Cyprus-Forum.com

[bill cobbett]

All beliefs in the Almighty, in Resurrection and Eternal Life are rubbish.

This life is all there is, nothing before it and nothing after. This life is as good as it gets.

Sad????...

.... Not really... just look at yourself for a mo and ask a question....

How outrageously ridiculous is the probability that you should be around, that you should exist today, ... to be able to waste the time to read these words???

Consider the billions of years of evolution, from the first self-replicating little strings of bio-chemicals, through all the mass extinctions that, so far, have favoured furry little mammals, all the chance encounters of your ancestors and all the millions and millions of other variables in your personal history...

...It is remarkable that you are here today... you are a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion to one winner....

... you are the only miracle.

[Buccaneer]

[kurupetos]

This thread deserves a star! My own!

[Bananiot]

It's like winning the lotto on six consecative draws, and beyond. Actually, every step we make break all rules of probability.

[Piratis]

This reminds me of a course I watch some years ago. Here is part of the transcript from one lecture, but you better watch the video here: http://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/death/co ... ure17.html

Or the whole course here: http://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/death/co ... s-sessions

I need two volunteers. I need a male volunteer from the audience. Good. Okay, you'll be the male volunteer. And I need a female volunteer from the audience. Come on, it won't hurt. I need a female volunteer. Okay. What I'd like you to do after class is go have sex and have a baby. Okay.

Now, let me just suppose that this isn't actually going to happen. Sorry. Or sorry, I don't know. Let's consider, though, the possibility never to be actualized, the possibility that they would have sex and have a baby. His sperm joined with her egg, form a fertilized egg. The fertilized egg develops into a fetus. The fetus is eventually born. It's the fetus that we got by mixing egg 37 with sperm 4,000,309. There's a person that could have been born. But let's suppose, never does get born. That particular person who could have been born, let's call Larry. Okay. Larry is a possible person. It could happen, but won't happen. It could exist, but won't exist. Now, how many of us feel sorry for Larry? Probably nobody. After all, Larry never even exists. How can we feel sorry for Larry?

Now, that made perfect sense when we accepted the existence requirement, (A), something can be bad for you only if you exist. Since Larry never exists, nothing can be bad for Larry. But once we give up on the existence requirement, once we say something can be bad for you even if you never exist, then we no longer have any grounds for withholding our sympathy from Larry. We can say, "Oh my gosh! Think of all the goods in life that Larry would have had, if only he'd been born. But he never is born, so he's deprived of all those goods." And if death is bad for me, by virtue of being deprived of the goods of life, then nonexistence is bad for Larry, by virtue of his being deprived of all the goods of life. I've got it bad. I'm going to die. Larry's got it worse. We should really feel much sorrier for Larry. But I bet none of you feels sorry for Larry, this never-to-be-born-at-all person.

Now, it's important in thinking about this, that we not slip back into some version of the soul view, especially some version of the soul view where the souls are prior existents. You might imagine--there's a scene in Homer, I think, where some sort of sacrifice is being made and all the dead souls go hover around, longing to be alive again, to savor the food and taste and smells of life, right? If you've got this picture of the nonexistent, merely potentially possible but never-to-be born individuals as somehow really already existing in a kind of ghost-like state, wishing they were born, maybe you should feel sorry for them. But that's not what the story is at all on the physicalist picture that I'm assuming. Nonexistent people don't have a kind of spooky, wish-I-were-alive ghost-like existence. They just don't exist, full stop. So once we keep that in mind about Larry, it's very hard to feel sorry for him.

Of course, look, since I've been going on about how he's deprived of all the good things in life, maybe some of you are feeling sorry for Larry. So it's worth getting clear about just what it would mean to take seriously the thought that it's bad for merely potential people never to be born. How many merely potential people are there? I want you to get a sense of just how many there are. Not just Larry, the unborn person that would exist if we mixed whatever it was, you know, egg 37 and sperm 4,000,029, whatever the number was. Not just Larry, who's a potential person who never gets born, that would have to be an object of our sympathy, there's a lot of merely potential, never-to-be-born people.

How many? A lot. How many? Well, I once tried to calculate. Well, as you'll see, the calculation is utterly off the back of the envelope, sort of rough and completely inadequate in ways that I'll point out. But at least it'll give you a sense of just how many potential people there are.

Let's start modestly and ask: How many possible people could we, the current generation, produce? Now as I say, I made this calculation some years ago. It doesn't really matter how inaccurate it's going to be. As we'll see, it's very rough, but it makes the point. How many people are there? How many possible people, rather, could there be? Well, suppose there were 5 billion people. Roughly half of them are men, half of them are women.

What we want to know then is, how many possible people could the 2.5 billion men make altogether with the 2.5 billion women? The crucial point in thinking about this is to realize that every time you combine a different egg with a different sperm, you end up with a different person, right? If you combine an egg with a different sperm, you get a different genetic code that develops into a different person. You combine that sperm with a different egg, you get a different person. You know, if my parents had had sex five minutes earlier or five minutes later, presumably some other sperm would have joined with the egg. That would have been not me being born, but some sibling being born instead of me. Change the egg, change the sperm, you get a different person. So what we really want to know is, how many sperm-egg combinations are there with roughly 5 billion people in the world?

