The Geniuses' Thread

Chuchoter

**Timbuk2** wrote: »

First and foremost, I DO believe in God and all that.

But let's assume that God does NOT exist, and that the world was created by 'chance'.

I was thinking about this in statistics the other day. For example, if you have a large amount of data about a storm, and then you are given some value, e.g. wind speed, you have to determine how likely it is. If something odd happens, such as it being 3 standard deviations from the mean, then we reject it as the probability of it happening is very very slim.

Now, if God doesn't exist, the probability that everything on this world was here, and 'works', without intervention is extremely slim. Does this not hint at the existence of God? I know there are factors such as the things that can survive on this planet are the ones that actually survived and thus carried on through generations, but in overall terms!

Just a random thought, not that important and probably not suited to the Genius thread :P

Define works? It appears as if you are saying the world fits around us, we fit around the world. We adapted to the oxygen to carbon dioxide ratio in the world, it didn't appear to suit us.

Also, ever heard of a black swan event? Its when a seemingly minor, very unusual,unlikely event causes enormous repercussions. Life is that event.

**Timbuk2**

The Banana video is good, although it's uncomfortable to watch ( I have a fear of bananas - I'm aware it's not normal :P )

OK I was being vague.

What I mean is the probability of the way life exists so perfectly on earth. Obviously it can't be measured quantitatively, but you can still guess it.

I can't really express myself well, as my thought is suddenly seeming less tangible by the second, but I was thinking that the 'chance' of

there being a planet that can perfectly contain life - provides food, water, and the atmosphere contains just the breakdown of oxygen, etc. that we need to survive.
The fact that we can live amongst other animals, some of them completely different, and all survive alongside each other.
The fact that each type of animal/human etc. has a method of reproduction that works flawlessly.
The existence of the laws of physics, that allow life to even emerge in the first place!
Evolution of early life into higher higher forms.
How did we even get here, in perfect self-replicating forms?

I'll probably be able to phrase all this better in the morning. Written down this doesn't look as solid as I thought it was. I just thought the chance of all this happening is like flipping 200 coins and getting heads each time. Of course it can happen, but it's very very unlikely.

Cocoa: That's an extremely good point about there being many planets, so that increases the probability of it occuring on SOME planet! I never considered that! Probability can be a bit surprising like that - when I first learned about Baye's Rule I was sure there was a mistake (only 0.0018% chance of having AIDS even if the test is positive). It makes more sense when you actually think about it.

sock puppet

**Timbuk2** wrote: »

I just thought the chance of all this happening is like flipping 200 coins and getting heads each time. Of course it can happen, but it's very very unlikely.

That's true. But if you tossed 100 trillion coins then the probability of getting 200 heads in a row isn't so low.

cocoa

**Timbuk2** wrote: »

there being a planet that can perfectly contain life - provides food, water, and the atmosphere contains just the breakdown of oxygen, etc. that we need to survive.

To be honest I (and a lot of others, I imagine) would take issue with your use of the word perfectly here. Yes, it's easy to choose a few factors that if they were changed slightly, life as we know it could not exist, but what about other life? I would say things exist imperfectly, and more than that, the whole evolutionary system relies on imperfections to work.

**Timbuk2** wrote: »

The existence of the laws of physics, that allow life to even emerge in the first place!

The existence of physics etc is a fun one, but if you want to explore that probability you have to define a sample space, i.e., what are/were the alternatives? =P

**Timbuk2** wrote: »

Evolution of early life into higher higher forms.
How did we even get here, in perfect self-replicating forms?

Again, we are not here in either perfect or self-replicating forms, we are here in imperfect, iterative forms

**Timbuk2** wrote: »

I'll probably be able to phrase all this better in the morning. Written down this doesn't look as solid as I thought it was. I just thought the chance of all this happening is like flipping 200 coins and getting heads each time. Of course it can happen, but it's very very unlikely.

True, but you keep flipping for a couple billion iterations... Actually, that's probably way more than you'd need... See how fraught even the language is? =P

**Timbuk2** wrote: »

Cocoa: That's an extremely good point about there being many planets, so that increases the probability of it occuring on SOME planet! I never considered that! Probability can be a bit surprising like that - when I first learned about Baye's Rule I was sure there was a mistake (only 0.0018% chance of having AIDS even if the test is positive). It makes more sense when you actually think about it.

Yep, probability can be extremely surprising and we are extremely bad at calculating or understanding it intuitively or by instinct, there's a whole list of systematic errors that people make (Risk by Dan Gardner is a good read if you're interested), I've found you can only ever really trust a very carefully applied formula... and even then...

