• Ech
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    21 year ago

    Murphy’s Law (edited a bit by the Nolan brothers)- If something can happen, it will happen. On the scale of infinity, this is particularly inevitable.

      • Ech
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        11 year ago

        Umm…logic? Statistics? If something has a chance of happening, even the smallest possible chance conceivable, it will happen given infinite time and iteration.

        • @rockstarpirate
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          21 year ago

          Well, but if there are other “me”s, then there must be some set of common events that must occur in each universe containing a copy of me in order for that individual to qualify as me. In that case, isn’t it entirely possible that those particular things that must be in place preclude certain other possibilities that make it such that there is no chance that some otherwise conceivable events could occur?

          • Ech
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            11 year ago

            Sure, and that would fall under “can’t happen, won’t happen”.

            And if we’re getting that philosophical about it, what qualifies as “you”? Arguably, that’s just you, since you represent a single culmination of events and possibilities. All other variations would technically be someone else with a mostly similar history. You could consider a “spectrum” of you’s, but again, where is the cutoff? Trying to define that gets pretty tricky.

            • @rockstarpirate
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              11 year ago

              I agree with all of that. But the bigger point is that there are things that can’t/won’t happen that we can’t predict, so this means we can’t assume that “there must be a universe in which X happens to me”.

              • Ech
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                11 year ago

                In respect to the lottery, every (lottery valid) combination has a chance of happening and we are assuming infinite variation, so if someone buys a lotto ticket for say “1 2 3 4 5”, that will be the picked numbers in at least one variation.

                • @rockstarpirate
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                  11 year ago

                  Ok, that makes sense. I would agree that for any truly random circumstance, when given infinite iterations, all possible combinations will eventually occur.