Born to do Math 33 – Entropic Arguments
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/09
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Rick Rosner: That you have entropic arguments. You can argue things about entropy and order that show why the world is not crazy. It is orderly. That the odds—this is a fairly common example. The odds that you would suddenly suffocate because all of the air molecules in a room randomly suddenly decide to be where you’re not. The odds of that happening of that are so low that it wouldn’t happen in a quadrillion lifetimes of the universe.
Yea, they might rush someplace else, but there’d have to be a reason. If you’re in an airplane, and then hole gets punched into the fuselage, then there’s a reason all of the air rushed to one place. So in general, we exist in a world where things happen for a reason and random action doesn’t generally – unless things have been set up like a coin toss. Chaotic randomness doesn’t happen. Things generally have causes.
One reason we will run into randomness making us suffocate is we don’t live long enough to be threatened by random motion of air molecules. We are limited creatures – limited in space and time. There’s the viral lady that says, “No time for that!” We don’t have time for that in our 70, 80, 90 years on Earth. We have to take shortcuts that reflect the extreme probability that ignore the extreme improbabilities.
We can deal with entities as if they are precisely existent because we don’t have time to deal with the tiny improbabilities that might make non-existent.
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