Pygmalion

**Timbuk2** wrote: »

I can't really express myself well, as my thought is suddenly seeming less tangible by the second, but I was thinking that the 'chance' of there being a planet that can perfectly contain life - provides food, water, and the atmosphere contains just the breakdown of oxygen, etc. that we need to survive.

We also have famine, drought, earthquakes and flesh-eating bacteria.
Amazing how you never see people talking about them in context of how great god's plan is >.>.

As for the perfect breakdown of oxygen and stuff I'd be willing to bet that if it were 5-10% higher or lower we'd do just fine, kinda the point of that whole "evolution" thing is that we adapt to the environment we're in over a ridiculously long period of time.
Of course that's all irrelevant when you think about the size of the universe and how there's probably about a billion other planets with the same levels of oxygen in the air.

amacachi

**Timbuk2** wrote: »

What I mean is the probability of the way life exists so perfectly on earth. Obviously it can't be measured quantitatively, but you can still guess it.

I can't really express myself well, as my thought is suddenly seeming less tangible by the second, but I was thinking that the 'chance' of

there being a planet that can perfectly contain life - provides food, water, and the atmosphere contains just the breakdown of oxygen, etc. that we need to survive.
The fact that we can live amongst other animals, some of them completely different, and all survive alongside each other.
The fact that each type of animal/human etc. has a method of reproduction that works flawlessly.

Life isn't "perfect", it's far, far from it. Also the only way life can exist is if it adapts and changes to suit its environment, like in evolution.

The existence of the laws of physics, that allow life to even emerge in the first place!

I'm not a physicist but I read (I think) Dawkins speaking about 6 constants in the universe that if any were more than a percent or two off then chemistry wouldn't happen. If the laws of physics didn't exist there'd be nothing to compare them to.

Evolution of early life into higher higher forms.
How did we even get here, in perfect self-replicating forms?

There's no "higher" forms, the first hurdle to get over when looking at evolution is thinking there's a point to it or that it's aiming for anything. We're not "higher" forms of life than anything else that has also survived.
On our replication, it's far from perfect and there's a lot of wastage and failures. Why sexual reproduction even exists is a nice question, I'm not going to go into it too much right now because I still have to read up a lot about it for my exams. :P
It's not exactly what you were talking about but a lizard has been discovered in Australia that's started reproducing like a mammal instead of a reptile, showing that there's some advantage to not leaving your spawn lying around in eggs. :pac:

Check out Cosmos, there's loads in there to answer some of your questions and some others you haven't asked. :pac: When it comes to life on other planets there are a few variables, the one that I didn't think of on my own was time. How small a period of time has intelligent life been on Earth? For how much of that time have we been able to see much of space? If it took the same amount of "time" (very hard to talk about such a thing when talking about other galaxies) for other planets to get to the same point as us and they're a few thousand light years away then it'll be at least a few thousand years til either us can discover each other and another few thousand years for a reply to come. Then you have to question whether we'll be around in two thousand years to get the reply.
By all means feel free to believe in God, if he exists then he's really cleverly hidden any trace of himself within evolution, preferring to take massively convoluted routes to achieve things in organisms that even our feeble minds could find far more efficient and quicket ways to achieve.

amacachi

Pygmalion wrote: »

We also have famine, drought, earthquakes and flesh-eating bacteria.
Amazing how you never see people talking about them in context of how great god's plan is >.>.

Of course then there's thanking God for those miners coming out in Chile, but it wasn't his fault they got stuck in the first place somehow. :pac:

Timbuk2, the fact that we're here means that the creation of the world has happened, however unlikely.

Isn't the probability that there happened to be an omniscient, omnipotent deity around to create the Earth quite low, even if you use God to explain why we're here?

Improbable events do happen.


Edit: If you want a precise, formal definition of this argument rather than the intuitive argument I've expressed it as here, I believe this is called the Anthropic Principle.

**Timbuk2**

I know improbable events do occur, but isn't it more likely that the Earth was created as a result of God, than it if was just created and everything came to be as it is now.

I feel like I'm missing something obvious :S

amacachi

**Timbuk2** wrote: »

I know improbable events do occur, but isn't it more likely that the Earth was created as a result of God, than it if was just created and everything came to be as it is now.

I feel like I'm missing something obvious :S

Why is that more likely? The odds of a planet exactly like this occurring are slim but there are plenty of small differences that could make life similar to what we have still come to exist. Then there are the millions (or billions or trillions, I'm a biologist so I don't know!) of other planets around that could have life that we can't visualise. There may be alien species whose visible spectrum is somewhere else on the electromagnetic spectrum (like bees!) or species that can communicate by capacitance or varying their resistivity which could also let them produce radio waves. But enough conceptualising, even keeping everything confined to just the kind of life we can easily visualise, it's almost certain that there is life of that kind on many other planets "now" and there has and will be on innumerable others in the past and the future.