Well, let's see. [See Figure 17.2] There's 2.5 billion women, [writing] billion women. How many eggs can a woman have? Well, fertile periods, round numbers, it's not really going to matter, precision, roughly 30 years, roughly 12 eggs a year. So that's how many eggs. Actually, I discovered some time after having done this calculation that the number of possible eggs is far greater. A woman actually ovulates and gives off this many eggs roughly during her fertile period. But there's many, many other cells, I gather, that could have developed into eggs. So that's a much, much larger number of potential eggs. But this will do. 30 years, 12 eggs a year.

How many men? Roughly 2.5 billion men. Each man has a much longer period in which he's able to produce sperm. Let's just be round numbers here, 50 years. How many times a day can the man have sex? Well, certainly more than once, but let's be modest here and just say once a day. So that's 365 times a day--a year. 365 days a year. 365 days, I guess that should be. I wrote it too big. I don't have space left for the last number. Each time the man ejaculates, he gives off a lot of sperm. How much sperm? A lot. As it happens, I looked this up once. Round numbers, 40 million sperm each time the man ejaculates. So this last number has got to be times 40 million sperm. Okay, so we took all the men that exist now and all the women that exist now and ask: How many merely possible people? You know, most of these people are never going to be born, of course. But we're talking about possible people.

How many possible people are there? There's 2.5 billion times 30 times 12 times 2.5 billion times 50 times 365 times 40 million. That equals--I'm going to round here. That equals approximately 1.5 million billion billion billion people. That's 1.5 x 1033. That's how many possible people we could have, roughly speaking, in the next generation, of which obviously a miniscule fraction are going to be born. There's--If you're going to feel sorry for Larry, you've got to feel sorry for every merely possible person. Every person who could have been born that never gets born. And there's 1.5 million billion billion billion such people, such possible people.

And of course, the truth of the matter is, we barely scratched the surface here. Because now think of all those people and think about all the possible children they could have. We got this number starting with a mere 5 billion people. Imagine the number we would get if we then calculated how many possible grandchildren we could have. I don't mean that we could actually have all of those people at the same time, but for each one there is a possible person that could have existed. You quickly end up with more possible people than there are particles in the known universe. And that was just two generations, right? Three generations, you're going to have more. Four generations, you're going to have more. If we think about the number of possible people, people who could have existed but will never exist, the number just boggles the mind.

[bill cobbett]

This reminds me of a course I watch some years ago. Here is part of the transcript from one lecture, but you better watch the video here: http://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/death/co ... ure17.html

Or the whole course here: http://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/death/co ... s-sessions

I need two volunteers. I need a male volunteer from the audience. Good. Okay, you'll be the male volunteer. And I need a female volunteer from the audience. Come on, it won't hurt. I need a female volunteer. Okay. What I'd like you to do after class is go have sex and have a baby. Okay.

Now, let me just suppose that this isn't actually going to happen. Sorry. Or sorry, I don't know. Let's consider, though, the possibility never to be actualized, the possibility that they would have sex and have a baby. His sperm joined with her egg, form a fertilized egg. The fertilized egg develops into a fetus. The fetus is eventually born. It's the fetus that we got by mixing egg 37 with sperm 4,000,309. There's a person that could have been born. But let's suppose, never does get born. That particular person who could have been born, let's call Larry. Okay. Larry is a possible person. It could happen, but won't happen. It could exist, but won't exist. Now, how many of us feel sorry for Larry? Probably nobody. After all, Larry never even exists. How can we feel sorry for Larry?

Now, that made perfect sense when we accepted the existence requirement, (A), something can be bad for you only if you exist. Since Larry never exists, nothing can be bad for Larry. But once we give up on the existence requirement, once we say something can be bad for you even if you never exist, then we no longer have any grounds for withholding our sympathy from Larry. We can say, "Oh my gosh! Think of all the goods in life that Larry would have had, if only he'd been born. But he never is born, so he's deprived of all those goods." And if death is bad for me, by virtue of being deprived of the goods of life, then nonexistence is bad for Larry, by virtue of his being deprived of all the goods of life. I've got it bad. I'm going to die. Larry's got it worse. We should really feel much sorrier for Larry. But I bet none of you feels sorry for Larry, this never-to-be-born-at-all person.

Now, it's important in thinking about this, that we not slip back into some version of the soul view, especially some version of the soul view where the souls are prior existents. You might imagine--there's a scene in Homer, I think, where some sort of sacrifice is being made and all the dead souls go hover around, longing to be alive again, to savor the food and taste and smells of life, right? If you've got this picture of the nonexistent, merely potentially possible but never-to-be born individuals as somehow really already existing in a kind of ghost-like state, wishing they were born, maybe you should feel sorry for them. But that's not what the story is at all on the physicalist picture that I'm assuming. Nonexistent people don't have a kind of spooky, wish-I-were-alive ghost-like existence. They just don't exist, full stop. So once we keep that in mind about Larry, it's very hard to feel sorry for him.

