What Are The Chances That You Would Be Born?

“You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won’t believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!”

The point that Feynman was trying to make is that you can’t just hunt for anomalies after the fact and then say they are somehow significant. You have to make predictions and do the test and see if those predictions bear out. In the same way it’s not amazing (at least statistically, although perhaps biologically) that any one person is born. It’s just like that license plate. Of course, the license plate ARW 357 is one of millions of possibilities, but that doesn’t mean that it’s amazing every time you see a license plate. They’re all one of millions, and it has to be one of them.

I came to say that, but it's eloquently copied from: http://surplusgamer.tumblr.com/post/1114853865/derren-brown-...

1) It applies to everyone reading it, and it would apply to me if I were different and reading it. It tries to convey a specialness which doesn't seem to exist. If a billion people win a penny each then winning a penny isn't miraculous, even if it is a 1 in 1,000,000,000 chance that you win any particular penny - but the 'particular' part has no significance.

2) I am reading it, so my existence probability is ~1.

3) I wasn't waiting in the wings somewhere with a dice roll choosing whether I would be born or not, I am what was born to and raised by my parents. Birth and youth happened before "I", not the other way around.

"Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely — make that miraculously — fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stuck fast, untimely wounded or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result — eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly — in you."

That said, the calculation is exactly as meaningful as the Drake Equation: you can plug in wild variations in equally "probable" values for the several steps in the equation, yielding staggeringly divergent end results, all of which mean precisely fuck-all, because nearly every number is little better than a wild-assed guess.

It's an interesting thing to think about, certainly, and a great way to remind yourself how stupendously fortunate you are to have been given the incredible, inestimably valuable gift of being, but in the end, it's naught more than sophistry dolled up in an equation that passes muster as well as a 16-year old kid using an fake ID saying he's 35.

Looking at it from a macro perspective these particles, energy quantums, and forces have resulted in innumerable acts of learning and knowledge. People more learned than you and I have developed all manners of science and technology. Wars have been fought. Nations conquered. Virulent plagues unleashed with millions of people dying. A veritable tapestry of human achievement has been women together due to the interactions of countless tiny little particles, bundles of energy, and forces.

And all this rich history of the universe has been building up like a fantastic crescendo in the most amazing symphony every conducted, culminating in a singular event so that here and now I would post this comment on Hacker News. What are the odds of that?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy

It is us who give meaning to probabilities and deem some events as interesting and others not.

"Suppose a man threw into the ocean a yoke with one hole in it, and then the east wind blew it west and the west wind blew it east and the north wind blew it south and the south wind blew it north; and suppose there were a blind turtle that came up to the surface once at the end of each century. How do you conceive this, bhikkhus, would that blind turtle eventually put his head through that yoke with the one hole in it?"

"He might, Lord, at the end of a long period."

"Bhikkhus, the blind turtle would sooner put his head through that yoke with a single hole in it than a fool, once gone to a lower realm, would find his way back to the human state."

M. 129

[Nanamoli, The Life of the Buddha, p. 250]

As the post says, the probability of the turtle surfacing with his head in the yoke on any one try is about 10^-15. Since the turtle tries once per century, the expected length of time as a non-human is 10^17 years, or 10 million times longer than the amount of time since the most recent Big Bang. It's actually kind of cool to visualize this. Let one penny represent the amount of time since the Big Bang (about 10 billion years). Then here's a picture of the amount of pennies representing the expected length of time as a non-human: http://www.kokogiak.com/megapenny/seven.asp

There's a huge potential set of humans, of which the current population represents one infinitesimally tiny subset of that potential set. But there's a lot of people, and the fact that one of them is you is largely unremarkable. If it hadn't been you, it would've been someone overwhelmingly similar to you.

In other words, we're not unique snowflakes. Humans are more alike than they are different, so don't get so excited about the miracle of your existence.

Or in other words, the chances of the outcome having a very low probability are very high.

Of course, that assumes that the knowledge is correct; but even the most die-hard skeptic can be absolutely certain that they themselves exist.

Let me summarize the content:

Re: fw: re: re: re: fw: fw: fw: CHECK THIS OUT!