assertion with no basis in fact. We have no idea what p is.
I am not arguing for an infinitesimal p. I have always been arguing that we have no idea what p is. I can fall anywhere between unity and 1/infinity.
I am not satistfied of that. Why should we be satisfied of that? Because you say it repeatedly? Because you claim that p is proportional to the number of competing hypotheses?
What evidence do you have that will satisfy us that p is closer to 1 it is to 1/10^900? Because you just told us that we should be satisfied that p is closer to 1 it is to 1/10^900?
But we are not discussing evolution. We are discussing the conditions necessary for life to arise.
So tell us, what evidence do you have that will satisfy us that p of a planet permitting the development of proto-life is closer to 1 it is to 1/10^900?
Except that you have already conceded that viruses have to be much more complex than a cell in order to evolve. For a virus to evolve, it must first itself evolve form a pre-existing cell. IOW for a virus to exist, the system must evolve both a functioning cell, and a virus. That is a much more complex and derived system than a system in which a virus has not evolved.
Claiming that a virus can evolve with something less complex than a cell is simply factually incorrect.
I sense a bit of confusion. You write of the probability “approaching” unity, but allow for an infinite number of trials. Strictly speaking, however, the probability only approaches one because infinity isn’t an actual number (i.e. an infinite number of trials is impossible). When someone speaks intuitively of the probability equaling one with an infinite number of observations, she means nothing else than that the probability approaches one as the sample size grows without bound.
What of the contentious statement, that an event x will occur an infinite number of times over an infinite number of trials when P(x) = 0.5? Assume it were false; we run an infinite (or extraordinarily huge) number of trials and x occurs n times. Then the estimated probability of x is 0 with great precision. In fact, this event – x occurs a finite number of times – has measure zero.
In other words, the probability that x occurs infinitely often is one. Which is intuitively quite the same thing as saying that x occurs infinitely often. Meaning: if p were positive, even if very, very, very small, a sufficiently huge number of planets would still imply a very high probability of life existing somewhere.
Kind of surprising you never heard that. A lot of people think slaves built the pyramids, and that the Israelites were slaves in Egypt, and so therefore they must have built the pyramids.
But you’re right, almost all of the pyramids, including the most famous ones, were built a thousand years or more before the date that Biblical scholars (and I really want to put that in quotes) assign to the Israelite captivity in Egypt. And there is not a scrap of evidence outside the Bible that such a captivity actually occurred.
For primitive read less complex - or do you dispute that a virus is less complex than a vertebrate?
Really? Something that can be explained by any of a number of reasonable scientifically plausible hypotheses is not more probable than something that can only be explained by the use of fairies and pixie dust?
You brought up myths as if they were equivalent to plausible hypotheses.
Only if you perversely misinterpret it.
See above. Of course we are only discussing relative probabilities, not actual ones.
This is a heuristic, like Occam’s Razor. If you asked me for evidence of that, I’d be stumped too.
What’s the probability that I will get wet when I walk down the street? We don’t know exactly, but if possible ways of getting wet included rain, a neighbor’s sprinkler, or a kid with a water balloon won’t it be more probable than if I had none - or perhaps only that someone drinking water when he gets raptured May 21 spills it on me.
If you claim total ignorance it is hard to argue. But you have given no reasons at all why life should be very improbable given what we know about it and the early conditions of the earth - besides the fairly well discredited moon hypothesis. If you really don’t know you shouldn’t be arguing one way or another, but it seems to me that you are either supporting the infinitesimal position or claiming that p is infinitesimal because you can’t figure out what it is.
How do you define life? If at some stage a non-living reproducing thing becomes living, then evolution definitely is involved.
I’m not a biologist, but if and when someone comes up with a simple self-replicating molecule, composed of smaller molecules that are prevalent in the early earth, we would be able to compute an approximation of the probability fairly easily.
What the hell are you talking about? Here is a page discussing virus origins. While some represent RNA in cells that mutated and split away, some, such as retroviruses, come from long, long ago.
This is utter bilge. Are you claiming that evolution runs only from the more complex to the less complex? Cite please, and not from a creationist source.
We certainly know that less complex things (as measured by the amount of DNA) can evolve from less complex ones.
At the stage where a non-living reproducing thing becomes living, we are no longer discussing the conditions necessary for non-living reproducing things to become living.
