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Re:The Conundrum of Life's Origin by snakeyjake on Thursday January 16, 2025 @05:58PM (#42731994)
You are mistaken. I don't think one million sixes is any less likely than any random combination. I know that the odds of all possibilities are the same. That's why gambling disgusts me and lotteries hold no fascination with me.

I also know that it is impossible.

If you disagree, show some proof. Not "a proof". Proof.

I live in the real, not theoretical world.

Create a video showing one million dice rolls that have all hit six, and I will accept that it is not impossible to roll a die one million times and have every roll hit six.

No numbers. No computer programs. No math. Dice.

Mother. Fucking. Dice. Cubes covered in pips.

Real, physical, standard layman's definition dice rolled in the real, physical, actual world.

Show me! Please!

Until then? S'ay imposseebluh.

Re:The Conundrum of Life's Origin by tsimionescu on Friday January 17, 2025 @01:34AM (#42734710)
I'm not saying that we'll see the all six combination if we actually threw a million dice. I'm saying that if we throw a million dice, we'll see some combination, and that should be just as amazing as the all six combination, because, whatever it is, it was monumentally unlucky to happen.

My only point is that there is no way to say "events with probability < X are impossible in real life", for X > 0. For any probability value, it's trivial to construct an experiment that will be guaranteed to have an outcome whose probability is that low.

Re:The Conundrum of Life's Origin by prmph on Friday January 17, 2025 @04:47AM (#42735809)
This argument I think hints at something i regard as mysterious regarding probability as applied to the real world (as opposed to the platonic, pure math concept)

My own view is that there something deep about probability akin to the measurement problem. My view is that probability is not an objective fixed thing, but that it is something relative to the observer of experiments.

Re:The Conundrum of Life's Origin by tsimionescu on Friday January 17, 2025 @06:07AM (#42736299)
> My view is that probability is not an objective fixed thing, but that it is something relative to the observer of experiments.

This is basically the Bayesian view of probability - that probability is a measure of the knowledge of an agent, not a property of a system. There are even some interpretations of QM that try to find a way to apply this to the measurement problem.

However, for this particular case, I don't think there is anything all that mysterious. If a process is more or less equally likely to produce any of a huge number of outcomes, it stands to reason that you can't predict which outcome will happen, even while knowing some outcome is fully guaranteed.