8 ms·
You're never going to shuffle a deck of cards 52!+1 times. It's unique within the extent of this physical universe. If that's not the universe of discourse, you
by philh 11y ago
You're never going to shuffle a deck of cards 52!+1 times. It's unique within the extent of this physical universe. If that's not the universe of discourse, you're going to need to specify what is.
Of course life is special. But it's not special just because it's rare. I don't know why it's special, but I do know that's not it. And I know that whether or not life is random, even if it would be repeated in a universe with infinite time, it would remain special.
If your definition of "special" relies upon subtle facts about the universe that may not ever be knowable... I'm going back to "that's really weird".
Similarly, I know that special and valuable aren't the same thing. But I don't have a good definition of special (you gave a bad one), so I was attempting to point at the sort of things that correlate with it.
- rnovak 11y agoWhile I agree somewhat with what you're saying, I'd like to ask something about the playing card example. In a deck of cards, if you consider any ordering without any meaning added, then it is literally just 1/52!. however, what if you started ascribing meaning to the different cards? Would it be special then if your shuffeling resulted in all face-cards being grouped together? What about if all like-numbers were grouped together (i.e. all 1's, all 2's, all 3's) and so-on? What about the case when the cards get shuffled and end up in ascending/descending order? i.e. {1H, 2H ... KH, 1S, 2S, ...}. There are only 4 such permuations possible, making it an infinitesimal chance that you arrive at that specific ordering. Couldn't that be viewed as special? I guess in this case, I'm saying that the tuple of {Meaning, Uniqueness} is indeed special, not just uniqueness alone.