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To: Gondring
Still, intelligent agents regularly identify courses of action that random chance would not stumble upon in the history of the universe.
Oh? Do tell.

To use a trivial example, suppose you asked me to sort out all the hearts from a deck of cards. That is a trivially easy task for the average person. But to expect a chance mechanism to sort out the hearts and only hearts from a deck of cards would be unreasonable within a human timeframe.

A rule of thumb is that there are about 10^78 elementary particles in the universe. Probabilities of less than 1 in 10^50 are therefore considered such that they would never happen in the history of the universe for any macroscopic event, as a rule of thumb. But even if we bump the odds to 1 in 10^100, the point is that it is easy for intelligent actors to do things that transcend these odds.

18 posted on 01/09/2009 1:47:03 PM PST by Liberty1970 (Democrats are not in control. God is. And Thank God for that!)
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To: Liberty1970

But that’s assuming this isn’t the universe in which it happens.

Looking at a single deck is one thing, but when you have an infinite number of decks, it’s easier for a deck of those to have a specific configuration than if you asked a human to sort one.

And there’s no reason to believe we are not in a universe that has that configuration, as we would not be observing the universe if we were in an inhospitable one.


20 posted on 01/09/2009 2:06:05 PM PST by Gondring (Paul Revere would have been flamed as a naysayer troll and told to go back to Boston.)
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