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I guess I'm one of those people because I read Wikipedia and this seems like a complete non-sequitur to me: > The Copernican principle suggests that any one hu
by dataflow 3y ago
I guess I'm one of those people because I read Wikipedia and this seems like a complete non-sequitur to me:
> The Copernican principle suggests that any one human is equally likely (along with the other N-1 humans) to find themselves in any position n of the total population N.
I feel like I must be misunderstanding the argument because it just doesn't make sense to me.
First, why should I even assume N is finite? Second, even if I did, not everyone had an equal chance of participating in this hypothetical thought-experiment (or random selection, or whatever you want to call it) -- only those alive at the time of your sampling can participate in it.
- Denvercoder9 3y ago> First, why should I even assume N is finite? Our current understanding of physics dictates that the (observable) universe has a finite size and a finite lifespan, from which it logically follows that there can't be an infinite amount of humans.
- dataflow 3y agoIf that's genuinely the basis for this reasoning, it only makes the argument seem even more dubious to me. If the statistical argument is really so sound, it shouldn't have to rely on our understanding of cosmology. Also, is there no phenomenon here where a sufficiently large N becomes increasingly indistinguishable from infinity?
- zeroonetwothree 3y agoThe entire universe could very well be infinite, with infinite “Earths” and “humans”. In which case the argument doesn’t work since you can’t choose uniformly from an infinite set.