what’s meant by “life”? If the question is “something recognized by a majority of humans as life”, I’d give a very different answer than if the question is “something recognized by any human as life”.
There’s also some e-prime-flavored breakage to “is” in the probability questions, perhaps intrinsic to all probability questions. For instance, there are some people who go through life with absolute certainty that the government is controlled by camouflaged reptiles, and other people who find reptiles the best available metaphor for predicting how the government will behave. I believe it’s overwhelmingly likely that tissue samples and full-body scans of all politicians would show them to be biologically indistinguishable from other humans, yet it is simultaneously true that some people live in a world where the politicians are “really” reptilian and the tissue samples were faked somehow. What probability in that box would accurately communicate this view?
what’s meant by “life”? If the question is “something recognized by a majority of humans as life”, I’d give a very different answer than if the question is “something recognized by any human as life”.
There’s also some e-prime-flavored breakage to “is” in the probability questions, perhaps intrinsic to all probability questions. For instance, there are some people who go through life with absolute certainty that the government is controlled by camouflaged reptiles, and other people who find reptiles the best available metaphor for predicting how the government will behave. I believe it’s overwhelmingly likely that tissue samples and full-body scans of all politicians would show them to be biologically indistinguishable from other humans, yet it is simultaneously true that some people live in a world where the politicians are “really” reptilian and the tissue samples were faked somehow. What probability in that box would accurately communicate this view?