I think "why was I born here and not there" is a question of the same
status as "why is my hair colour black and not blonde". My hair colour
could have been otherwise, just as my birthplace could have been
otherwise.
There is no conditioning of the question upon any part of myself.
If you look at all the properties that go into making up yourself,
each one will be drawn from a distribution. Most will have fairly
average values, but it would be usual for some values to be somewhat
extreme. For instance in my case (and probably in yours too, since
you're engaged on this list) my intelligence most likely lies in the top 1% of
human population. But in athletics ability, I'm pretty average - there
are plenty of other people who are faster, or jump higher. I live in a
middle sized country, I am middle class (reasonably well-off, but not
rich) and so on.
Cheers
On Sat, Nov 17, 2007 at 12:15:56PM -0800, Gene Ledbetter wrote:
> In another thread Rolf mentioned a variant of the Doomsday Argument where the universe is infinite:
>
> << ...This variant DA asks, "if there's currently a Galactic Empire 10000 Hubble Volumes away with an immensely large number of people, why wasn't I born there instead of here?" >>
>
> The implication of the question seems to be that the questioner (Q) could have been born in either of the two populations at random, and, assuming the number of people in the Galactic Empire is sufficiently immense, the probability that he could have been born on Earth is close to nil.
>
> But Q could not have been born in either of the two populations; he could only have been born on Earth, and his failure to realize this suggests that he has ignored his own material and biological nature.
>
> Q is a material object and a living organism. He is composed of atoms from Earth's interior that could in no way be part of a remote Galactic Empire. Q's birth occurred because humans reproduce sexually, and his birth occurred on Earth because his parents lived on Earth. Q could not have been born in the Galactic Empire because he could not have been born anywhere but on Earth.
>
> If Q could only have been born on Earth, then the probability that he would have been born on Earth is 100%. The answer to Q's question, "...why wasn't I born there instead of here?", is that the probability of his having been born there is 0%.
>
> Gene Ledbetter
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Get easy, one-click access to your favorites. Make Yahoo! your homepage.
> >
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Mathematics
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Received on Sat Nov 17 2007 - 17:52:01 PST