PyramidHead
Contributor
Don't focus too much on that aspect of it, as it's just one way to independently designate something. You could also choose a number after it was picked but before it was revealed, and the same would be true. Or it could be "chosen" by another, separate random number generator, not deliberately (imagine the odds of two independent generators producing 360958 simultaneously!). The important part is that there is a coincidence between two things that didn't need to be associated with one another, and could have easily gone many other ways in which they weren't associated.Improbability is not a matter of picking one sample out of a bucket of many possible samples, as you rightly indicate with your example here. Improbability is when there is a coincidence between a random selection like that and another, independently designated thing. For example, there is nothing improbable about a random 6-digit number generator producing the number 360958. As you say, it has to produce some number, and 360958 is no less likely than any other. But if you had been given a slip of paper with the number 360958 written on it, and then watched as the generator randomly produced exactly that number, you would have witnessed something staggeringly improbable: not the generation of the number per se, but the generation of the same number that had just been independently designated as THIS number. This is why it's improbable that my lottery number will be the winner, but not improbable at all that SOME lottery number will be the winner. The improbability is at the intersection between specific and random selection.
Applying this reasoning to the universe, your take about life is correct. In a population of randomly and arbitrarily varying universes, if there is a chance that one combination of variables will yield conditions appropriate for life, such a universe will eventually emerge from the "random universe generator". So, the existence of life per se is thus not improbable. But a problem remains. There is something about this universe that, from your perspective, is independently designated: your presence in it. Even if SOME universe capable of supporting life were statistically inevitable, it's still staggeringly improbable that it should be THIS one, the universe YOU currently inhabit.
If you think there is nothing improbable about your existence in a universe capable of supporting life because you wouldn't be here to notice if you didn't exist, consider the analogy of Russian roulette. If you were given a revolver and a bullet and told to play Russian roulette, you would probably have serious doubts about your survival. If somebody told you that in all the adjacent rooms of this building, there are hundreds of other people playing the same game of Russian roulette, you wouldn't feel any better about YOUR odds. That is, just because the odds of SOME person surviving the game are good because there are many players, that fact doesn't make YOUR survival any more likely. Of course, the only way you'd exist to notice the outcome would be if you beat the odds and survived. But that doesn't make it any better for you, since there is still the same uncomfortable chance that you would in fact be one of those unlucky dead people.
Essentially, you must accept that your presence in a universe capable of supporting luck is explained by a happenstance convergence between (a) what the "random number generator" of this universe's initial conditions happens to produce in the way of intelligent life and (b) the specific conditions that needed to be met so that you would exist. There was never any guarantee that those conditions, which you might represent as a string of numbers like 360958, would ever be produced by the universe at the right time and place to bring you into being. Moreover, there is no justification for why your existence should even be possible at all, that it should be conditional on ANY "number" the universe might spit out. Yet, here you are, and the hypothesis that your existence depended on a specific set of biological specifications being satisfied at a specific place and time says you're basically luckier than a person who has won the lottery thousands of times in a row.
The alternative hypothesis, which resolves this improbability, is that the conditions for your existence are not so strict. You would have been one of the organisms produced by ANY universe capable of supporting life, even if its history went differently from this one. It's not improbable that you were the thousand-times lottery winner, because you have all the tickets. Any winner is you by definition.
I don't think this is the main issue. I am quite sure that the improbability they speak of stops at life/humans and not any particular human. But I still don't see how my existence is a coincidence if there is only this universe.
In your example, a number was chosen before it was picked. What or who chose me to see if I will exist in the universe?
In the case of existence, we have two apparently unconnected chance events: the emergence of a universe that can support life and the emergence within that universe of a being that is you. A universe that can support life, on its own, is perhaps rare but as you say, it might be expected to emerge eventually in a large enough sample set. But if your existence is restricted to exactly the person you are now, including your whole history before now and all the details of your biological and genetic makeup, you only had one shot at coming into being. In hindsight, it looks like a carefully coordinated dance, where one misstep would have resulted in somebody else being here instead of you. If there are only a few possible universes capable of supporting life, then there are only a few chances of getting the conditions that enable your unique self to be part of it.
Exactly. It would have been vastly more likely that one of them should be sitting in your place right now. If you win the lottery, the same kind of thing happens: on the one hand, it's true that anybody who won would have been amazed at their luck, but that doesn't make it any less amazing (from your perspective) that YOU were in fact the winner. From your perspective, there was an improbable coincidence between the number that the machine spit out and the designation of that same number as YOURS. It had to be SOME person's number--that could have happened in lots of ways. But for it to be your number, it could have only happened in one way, and that's what makes it improbable.And, anyone who is not me, then, should be amazed by the odds of themselves coming into the universe.
Every lottery winner can rightly regard their experience as improbable from their own perspective while simultaneously agreeing that it is not improbable from an outside perspective that somebody would win the lottery eventually. Neither perspective is more "true" or "objective"; they are saying different things and are both accurate.