Since the “French Don’t Like Scientology” thread became a little derailed, I thought it might be an idea to start a philosophical rant thread so that we didn’t get told off for wanton thread hi-jackery!
Only rules are that we keep it civil and stop circular arguing after four or five ripostes with a “let’s agree to disagree” and start something new.
Starter topic for 10… is there such a thing as luck, chance or probability (since that was where the topic hi-jacking really got going!)…
But in the end, any event is definable. Say someone got a disease now and the cause is unknown, but in the future they are able to trace back where he got it from. There was no probability in this, just cause and effect. He and the people around him just didn’t know about the cause nor the effect, because the medical knowledge wasn’t advanced enough in their time.
My beef (such as it was, actually it was more like watered down chicken soup really… but I digress…) with your comment that it all “happened by chance” was probably poorly worded… I shall attempt to clarify (and probably muddy the water even more! haha!).
However you care to look at it, from a completely objective viewpoint, there is no such thing as chance (just as there is no such thing as destiny). Similarly there’s no such thing as cause and effect but I’ll get to that in a moment…
Humans are highly evolved pattern recognition engines. We see patterns in everything. We’re adept at finding information in chaos and interpreting very weak or cluttered signals. This is what enables us to drive at 60 MPH on a single carriageway road on a rainy night. It also enables us to find our way around the world and store information. We also see patterns in time; the seasons come round, the sun rises and falls and so on. However, our very powerful pattern recognition ‘software’ is not infallible; it can be easily subverted by illusions, tricks and so on. It can also return false positives, finding patterns where none exist for instanct the “face” features found in the Cydonia region of Mars, or even the classic (there isn’t a face there, just two dots and a curve in a circular field, however our brain “gets” it, interpreting it as a happy face.
Chance is a perceived pattern (that may or may not actually exist). When we observe an event in our local observable space, we note that event “X” happens “Y” times in that space and therefore draw conclusions about the likelihood of that event pattern reccuring. So yes, on a local and entirely anthropocentric basis, our guestimates about the likelihood of “X” occuring are accurate (but only until that event happens again; due to the nature of odds).
The key to our understanding of chance is that it is based on human observation of local space; I don’t need to tell you just how much space there is out there - whilst we perceive our observations to hold true locally, there’s nothing to say that there aren’t zones out there where our test event happens four million times a second, or never, or that our perception of our local space may not change, altering the reccurrence of the pattern (if no-one can see the event, does it happen??*).
Chance, like time and all our other constructs is an imposed law based on our perceptions; since our perception of the universe is clearly limited, so too is the objective validity of our laws, thus making chance an irrelevance at best.
Our observations of cause and effect are similarly flawed; sure, if I aim a gun at someone & pull the trigger, my observations of the events that occur tells me that they died because I shot them. They also tell me that if I do it again, chances are there’s going to be lots more bodies around here.
If I happened to be travelling at the speed of light while I get trigger happy though (you know, just, as you do) then it’s entirely possible that one could conclude that my shot was the root cause of the sun going supernova, or that their death caused me to fire my gun (and that many people dying will most likely result in a barrage of gunfire).
Most, if not all such constructs only apply to human perception, at the moment, in this bit of the space-time continuum. Just because we perceive them to be true, doesn’t mean that they are. The only way we could know that would be to become gods (if such entities exist… nice callback to the source thread there!) step outside of the universe and observe everything from a truly objective perspective.
This is why I corrected your quote to say,
Chance may or may not have played a part; all we can be (fairly) sure of (as far as we know) is that “these things happened”. (probably!).
*If a tree falls in the middle of a wood and lands on a mime artist, does anyone care? Also, the sound of one hand clapping is clearly “cla”… [/size]
I’m sorry, but that’s a completely irrelevant argument. As I said in my previous post, perception is a human model of determining the likelihood of events. Since it is a human model, it doesn’t matter whether it would change if our perceptions of time and space were different, since they aren’t different.
The model of chance doesn’t take into account cause and effect: if you roll fifty dice and try and work out how many will get a six, it doesn’t matter whether you include how you rolled them.
Finally, you can’t say chance may or may not have played a part. It’s like saying one may or may not be a number. If a thing happened, it had a chance of happening, end of, unless you insist that everything is predetermined.
The cause and effect bit was actually aimed more at Mr. doom really. As to the argument being completely irrelevant, I happily concede that on a day to day basis it is, in much the same way that on a day to day basis, the average lay-person doesn’t give a crap about quantum theory, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Schrodinger’s cat or any other mind exercise. We look at the world and see chance happening, end of. This I completely agree with.
However, since this is a philosophy thread (and philosphy is all about the intellectual exploration of logic, metaphysics, ethics and resolving existential questions about the human condition) I still contend that our way of viewing the world can only be an interpreted view of “the truth” (if such a thing exists). Make no mistake, I do not subscribe to the idea of predetermination; destiny is not a factor (just a human pattern recognition artefact). However if an event is observed to have happened, that’s all that one can be sure of. Until it is observed to have happened, there are n possible outcomes.
