We're all here by accident.
Discussion
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For no particular reason? Then you believe in fate?
Nope.
The randomness refers to our existence? Or do you mean something completely different by accident?
Did you choose when you were born? Who you were born as? Where you were born? Why you were born? Did you choose every unfortunate turn in your life, that forced you to take a new path? Did you choose to know about me? Or did a serious of events, largely beyond your control, but fortuitously aligned, bring you to this very moment where you're typing words onto a device, that you didn't choose to be invented, or a vast computer network spanning the globe that you didn't choose to be part of your world? Most of our lives are a series of accidents. That doesn't have to be a bad thing!
Just cause you didn’t choose yourself doesn’t make it an accident.
If you don't believe in the supernatural, it does!
There is still the possibility of a non-accident that is also not supernatural (when supernatural is defined in the way we are taking it here: beyond the laws of nature)
Explain how that possibly works?
Us existing in a simulation, for example, could be an origin that is neither 'supernatural' nor accidental.
The Simulation Hypothesis, particularly Bostrom's anthropic reasoning for it, is complete nonsense. In my admittedly, not so humble in this case, opinion.
First off, maybe we do agree that it’s still a possibility, even if you’d disagree that it’s likely.
That aside, where do you get off the Bostrom bus?
In both his calculation of the nominator and the denominator of his anthropic reasoning. The nominator requires a definition of an "ordinary observer" of which humans supposedly count. But it's not clear what the boundaries of an ordinary observer are in the definition. I don't really have enough time before bedtime to write ten paragraphs on the problem. But to summarize it seems very humanistically chauvinist. (Maybe paste that into Bard or ChatGPT and I'm sure it will know where I'm going with this).
The second problem deals with the assumed boundedness of the number of simulations, which I find problematic. Mainly because Bostrom doesn't seem to be very careful about thinking about how conservation laws will place significant energy constraints on nested simulations.
I don't think a top-level universe lacking conservation laws would be the kind of universe that would permit the minds of physics for life to evolve and build computers with simulations makes any sense, either.
But basically, if you were simulating entire universes within universes, in an ad infinitum nesting as Bostrom suggests, you'd quickly run out of energy to advance the nested simulations in anything resembling an economical way. We're talking about simulating entire universes down to sub-atomic particles, here. There's a real upper bound on the computation-energy budget here.
It turns out, when you take conservation laws into account, we're actually most likely to be living in a universe where no further simulations are possible. And the likelihood we are living in a top-level universe is far higher than in Bostrom (and Musk's) formulation.
That's all assuming we get over the ordinary observer problem.
Psst! It's metaphysical nonsense ...
I completely agree with you that all these things are beyond our control. Therefore, I think that we should not waste our energy on paying too much attention to these things. We should shape the areas of life that are malleable. But can we talk about coincidence? I know you are very careful with words, so I am asking.
If every effect is preceded by a cause, perhaps every accomplishment is preceded by a reason. The logos of the first observer
It goes without saying there's a "reason" for everything. Otherwise we wouldn't have a cognizable universe and we wouldn't exist. But that we find ourselves here in this moment is an accident of biology, history, circumstance, timing, and opportunity. The vast majority of things that brings you to this very moment were completely outside your control.
Yes, I can agree with that. But was it an accident, or did the first orderly cause bring about our existence the moment it was set into motion?
But at this point I think we're wasting time wringing our hands around the category of things that count as "accidents" into a reductionist vortex. You can really do this with anything if you try. The point is, that most of what you think of as your self-directed subjective experience, is a product of things completely beyond your control.
Whether we live in a deterministic or stochastic universe is really completely orthogonal to that point.
So by accident, you simply mean beyond our own individual control?
Has to be an accident. An endless chain of happenstances. Our mammalian brains like to urge differently as pareidolia does.
Is our whole life a series of accidents? 🤔
🐶🐾🫂💜
“We don't make mistakes, we just have happy accidents.”
- Bob Ross
Or by intention …
Eu chamo isso de milagre. Um pouco mais: propósito.