No, we would not. This is yet another non-sequitur.
Yes, and as that page clearly states they are "presumed to have “degenerated” …from cellular organisms, or else are “a living relic of the enzyme that enabled the switch from a presumably RNA-based genetics to DNA-based heredity.”
In short, all viruses required a pre-existing cell from which it evolved.
No, it is in fact perfectly correct.
No, why would you think that?
I am claiming what I claimed: that system that requires a complex cell in addition to a viral entity is, by definition, more complex than a system that requires only the complex cell.
I am astounded that you dispute this tautological truth. Any system comprising A + B is, by defintion, more complex than a system comprising only B.
Exactly, they evolved *from *them. They could not have evolved from something less complex than them, as you claimed.
I simpler entity A evolves from more complex organism B, and remains entirely dependent upon B, then you can not use that as evidence that A can evolve without reaching the level of complexity of B. Yet that is what you are trying to do.
That is not what primitive means. You can say “For leg, read tail” as much as you like, a dog still doesn’t have 5 legs.
A virus as inert chemicals is not as complex as a vertebrate as inert chemicals. But we are not discussing chemical composition, we are discussing origins.
Originating a vertebrate virus is much more complex than originating a vertebrate. It can not fail to be, since it requires a vertebrate as one of the starting ingredients but also requires the virus itself, which production of the vertebrate does not.
As I said when you first introduced this red herring, an eyeball also evolves and it is also less complex than an elephant. That does not allow you to claim that an eyeball is an example of an evolving unit that might give rise to an elephant. Viruses are no different.
Do you really believe that? Because I reject it out of hand as ridiculous.
Yes, and by the standard that was being applied they are equivalent. If you believe otherwise then demonstrate how they are not equivalent according to that standard.
No, inevitably if interpreted literally and faithfully.
And you are unable to provide evidence for the claim as it applies to relative probabilities. It is an unsupportable assertion no matter how you try to apply it.
I can find you thousands of references to support Ockhams razor. You can not find me one reference to support this claim. That is because millions of people accept the utility of Ockham’s Razor, and nobody supports this claim. This is something you just made up, and it is totally unsupportable.
No of course it bloody well won’t be more probable. That is a ridiculous claim. :eek:
You are seriously arguing that in a world where the only living people have been locked indoors all their life and never seen rain, the chances of a rock getting wet are less than they are in an identical world where people live outdoors.
This is nonsense. The number of people who believe in the existence of rain doesn’t increase the chance of it raining. This is bald magical thinking, and I can not believe that you are seriously arguing for it.
The universe does not care one whit whether everybody is aware of the concept of rain, or nobody, or even if people do not exist at all. in a world where the only idea you have about getting wet is the rapture, the probbailityof it raining this afternoon is exactly the same. Your thoughts do not cause the rain.
Lets take a simple example. 500 years ago nobody knew that finches nested on the Galapagos islands. There did not exist a single idea that the event existed, and hence no idea that finch eggs could get broken. Now billions of people know about this event. There exist all sorts of ideas about how eggs could get broken: falling out of nests, being bitten by predators etc.
So you must believe that the chances of a Galapagos finch egg getting broken is higher now than it was in 1500. Right? After all, there are indisputably more ideas about how it could happen. And to paraphrase you:
What’s the probability that an egg will get broken when it is laid in a nest? We don’t know exactly, but if possible ways of getting broken included falling from the nest, being eaten by a predator, or being baked in a wildfire won’t it be more probable than if I had none?
Do you really not see how ludicrous this contention is?
This whole line of argument is mind boggling.
It is impossible to argue, because we *are *in a state of total ignorance. We have a sample of one, and that sample must be rejected because it is biased. So we have zero degrees of freedom. Zero degrees of freedom is total ignorance
For the third time: I am not arguing that life should be very improbable. I have never argued that life should be improbable. I have stated multiple times that I do not believe that life should be very improbable.
When I repeatedly and clearly disavow a position, and you keep trying to attribute it to me in every post, that is a strawman and it proves that your argument is worthless. You can;t establish the truth through the use of logical fallacies.
So if we really don’t know, nobody should point out that you are promulgating ignorance when you claim that we really *do *know? And know with *n *degrees of certainty? Even though what you say *must *be wrong, because we really *don’t *know what the truth is, much less what the certainty level is?
