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Kyo · 11-30-2003, 12:49 PM

- To begin with, one should not drop apathy. I was not being snide with that question. It is important for philosophical discussion to result in some kind of gain; I believe that philosophical discussion purely for its own sake is a waste of time and effort. There is a reason that many 'laypeople' disdain philosophy as merely an intellectual diversion.

- Chaos theory in fact has quite a lot to do with my tossing of the coin. The premise in that argument is that each toss is an independant event - an assumption that chaos theory blatantly refutes.

- Happyraul, you do not disagree that the probability of tossing tails on each individual toss does not decrease, regardless of the number of tails you have tossed before it. I argue that this fact alone is enough to refute the statement that the probability of tossing 30 tails in a row is so close to zero that it might as well be zero (and yes, 'in a row' being the key term). Each time you toss a coin, it is a completely isolated event. Therefore, your current toss does not 'see' how many tails you have tossed previous to this toss. The chances of you tossing a tails on your one millionth toss is equivalent to the chances of you tossing tails on your first toss. In short, my argument is that if the probability is not zero, it can not be considered zero, regardless of how close to zero it actually is.

- Taken another way, we consider what actually makes the probability decrease: the number of tosses. The chance of getting any particular sequence of heads or tails decreases at an equal rate as you increase the number of tosses. Therefore, the chances of tossing any particular sequence of heads and tails goes to zero as the number of tosses approaches infinity. If you consider each sequence to be a sequence of events as they have occured in reality, the probability of our specific reality occuring is extremely close to zero - so close, in fact, that it might as well be zero by your argument. And yet, here we are.

- Bypassing your 'paradoxical' 3D surface, consider just the spatial components of matter; ie. the exact location of any given particle in three dimensional space. We will assume that there are a finite number of particles, and a finite number of possible orientations of these particles into elements. However, if you claim that space is infinite, then there exists an infinite number of possibilities for the location of each particle. Therefore, I argue that my infinite-sided dice is, in fact, an acceptable analogy for this discussion, assuming that the universe is, in fact, infinite.

11-30-2003, 12:49 PM	#33 (permalink)
Kyo Crazy	- To begin with, one should not drop apathy. I was not being snide with that question. It is important for philosophical discussion to result in some kind of gain; I believe that philosophical discussion purely for its own sake is a waste of time and effort. There is a reason that many 'laypeople' disdain philosophy as merely an intellectual diversion. - Chaos theory in fact has quite a lot to do with my tossing of the coin. The premise in that argument is that each toss is an independant event - an assumption that chaos theory blatantly refutes. - Happyraul, you do not disagree that the probability of tossing tails on each individual toss does not decrease, regardless of the number of tails you have tossed before it. I argue that this fact alone is enough to refute the statement that the probability of tossing 30 tails in a row is so close to zero that it might as well be zero (and yes, 'in a row' being the key term). Each time you toss a coin, it is a completely isolated event. Therefore, your current toss does not 'see' how many tails you have tossed previous to this toss. The chances of you tossing a tails on your one millionth toss is equivalent to the chances of you tossing tails on your first toss. In short, my argument is that if the probability is not zero, it can not be considered zero, regardless of how close to zero it actually is. - Taken another way, we consider what actually makes the probability decrease: the number of tosses. The chance of getting any particular sequence of heads or tails decreases at an equal rate as you increase the number of tosses. Therefore, the chances of tossing any particular sequence of heads and tails goes to zero as the number of tosses approaches infinity. If you consider each sequence to be a sequence of events as they have occured in reality, the probability of our specific reality occuring is extremely close to zero - so close, in fact, that it might as well be zero by your argument. And yet, here we are. - Bypassing your 'paradoxical' 3D surface, consider just the spatial components of matter; ie. the exact location of any given particle in three dimensional space. We will assume that there are a finite number of particles, and a finite number of possible orientations of these particles into elements. However, if you claim that space is infinite, then there exists an infinite number of possibilities for the location of each particle. Therefore, I argue that my infinite-sided dice is, in fact, an acceptable analogy for this discussion, assuming that the universe is, in fact, infinite. __________________ Sure I have a heart; it's floating in a jar in my closet, along with my tonsils, my appendix, and all of the other useless organs I ripped out. Last edited by Kyo; 11-30-2003 at 12:52 PM..