To illustrate with an example drawn from my personal experience, I had a maths lesson where the teacher was introducing the principles of probability. He wrote up the basics of the formula for calculating the odds of a coin-toss, then flipped the coin, allowing it to land on the desk. The coin duly proceeded to blow his carefully constructed formula to bits by landing, bouncing and spinning around, to come to rest on its edge. We mocked him for not including landing on its edge as a part of his equation, at which point he responded that the chances of it doing such a thing were 1 in millions (or more). The teacher’s calculations were based on his (and, to be fair, most people’s) observation that coins, when flipped, land either on one side or the other, but never the edge. Until that day, he had never considered it a viable possibility and so never included it in his calculations. As a result we were left staring at an impossible event; this clearly was an inaccurate conclusion, since the event had happened, in front of 32 witnesses.
Until the coin finished moving, anything and everything was possible. As the coin slowed, the number of likely results diminished (the outcome waveform collapsed, if you like) until we were left staring at one of n potential results. Ultimately something was going to happen, and that’s all we could really be sure of. All I know is that the teacher switched to die rolls as his example, because it’s harder for a die to do the dirty on him land on a corner (unless you roll it on a carpet…)[/size]
Of course this is just my personal and (almost certainly) highly uninformed opinion, but then, I’ve never personally believed in luck or chance; I maintain that I can only be sure of my interpretation of - and response to - events… I also happily concede that I may not be putting my point across as clearly as I see it in my own head… mea culpa! Anyhows, feel free to disagree, I’ll always welcome opposing opinions; it’s good for beliefs to be tested!
Picking up on part of your response (for the next topic!) 1, 0 and indeed all integers almost certainly don’t exist… discuss…
I totally see your point, but what I said still stands. We may not always account for every single possiblity (mostly because there’s no need to) but even if we don’t, it still has a possibility of happening if one were to look at it (the fact of whether someone has worked it out or not is irrelevant). Like you said, though the teacher didn’t account for the coin landing on its edge, it still had a chance of 1 in millions of happening. That is still a probability, whether he factored it in or not. If everything and anything was possible when it was moving, everything and anything had a possibility of happening.
I’m starting to think that this may be an argument about the logic of probability equations rather than the idea of events having/not having a probability.
For the integer argument: I agree. And since they don’t exist, we should have a new system of numbering involving different shaped chips.
:freeman:
I propose curly, ridge-cut, steak-cut, frites and potato waffles…
Ok, since we didn’t come up with anything properly argumentative there, until someone else pitches in on that (so we can crush them with logic!!! :3), an ethics question for you (based on [edit] SHAMELESSLY RIPPED OFF FROM!!!1!![/edit][/size] that new film with Cameron Diaz):
If you had a chance to receive £1,000,000 (substitute your own regional currency!!) on the condition that someone in the world would be killed, would you take it? (and, as a sub-question, if everyone’s ethics has a “price” - that is to say, if not £1M, perhaps £1Billion would tempt you, or perhaps £1Trillion - are we all guilty or is guilt just a product of having too much brain and not enough to occupy it with?)
I would be fully willing to take the money, spend half of it on saving starving children in Africa, and then know that that person died to save others.
Then the issue becomes more interesting. Ultimately any decision lies in the person in question’s will, though if that person was very close I still would possibly be unable to do it.
So if the person were a murderer or rapist, or even just a crappy second cousin that you never write to anymore anyway, you’d happily take the money…
Surely if we, as a society, accept that killing is a Very Bad Thing, then it doesn’t matter who’s being killed (murderer, rapist or crap cousin!); if you know that because of your actions, someone else to die, surely that’s still murder (killing with malice aforethought)?
The surest test of any viewpoint is to look at the reciprocal for a second… someone out there in the world, who you’ve never met, is given a chance to win £1M with the condition that someone else dies (and that someone is YOU!). Still feel that taking the money’s alright? Surely knowingly depriving someone else of their freedom of choice (i.e. their choice to live) still counts as murder? (n.b. from an absolutist point of view!!)[/size]
The next logical progression in this thought experiment is assisted suicide/euthanasia… Let’s say you have control of the life-support for someone who’s fully paralysed but mentally entirely functional (based on EEG & fMRI scans); they’re fed through a tube, respirated through a tube, evacuated through tubes and whose heart is kept going with a pacemaker. Without the technological aids, they’re dead. They also have a condition that in an able bodied human would be causing immense pain, but they are unable to articulate whether there actually IS any pain. Would flicking the switch be murder, since you are removing their last vestige of freedom of choice? Would it be an ethical, human response (after all, you wouldn’t think twice about putting down a dog who’s in pain)? Now there’s a question I couldn’t tell you the answer to unless I was faced with it in person!
Of course it does, you are completely free to murder someone… and society is completely free to investigate that murder and take action. Laws are merely the codification of a consensus opinion; feel free to go break them, but also feel free to take the consequences!
Having mulled over the question some more, I would have to say that I would not accept such a deal. Since I have no idea who I would kill, and since I live in a country where people can go from nothing to almost anything, I think that any one mans potential is greater than the one million dollars and the lives that would save.
Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.
(there isn’t a face there, just two dots and a curve in a circular field, however our brain “gets” it, interpreting it as a happy face.
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