Before I became a rationalist, I believed that there was no god, but there were souls, and they manifested through making quantum randomness nonrandom.
I realized that lower-level discussions of free will were kind of pointless. I abandoned the eternal-springing hope that souls and psychic powers (Hey! Look! For some reason, all of air molecules just happened to be moving upward at the same time! It seems like this guy is a magnet for one in a 10^^^^^^^10 thermodynamic occurances! And they always help him!) could exist. I fully accepted the physical universe.
It’s two tens with six supers between them! That’s twice as much as 10^^^10, right!
I guess it just intuitively seems like there should be a useful not-impossible-just-rare event that has a probability in that range (long-term vacuum fluctuation appearance of a complex and useful machine on the order of 5kg, maybe?)
Let’s say there are 10^^10 particles in the universe, each one of them independently has a 1 in 10^^10 chance of doing what we want over some small unit of time, and we are interested in 10^^10 of those units of time. Then the probability that the event we want to observe happens is much better than 1 in 10^^12, and that was only two up-arrows.
(We can rewrite ((10^^10)^(10^^10))^(10^^10) as 10^(10^^9 x 10^^10 x 10^^10) which is less than 10^((10^^10)^3) which is less than 10^((10^^10)^10). This would be the same as 10^^12 if we took exponents in a different order, and the order used to calculate 10^^12 happens to be the one that gives the largest possible number. Actually if I were more careful I could probably get 10^^11 as a bound as well.)
And although I’m not entirely sure about the time-resolution business, I think the numbers in the calculation I just did are an upper bound for what we’d want in order to compute the probabability of any universe-history at an atomic scale.
Before I became a rationalist, I believed that there was no god, but there were souls, and they manifested through making quantum randomness nonrandom.
Which part(s) of that set of beliefs did becoming a rationalist cause you to change?
This was long before Less Wrong.
I realized that lower-level discussions of free will were kind of pointless. I abandoned the eternal-springing hope that souls and psychic powers (Hey! Look! For some reason, all of air molecules just happened to be moving upward at the same time! It seems like this guy is a magnet for one in a 10^^^^^^^10 thermodynamic occurances! And they always help him!) could exist. I fully accepted the physical universe.
I get the concept of hyperbole, but this:
Is ludicrously too far.
It’s two tens with six supers between them! That’s twice as much as 10^^^10, right!
I guess it just intuitively seems like there should be a useful not-impossible-just-rare event that has a probability in that range (long-term vacuum fluctuation appearance of a complex and useful machine on the order of 5kg, maybe?)
Not… quite.
Let’s say there are 10^^10 particles in the universe, each one of them independently has a 1 in 10^^10 chance of doing what we want over some small unit of time, and we are interested in 10^^10 of those units of time. Then the probability that the event we want to observe happens is much better than 1 in 10^^12, and that was only two up-arrows.
(We can rewrite ((10^^10)^(10^^10))^(10^^10) as 10^(10^^9 x 10^^10 x 10^^10) which is less than 10^((10^^10)^3) which is less than 10^((10^^10)^10). This would be the same as 10^^12 if we took exponents in a different order, and the order used to calculate 10^^12 happens to be the one that gives the largest possible number. Actually if I were more careful I could probably get 10^^11 as a bound as well.)
And although I’m not entirely sure about the time-resolution business, I think the numbers in the calculation I just did are an upper bound for what we’d want in order to compute the probabability of any universe-history at an atomic scale.