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I respectfully disagree. I claim the probability of human existence could have been less than 1, just as the probability of heads when tossing a fair coin is le
by ulmus 10y ago
I respectfully disagree. I claim the probability of human existence could have been less than 1, just as the probability of heads when tossing a fair coin is less than one, even when heads is observed as an outcome. We simply can't observe "tails" in this case.
- lisper 10y agoYou are confusing two (perhaps three) different things. The probability of a fair coin landing heads is 1/2 before the coin has been flipped. After the coin has been flipped, the probability is either 0 or 1. You may not know which it is, but it is definitely one or the other (assuming classical mechanics). Now, if you are being a strict Bayesian then the probability of the coin being heads is never quite 0 or 1 because there is always the possibility that your eyes are deceiving you, or you are suffering from delusions or some equally unlikely contingency. But I assume that's not what you mean, and that you accept that humans do in fact exist in this universe, in which case the probability that humans exist in this universe is exactly 1. P(A|A)=1 by definition.