In other words you are saying that so long as we *really *don’t know what the truth is, you should be able to state that the truth is “A”, because we *really *don’t know that you are wrong?
You do know that this is a textbook argument from ignorance, right? This board is supposed to be about fighting ignorance, not constructing arguments base don it.
If we really don’t know I should be arguing vigorously against people who claim that they do know. More especially when those claims are built unsupportable and built upon logical fallacies.
If that is how it seems to you then you have no idea how science, statistics or elementary logic works. This is a blatant false dilemma. I am not supporting either of those things and have stated that quite clearly.
Your entire argument has now become based upon this strawman attack. You can’t support the claims that you have made, despite my requests that you do so, so you are forced to resort to attributing to me a position that I have specifically disavowed.
As such I think we can declare that your argument has been soundly refuted. It is baseless, unsupportable and reliant upon logical fallacies.
… but it’s all true. With probability one, as the number of trials grows without bound the number of occurrences of x grows without bound. That’s an issue of mathematics and there simply isn’t any way around it. Which isn’t to say that x occurring zero times is impossible – just incredibly unlikely as the number of trials continues to increase.
Which is exactly what I said: It is incorrect to say that x *must *occur or *will *occur. It never reaches unity and there is no sample size at which the event must occur. The repeated claims that the event *must *occur in an infinite universe is incorrect.
Or to put it another way, if the probability of life arising on any other planet is X, the probability of life not arising on any other planet is 1-x. As the number of trial rises, the probability of there being no other life out there also increases and approaches infinity. And if the probability is less than 0.5 then the chances of an infinite universe having life on only one planet is actually *higher *than the chances of life on multiple planets.
If an infinite number of trials must produce an infinite number of any possible outcome, then the universe must contain an infinite number of Hubble volumes with no life.
You exhibit some misunderstanding of the subjective nature of probability in this discussion. What’s the probability that an egg will be broken when laid in a nest? Ignoring quantum indeterminancy the probability is either one or zero – any particular egg will either fall or not fall. We use the language of probability because we haven’t access to all the information relevant for a deterministic prediction.
If we can’t think of any theories about why the egg might break, this is possibly relevant information; we guess that the probability of breakage is perhaps lower than half (or else we should be able to think of something). As we gather theories about possible breakage, gauging the likelihood of each new scenario, we continue to update our guess. Is the nest shallow? This makes falling out possible; we update our guess. Are there lots of predators around? This makes being eaten possible; the value of our guess increases.
You seem to be arguing that we should ignore the information provided by theories relevant to the origin of life.
No. He’s arguing that reasonable guesses in each scenario may differ. If all living people have been locked indoors and have never seen rain, they may have a perfectly valid prediction that rain will not occur. Would you argue that a civilization who lived underground and had no experience with, or knowledge of, weather patterns should compute the same probability of getting wet on the surface as our civilization?
But this is beside the point. “x must occur” and “x fails to occur with infinitesimally small probability” are colloquially the same statement. If I drop a ball, am I wrong to say that it must fall to the ground? There is nonzero probability that something else interferes. Nevertheless it is a perfectly valid and coherent thing to say; to deny it is pedantry.
This is true but is it relevant? Once we speak of infinities, with probability one there will be life elsewhere in the universe. If that is misleading then we shouldn’t speak of infinities.
Ok, let’s try some real numbers instead of infinity.
Probability of life arising on a non-Earth planet .1 (less than 0.5)
Number of non-Earth planets in galaxy 50 billion
Expected number of planets with life 5 billion
I submit that, given these values, it is far less likely to have 0 non-Earth planets with life than 1 or more non-Earth planets with life. I will grant you that it is more likely to have 0 than 50 billion.
Frankly, if the number wound up being 0, I would suspect that the probability was wrong, rather than the 10% chance of life coming up untrue 50 billion times in a row.
No, you exhibit gross misunderstanding that what has been proposed is that probabiity increases with the number of ideas put forward.
Right, so we could guess that it is perhaps .999999999. And that guess would be equally valid.
But the probability of the event occurring does not increase, which is what you are arguing happens.
No, I am arguing no such thing.
I am arguing that the existence of extraterrestrial life isn’t any more probable in 2011 than it was in 1986, despite that fact that we now have 1, 000 more ideas about how it could possibly have happened.
