31 enjoyable minutes.
In 2005.
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Dawkins TED talk
August 22, 2007 by seedsaside
2 Responses
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Brilliant indeed. I have a slight disagreement, however, on the probability of the appearance of life (on any given planet): even assuming there are 10^20 planets in the Universe (which seems reasonable) and that life appeared at least one (obviously it did), I don’t think this implies a lower bound at 10^-20 on the (Bayesian) *a priori* probability of its appearance. I believe in the (rather weak) form of the anthropic principle which states that we should disregard our own existence in counting probabilities in this regard, because it is the starting point of our observation. (To take it into account would be the same error of reasoning as to cast a hundred dice, repeat a dozen times, and say “this particular 100-dice combination that I got must be very probable because I just rolled a dozen times to get it!”.) But this is really a minor quibble and it only strengthens Dawkin’s point.
As a mathematician, I tend to be optimistic as to what human minds can imagine. This is because mathematics is full of concepts far stranger and unimaginable than the real world (I mean the physical world) has use of: quantum mechanics and relativity appear generally unsurprising to mathematicians because we are accustomed to far stranger theories. And the good news is, when dealing with such concepts, the human mind still seems capable of developing some form of intuition which renders us capable of handling them somewhat efficiently. I think this is no accident, that there is a theoretical reason behind this, which I see as a form of the Church-Turing thesis (namely, that the human mind is universal in the same way Turing machines are universal in some theoretical sense). A deeper reason (which ties back to the first point I make) is whether this “Turing capability” of human minds should be explained by evolutionary or anthropic-principle-ary arguments (I favor the former, but things aren’t as clear-cut as I’d like them to be).
Gosh Gee Damm. I’m still thinking about your last point. While I think the human mind is generally able to (something I concede to each fellow human), and therefore sort of universal in some way, it is unfortunately obscured by far too many things to exhibit this kind of universality you’re speaking about. First, it may have been evolutionarily selected to be partly filled with all this dark stuff (but not dark matter for it is not dense, rather empty)(I’m speaking about the sort of stuff making Dawkins going into argument)…