On 11/18/07, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>
> On 18/11/2007, Vladimir Nesov <robotact.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>
> > > How is this different to arguing that a person who wins the lottery
> > > should not ask how come something so improbable has happened to him
> > > since he could only be asking the question if he had been a winner?
> >
> > Should he?
>
> The improbable thing is that the person should transition from the
> state of buying a lottery ticket to winning the lottery, given the
> much greater weight of non-winning tickets. Answering my own question,
> the way this is different to asking why I was born me rather than one
> of the far more numerous entities who aren't me is that there is no
> primitive "me" spirit that can contemplate transitioning into every
> possible corporeal form, so that I can then look back and wonder why I
> didn't become one of the more common ones.
Yes, but there's no point in 'wondering' after winning the lottery
either. 'Wondering' is a technique to update probability of winning
after you experienced winning, but it's only applicable when this
probability is unknown and you can gain enough experience with both
kinds of outcomes. So, if you first expected some event to be very
unlikely, and then you experience that event, you probably should
increase your assessment of its probability.
Here confusion is similar: you experience an event (being born on
Earth), and based on that you try to update probability of being born
on Earth. But data is insufficient, so you can't do that.
--
Vladimir Nesov mailto:robotact.domain.name.hidden
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Received on Sun Nov 18 2007 - 07:11:32 PST