We see "our" planet and wonder how it could all of happened, but we have to bear this in mind:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wupToqz1e2g

That clip is almost cliched now but it's still beautiful to me. Everything in it sums up the problem with being earth-centric when looking at the universe. Think about it, every single thing you've ever heard or read has been thought of on that infinitesimally small speck. How can it make any sense for a God to make a universe so big just for that dot. http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/525347 is nice.

EDIT: It might not really address exactly what you're after but God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens is a great book that'll show what a load of ****e Religion is.
From a general "God" POV, along the lines of Deism I've yet to come across a reason within that to allow belief in such a God to influence one's life, or even why to refer to it as a God.
Then of course if one wants to state that God is necessary for a universe to begin then one must also ask where God came from and it becomes an infinite question which cannot be answered.

Duffy the Vampire Slayer

God is Not Great was spectacular. In fact everything by Hitchens is spectacular. Heres my favourite Hitch moment....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg5UNxOmTIY

**Timbuk2**

**Timbuk2** wrote: »

I know improbable events do occur, but isn't it more likely that the Earth was created as a result of God, than it if was just created and everything came to be as it is now.

I feel like I'm missing something obvious :S

No, because God's existence itself is several times more improbable. If it's unlikely that the universe just happened to have the right universal constants for everything to 'work' as you said, then how unlikely is it for a supernatural creator to just exist?

Besides, a supernatural creator isn't the only explanation for how we're here. There are theories that there are infinite universes, and we live in one of the few with desirable conditions for life. This might not seem farfetched if you've looked into quantum mechanics.

**Timbuk2**

My mind is now officially blown! This has given me a lot of food for thought :P

amacachi

Duffy the Vampire Slayer wrote: »

God is Not Great was spectacular. In fact everything by Hitchens is spectacular. Heres my favourite Hitch moment....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg5UNxOmTIY

The Hitch is just awesome. He's debating Tony Blair tomorrow in Canada. It's meant to be streamed live online but I'd expect they've underestimated how many will want to watch it. Not sure what time it's at but I hope I'm home in time from college to see it. If anyone can fcuk Blair it's the Hitch.

**Timbuk2** wrote: »

My mind is now officially blown! This has given me a lot of food for thought :P

Hence why science is awesome. :P

ihavequestions

I hope one of ye computer geniuses can help me! The realplayer download button has disappeared from Youtube for me I've tried going to realplayer preferences and internet options/manage add ons, but no luck! Any idea how to fix it?

Screaminmidget

have you tried turning it off and on again?????

ihavequestions

Yup I've tried that Really annoying!!!

Screaminmidget

What browser are you using??

ihavequestions

Internet Explorer... But I've tried Google Chrome and it's not on that either, and Mozilla Firefox and Safari need me to update my flash player !

Screaminmidget

god i hate microsoft.
anyways, there should be an arrow in the top right corner of the window. it should open a new window and you can download it from there????? hope that works

ihavequestions

Ammm.... whats this arrow supposed to look like? Can't see one.... sorry!

Screaminmidget

an arrow....
dont worry bout it.
i think youtube might be trying to stop people from downloading videos through realplayer
go into realplayer and paste the url in the search bar.
just wondering, can you download the youtube vidoes on facebook???

amacachi

Probably an update from Youtube, Real will most likely get around it soon.

Also, get every bit of RealPlayer off your computer now! It's disgusting malware!

ihavequestions

Ya thats proberly whats happening! I cant bloody download from realplayer when the video is playing in it I don't know how ha! Am I dunno! I'll try now.

EDIT: Nope I cant, stuuupid!

ihavequestions

amacachi wrote: »

Probably an update from Youtube, Real will most likely get around it soon.

Also, get every bit of RealPlayer off your computer now! It's disgusting malware!

Ahhh what you mean by malware?! Dangerous?

amacachi

ihavequestions wrote: »

Ahhh what you mean by malware?! Dangerous?

Nah it isn't really, it's just not something I'd want on my computer. There's better, cleaner things around for downloading videos from Youtube.

ihavequestions

Ah. Can you tell me these programmes for downloading songs from YouTube? I'm like technologicaly challenged! I uninstalled real player!

Screaminmidget

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=youtube+music+downloader

Carl Sagan

ihavequestions wrote: »

Ah. Can you tell me these programmes for downloading songs from YouTube? I'm like technologicaly challenged! I uninstalled real player!

Just search whatever song you want on Google with 'zippyshare' after it. You should find a download link.

Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan wrote: »

Just search whatever song you want on Google with 'zippyshare' after it. You should find a download link.

Or 'site:mediafire.com' in your search string in Google.