Of course, look, since I've been going on about how he's deprived of all the good things in life, maybe some of you are feeling sorry for Larry. So it's worth getting clear about just what it would mean to take seriously the thought that it's bad for merely potential people never to be born. How many merely potential people are there? I want you to get a sense of just how many there are. Not just Larry, the unborn person that would exist if we mixed whatever it was, you know, egg 37 and sperm 4,000,029, whatever the number was. Not just Larry, who's a potential person who never gets born, that would have to be an object of our sympathy, there's a lot of merely potential, never-to-be-born people.

How many? A lot. How many? Well, I once tried to calculate. Well, as you'll see, the calculation is utterly off the back of the envelope, sort of rough and completely inadequate in ways that I'll point out. But at least it'll give you a sense of just how many potential people there are.

Let's start modestly and ask: How many possible people could we, the current generation, produce? Now as I say, I made this calculation some years ago. It doesn't really matter how inaccurate it's going to be. As we'll see, it's very rough, but it makes the point. How many people are there? How many possible people, rather, could there be? Well, suppose there were 5 billion people. Roughly half of them are men, half of them are women.

What we want to know then is, how many possible people could the 2.5 billion men make altogether with the 2.5 billion women? The crucial point in thinking about this is to realize that every time you combine a different egg with a different sperm, you end up with a different person, right? If you combine an egg with a different sperm, you get a different genetic code that develops into a different person. You combine that sperm with a different egg, you get a different person. You know, if my parents had had sex five minutes earlier or five minutes later, presumably some other sperm would have joined with the egg. That would have been not me being born, but some sibling being born instead of me. Change the egg, change the sperm, you get a different person. So what we really want to know is, how many sperm-egg combinations are there with roughly 5 billion people in the world?

Well, let's see. [See Figure 17.2] There's 2.5 billion women, [writing] billion women. How many eggs can a woman have? Well, fertile periods, round numbers, it's not really going to matter, precision, roughly 30 years, roughly 12 eggs a year. So that's how many eggs. Actually, I discovered some time after having done this calculation that the number of possible eggs is far greater. A woman actually ovulates and gives off this many eggs roughly during her fertile period. But there's many, many other cells, I gather, that could have developed into eggs. So that's a much, much larger number of potential eggs. But this will do. 30 years, 12 eggs a year.

How many men? Roughly 2.5 billion men. Each man has a much longer period in which he's able to produce sperm. Let's just be round numbers here, 50 years. How many times a day can the man have sex? Well, certainly more than once, but let's be modest here and just say once a day. So that's 365 times a day--a year. 365 days a year. 365 days, I guess that should be. I wrote it too big. I don't have space left for the last number. Each time the man ejaculates, he gives off a lot of sperm. How much sperm? A lot. As it happens, I looked this up once. Round numbers, 40 million sperm each time the man ejaculates. So this last number has got to be times 40 million sperm. Okay, so we took all the men that exist now and all the women that exist now and ask: How many merely possible people? You know, most of these people are never going to be born, of course. But we're talking about possible people.

How many possible people are there? There's 2.5 billion times 30 times 12 times 2.5 billion times 50 times 365 times 40 million. That equals--I'm going to round here. That equals approximately 1.5 million billion billion billion people. That's 1.5 x 1033. That's how many possible people we could have, roughly speaking, in the next generation, of which obviously a miniscule fraction are going to be born. There's--If you're going to feel sorry for Larry, you've got to feel sorry for every merely possible person. Every person who could have been born that never gets born. And there's 1.5 million billion billion billion such people, such possible people.

And of course, the truth of the matter is, we barely scratched the surface here. Because now think of all those people and think about all the possible children they could have. We got this number starting with a mere 5 billion people. Imagine the number we would get if we then calculated how many possible grandchildren we could have. I don't mean that we could actually have all of those people at the same time, but for each one there is a possible person that could have existed. You quickly end up with more possible people than there are particles in the known universe. And that was just two generations, right? Three generations, you're going to have more. Four generations, you're going to have more. If we think about the number of possible people, people who could have existed but will never exist, the number just boggles the mind.

Absolutely... astronomical odds at just one stage, at the moment of a single human conception, one of an astronomical number of other stages, each with its own astronomical odds.

Boys and Girls .... The only Miracle around this weekend is you.

[CBBB]

I think I will open another KEO!

[SpartanGamer]

We're none of us a "miracle" but a random accident - of no special consequence; vehicles for the self-improving DNA. Whatever arises is not a "miracle" because it has no design to be teleological ...

[bill cobbett]

I think I will open another KEO!

... on the other hand the odds of some events are a near certainty...

[humanist]

Right now I want a KEO and a pitta of mixed souvlaki at the Agalma tou solomou souvligithiko ..... happy easter