81–90 of 180 posts
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So do Yolngu and Wiradjuri Dreamtime stories that date back 70,000+ years. Worth looking into?
Yeah pretty much any pagan religion has some sort of post mortuary soothing story. Worth looking into?
* not Christian other religions in the Roman Empire, or (more generally)
* not Christian religions.
Easier to say most, if not all, religions have an afterlife story.
Why do I keep (mis)remembering a fact that most members of the human race are alive right now?
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument This is worth a read for those unfamiliar with this argument. Essentially, it’s a way to make a probabilistic guess for when humans will go extinct based on the number of humans that have been born. There are several variants and as far as I know, the argument’s premise has never been conclusively refuted.
> In other words, one can assume with 95% certainty that any individual human would be within the last 95% of all the humans ever to be born
"any individual human" really means "a human chosen at random" from all humans who will ever live. Then they go on to assume that this is representative of the humans who have already lived. But clearly there's a problem there. They find a statistic that is true of all past-and-future humans and then assumed it must be equally true of all past humans as well. In fact we've exactly chosen the subset (past humans) as those that are least likely for this statistic to apply. It'd be like deriving some statistic about being 95% sure any given human can run a mile within 10 minutes, and then applying that statistic specifically to those humans with no legs. It's that dumb -- clearly past humans are fundamentally different from past-and-future humans in exactly the property they're sampling.
You can easily see this problem by simply going back in time and applying the same argument at any point in history. At some point, the total number of humans who had ever been born was 1 billion. At that point, we would have been 95% sure that the total number of humans would never exceed 20 billion. Oops! In fact, we would have been 99% sure that the total number of humans would never exceed 100 billion. Double oops!
Go back to when the total number of humans who had ever been born was 1 million. We would have been 99.999% sure the total number of humans would never exceed 100 billion. Triple oops!
It's a nonsense argument.
If you are just curious, the number is 117B people who was ever born on Earth. High amount of guesstimates and assumptions involved. Yadda yadda popsci article phrases.
Now wonder how many people have been born anywhere but Earth
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I guess I'm one of those people because I read Wikipedia and this seems like a complete non-sequitur to me: > The Copernican principle suggests that any one human is equally likely (along with the other N-1 humans) to find themselves in any position n of the total population N. I feel like I must be misunderstanding the argument because it just doesn't make sense to me. First, why should I even assume N is finite? Se…
> First, why should I even assume N is finite? Our current understanding of physics dictates that the (observable) universe has a finite size and a finite lifespan, from which it logically follows that there can't be an infinite amount of humans.
Also, is there no phenomenon here where a sufficiently large N becomes increasingly indistinguishable from infinity?
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We do put huge amounts of effort into ending it, which so far has only served to delay it by decades. It's part of life that it ends, it seems. No way of getting around that no matter how many sci-fi solutions Bostrom proposes as realistic.
I think there's a much more firm reason you're right - life expectancy isn't increasing how most think it is. There was an interesting study [1] that examined the life expectancy of all known individuals from Ancient Greece, excluding those with violent deaths (assassination, forced suicide, etc) and found the average male born before 100BC lived to 72 years old on average. In America in 2019 (to avoid COVID biases),…
For me, Bostrom is an egotist of the type that wishes to escape his thanatotic drive and acceptance that life just ends. It’s unfortunate, terrible even, but it seems as natural as birth. Proposing solutions such as “mind uploading” are not only ridiculous but the reality of the idea would be hellish. What’s worse is that he’s a philosopher so actually creating the technology to do it simply is not his problem – someone else will have to do the implementation, regardless of how nightmarishly difficult it could be. He could just as easily be inventing hoverboards or time machines. It’s not his problem to stay within the bounds of possibility, even the accepted bounds of what can realistically be designed and coded and implemented – he just has his graphs and statistics of work that other people have done in the past, and can now order them to fulfil his desires in future, one of the main ones being his egotistic desire for his ego to never die.
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Because I love life and there’s nothing after this?
Jesus claimed to offer everlasting life to those who believe in him (see Gospel of John). Worth looking into?
Why do I keep (mis)remembering a fact that most members of the human race are alive right now?
Same thing -- I know I came across that at some point in the past few years, and it seemed reasonable enough given exponential growth that I just accepted it as true without researching it further. Turns out it's one of those totally wrong "factoids" that nevertheless keeps getting repeated (like the only man-made structure you can see from space being the Great Wall, etc.), and which dates as far back as the 1970's…
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Now wonder how many people have been born anywhere but Earth
Apparently there have been cases of sexual intercourse on the ISS, so we could potentially have a human conceived there.
Makes me wonder how many more billions will have to die before we bother to put some actual effort into ending death, but I know that's a very obscure opinion. https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon
Wow, imagine having 117B people walking around on earth right now. No thank you.
And if you think owning a home is hard, just wait until every property in your city is owned by a group of immortal British lords who insist on women dressing modestly and "No Irish need apply" signs everywhere. This may not be too far away from what your actual town looks like right now, but at least we currently have the hope that those people will die and be replaced by slightly-saner ones.
I don't think that Earth had 300M people in 1 c.e. Roman empire with client states probably had population 30M, maybe another 30M for China and 30M for Indian subcontinent. These would absolutely dwarf everything else. No room for 3x of that.