I am astounded that you believe that the universe itself is actually more likely to contain life based upon human thought. That is classic magical thinking.
Do you also believe that your lottery numbers are more likely to come up if you imagine a range of scenarios of how they might come up? If so, congratulations. You are a true student of magical thinking.
No, he isn’t.
He is arguing that the existence of more ideas increases the probability of the event occurring.
Nonsense. Even if all the people were locked indoors, it would still rain. Human thoughts do not cause rain.
The claim was that the* probability of the event is occurring * would increase. It was never claimed that the calculation would differ. What has been repeatedly claimed is that the *probability of the event is occurring *will differ.
Would you argue that if a civilization lived underground and had no experience with, or knowledge of, weather patterns, then the probability of them getting wet on the surface would be lower?
Because that is what has been claimed: the the more ideas that exist, the higher the chances of the event occurring. That the number of ideas actually correlates to the probability of an event occurring.
Wait – I too have some difficulty parsing this. It isn’t true that the probability of there being no other life approaches infinity (in fact that doesn’t make sense as probabilities must lie within the unit interval). I suspect you’ve mis-written because your final statement is more or less true, viz
But to be clear about it: if the probability of life arising on any other planet is X > 0, then the probability of there being no other life remains 1 - X whatever the number of trials. There’ll still be an unbounded number of universes without any other life. Please correct me if I’m misreading you.
Equally valid in the sense that we can’t say for certain one way or the other. However, if we have examined the egg and the nest and cannot conceive of any theory as to why the egg might break, this is some evidence – perhaps limited, or larger if we feel confident in our knowledge of physics and the structure of the egg – that the egg will not break.
That is manifestly not what I’m arguing, and I’ll thank you to tread more carefully in the future when pejoratively assigning statements to others. I’m arguing that our guess changes – we get new information about the egg/nest/forest system and this allows us to reevaluate how likely we think breakage is. As I wrote, strictly speaking the egg either falls or does not.
And no one would disagree with you because no one has argued that physical reality changes because of our thoughts. However, if our state of knowledge has changed since 1986, then it IS true that our subjective probability of life arising may have changed.
You’re disappointing me. I wouldn’t argue I can increase the probability of winning the lottery by inventing scenarios in which my numbers come up. I would reevaluate the probability of my lottery numbers coming up if new relevant information arises (say I find out the administrator is sympathetic to me and unscrupulous enough to cheat). This is the point.
No, that is absolutely not what has been claimed. The argument is that plausible theories are relevant information to use when guessing a probability. A theory as to the origin of life does not make it more likely for life to arise in some absolute sense, but – if the theory is plausible – it gives us some reason to reevaluate our estimate of the probability of life arising.
To bring this home a bit more: if I enter the lottery, my chance of winning is p – some very small number. The theory that someone is willing to cheat on my behalf, if I have some evidence for that theory, doesn’t affect whether or not I shall win. But it does mean that I should adjust my estimate of the chance of winning. Would you argue with that?
(Or would you simply continue to claim that I’m engaging in magical thinking?)
That is because we already know the probability of ball falling to the ground base don multiple trials.
You have no trials at all for the origin of life.
Am I wrong to say that Obama must must win the next election? There is nonzero probability that something else interferes. So is it is a perfectly valid and coherent thing to say?
Of course it isn’t, because we have no prior samples upon which to base such probabilities. If the probability of an event not occurring is greater then the event occurring, it is not correct to say that the event must occur,and it is not pedantry to point that out.
So you agree that, at infinity, the probability of no life existing is one. Once we speak of infinities, with probability one of no life existing there will be no life elsewhere in the universe. If that is misleading then we shouldn’t speak of infinities.
Some simple questions:
You agree that the universe must contain an infinite number of planets with no life?
If the number of planets within no life is infinite, do you agree that the probability of the first planet we sample supporting life is infinitely small?
And do you agree that the probability of the second planet we sample supporting life is infinitely small?
And that the probability of the* n*th planet we sample supporting life is also infinitely small?
So do you agree that regardless of how many planets we sample size, the chances of finding one that supports life is infinitely small?
As you said, “x never occurs” and “x only occurs with infinitesimally small probability” are colloquially the same statement.