Hitting a small target in a large searchspace is only impressive if you can define the target beforehand. It’s the basis of the Fertilization Fallacy: what are the chances that precisely the right sperm fertilized the egg to produce me? The fallacy lies in the fact that I’m looking backward from the present, a present in which my particular configuration already exists.
If I flip a coin a hundred times, I will produce a specific sequence out of a sequencespace of 2^100. That always happens when I flip the coin that many times. This is not marvelous because I had no way of determining ahead of time what the sequence would be—the flipping wasn’t a search. Likewise, without the ability to predefine a target genomic configuration, the fact that I resulted from the spermatic lottery is not significant. Someone was going to result, and it happened to be me.
Let’s say we screen out all of the differences in human morality and look at the result, however large or minute it may be. What do the agreed-upon principles tell us about the nature of what is right?
Hitting a small target in a large searchspace is only impressive if you can define the target beforehand. It’s the basis of the Fertilization Fallacy: what are the chances that precisely the right sperm fertilized the egg to produce me? The fallacy lies in the fact that I’m looking backward from the present, a present in which my particular configuration already exists.
If I flip a coin a hundred times, I will produce a specific sequence out of a sequencespace of 2^100. That always happens when I flip the coin that many times. This is not marvelous because I had no way of determining ahead of time what the sequence would be—the flipping wasn’t a search. Likewise, without the ability to predefine a target genomic configuration, the fact that I resulted from the spermatic lottery is not significant. Someone was going to result, and it happened to be me.
Let’s say we screen out all of the differences in human morality and look at the result, however large or minute it may be. What do the agreed-upon principles tell us about the nature of what is right?
An inordinate fondness for beetles.