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Re:Rationality: From AI to Zombies by TeMPOraL on Friday March 20, 2015 @01:59PM (#9239380)
One reason is that you'd need to prove that the lastic impact is in fact zero. 3^^^3 dust specks is enough for one of them to rub something in a wrong way that rubs something else in the wrong way that gives a person cancer.
Re:Rationality: From AI to Zombies by zyxley on Friday March 20, 2015 @03:47PM (#9240265)
Having a speck of dust in one's eye will change the course of life in a tiny way for any given person, true, but unless we're postulating an even more absurd edge case like "everyone blinking at exactly the same time makes a blip in the physics experiment machine go unnoticed and a week later the universe explodes", it's a change that's going to be effectively random and indistinguishable from the general minor messiness of human life.
Re:Rationality: From AI to Zombies by jtheory on Friday March 20, 2015 @07:30PM (#9241283)
You're not making a serious effort to guess at what difference it might make, though.

Example (this is actually true!) -- I have a life-long inflammation in both eyes that started in one eye when I was about 5, and eventually spread to the other.

The specialists weren't able to figure out the original cause; their best guess was basically a speck of dust -- just the wrong speck of dust (maybe with a microorganism in it?), in the wrong place, that my immune system attacked and then just kept on attacking even after the original speck had been gone for years. Medication plus a series of unpleasant surgeries have managed to keep my eyes relatively functional, so far, but others with the same condition certainly do lose all vision.

Obviously this isn't a common result; but given enough specks of dust.... Well, you have to start doing some math.