Probability.

No.

Thats the point i'm making.. everything logicaly must have had a 100% chance of happening.. otherwise it woduln't have.

The universe had 100% definity of existing.

This is why alot of people become religious.. because they think that everything happened with such slight probability.. that a god must have caused it to happen.

Think of it this way.

There was a billion billion possible outcomes of the big bang.. there was 100% that ONE of those billion billion outcomes would occur. So one of those outcomes did occur.. and the result is the universe you see today.. if any of the other occurances happened.. then everything would be a whole lot different.

 

Yes, but any of the other billions of outcomes could just as easily have occured.

It just so happened to be the one we exist in.

 

Yeh exactly.. the universe we live in isn't magical or anything.. there is no order.. we are just one of billions of possibilities.

If one of the other outcomes occured.. then you'd be saying 'oh look how amazing it is that the universe is how it is' .... one of them had to happen .. and this is the one that did.

Theres nothing special about it though.

 

basically you keep applying probability to the past, where it is meaningless. the point of probability is to help predict what will happen in the future. everything that has already happened has 100% probability of having happened, but before it happened nobody knew that. there were several possible outcomes, including what actually occurred.

your big bang point. assuming of course that it was known for sure that there would be a big bang, there was a 100% chance that one outcome would occur, but the point of probability is to see the odds of each outcome occurring. so during the big bang, when there was a 100% chance of some outcome, there was still only a one in several billion chance of this outcome, just like there was a one in several billion chance of each other outcome.

i agree that using it as an argument for religion is stupid; of course so are pretty much all arguments for religion. like i said before though, probability is only useful for predicting what is going to happen. the past is used to determine probability, not the other way around

 

I'm sorry, i was just explaining it in a complicated way.

Probability is a tool used to explain to people the most likely outcome of a situation that already has a destiny. The destiny is already set out.. but us as humans can't measure what that outcome will be.. so we use probability to estimate the outcome of something that is already decided.

Think about it.. for something to happen, all the factors leading up to it must be a definite thing... and all the factors leading up to those factors are also definite.. so on and so fourth.

If you re-trace the happenings of something you will see all the causes of it.. and then all the causes of the causes.. and so on.. there is no room for freedom of choice.

It's just determinism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism

"Determinism is the philosophical proposition that every event, including human cognition and behavior, decision and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. Determinism may also be defined as the thesis that there is at any instant exactly one physically possible future."

It's prtty basic logic. It is a given fact that if the universe ONLY abides by the laws of physics.. then we cannot have free will and destiny is pre-defined.

 

ok, i see what you're saying. all i'll add is that that doesn't mean that probability is void. it is still useful for the purpose you describe below

 

interesting question. the more I think about free will, the more I doubt it exists.

I always thought determinism made a lot of sense, and see everything that happens as a sort of mathematical equation. everything is caught up in inertia. but who knows?

 

I used to be a die-hard determinist and would have agreed whole-heartedly with many of the posts here. That was until I began to experience what might be called consciously induced spiritual growth. It was then that I realized that, as zen arcade has inadvertently alluded to, determinism can never be applied beyond the realm of conceptualization. In terms of any given individual's immediate experience, it is absolutely impossible to experience determinism. And thus it simply becomes a mute point at some stage in an individual's personal evolution. Free will is the only perspective an individual will have while experiencing the upliftment of consciousness. There's always an option to exert one's willpower, but irrespective of the actual existence of determinism in the universal scheme of things, one can never exert their "determinism". So, for me, determinism is quite simply no longer a relevent aspect of my conceptual framework -- because it has no practical application (beyond allowing an individual to reinforce their ego-attachment to conceptualizing).


Travis