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| A Loaded Dice - My 'Explanation' of a 'Simple throw of the Dice' |
| This was my response to the barrel load of criticism I got from the Google Newsgroupees! After this, I got virtually no response. Jan/01/02 A Loaded Dice My 'Explanation' of a 'Simple throw of the Dice' A Simple throw of the Dice (Original Posting) I want you to imagine a situation were somebody is throwing a dice. First they throw a dice and get a six, they then throw another six and then another. After that a friend starts to take notice of what's going on. The friend then says "I bet you 10 pounds it's not another six". The dice thrower feels he's on a lucky streak and says "OK" and rolls again, getting another six. The friend wanting his money back, eggs on the dice thrower to try for another, figuring that rolling five sixes in a row is pushing the boundaries of normal luck and so has a excellent chance of winning his money back. The dice thrower takes up the challenge rolls the dice and.................. Well the ending of the story is irrelevant, but at that exact moment where we left the story, the odds of the friend of winning his money back is 1 in 6, Six dice sides but with only one side it can land face up on. And that has been the case mathematically speaking every throw. But we ordinary people don't experience it like that. We know that the 'chances' are not even with every throw and that the Dicethrower was less likely at that last throw to get a six than at the beginning. It's like the dice was increasing the number of sides as it went along, because it was BEING EFFECTED BY THE THROWS BEFORE IT! I can't stress how anti science that is. .. One of the ways I've come to view what's happening in a 'A Simple throw of the dice' is that it's extremely similar to how Chaos theory sees physical proceses. 'Numbers' swirl around just like the flow of water (turbulence), or weather systems and create a 'temporary order' out of randomness, and then just dissolve away. It is fundamentally unpredictable over the long term, but 'patterns' and clusters appear for limited periods and there are periods when there is a lot of clustering of 'events'. And it is these 'patterns' that I believe Gamblers chase after with their 'systems', which seem to produce enough success to keep them going, but which ultimately fails them in the long term. Now I know there's a pile of objections I can hear in my head, the main objection being my theory breaks the law of causality. But it has descriptive power for two points 1) It 'explains' to me why most ordinary non mathematically trained people feel an acausal connection in my dice throwing story, it's just a minor fluctuation of seeming 'order' which gives us a minor ablity to predict for the dice a likely outcome in the very near future. From a vast experience of dice games we notice when we throw the dice the majority of throws seem random or are in a state of 'disorder' but when we see a series of repetitive numbers we see that this looks like 'order' and recognise that this is not 'natural' and we know that it will return to the normal state of disorder pretty soon. 2) It also 'explains' to me why gambler's logic becomes the gamblers' fallacy. - And to elaborate on that point I'm aware that many intelligent people have succumbed to this gambler's fallacy, people like Dostoyevsky, Graham Greene an Ian Fleming too mention a few. Now it's easy, too easy to dismiss this as psychological aberration, but from a common sense, experiential viewpoint I find it hard to believe that these thoughtful and intelligent men's systems didn't produce some real results and enough of them to convince themselves that their systems have validity. To me their fallacy was not that their systems didn't work, but that they believed they could beat chance in the long run. As a matter of interest Dostoyevsky and Greene saw the light of reason, I don't know about Fleming though. What I have presented to you here of course is not proof, it's not even a proper theory, it is just an observation. An observation and the implications of which, have fascinated me since I first read about it and then devised that thought experiment about 20 years ago. This observation has such power for me because it comes from my direct experience and is commonly shared by everybody except scientists and mathematicians. And it's why I feel confident enough to argue against a bunch of experts. And here's a thought for you. When my daughter first emerged into the world she stared right into my eyes and appeared to be looking right at me. I was aware that from a 'scientific' view that this was 'impossible', babies brains hadn't developed properly or something. I then remember a couple of years later Desmond Morris on a TV programme demonstrating with a real live newborn baby that not only can they focus on you, but they actually imitate you! Experts Schmexperts! How on earth can child development consensus be so wrong? They do this, because when going through college they've just regurgitated other peoples 'Facts' and not actually bothered to look much at the actual source material itself i.e. The baby. Now don't go mad! I'm not using this example to promote my argument, I just wanted to level the playing field a bit. But there is one thing that I've extrapolated from this example and other information like it, is that, according to the laws of probablilty Science must be riddled with this kind of stuff. And maybe, just maybe this is one of those situations were, what the experts are saying does not correlate with human experience.. Look what I'm trying to do is put the onus up to you to explain to me that what I perceive, is wrong. Because up to now I've been presented with that view that the dice miust be loaded (which was not in the spirit of the thought experiment) and probablity theory arguments that show there is only randomness because of analysis of numbers on a large scale and that I should test my theory out in a casino. But if you look carefully at the thought experiment you see that it is focused in on a very small amount of time and that was deliberate. Because I wanted to make the point that, at that precise moment in time and no forther into the future than that, we have some minor predictive ability (and that doesn't mean it's going to be right) based on events that seem to be only connected by time. This is also the reason why in the thought experiment I deliberately put a high number of four consecutive 6's in a row, to make that guess on the fifth throw have much more predictive value of it not going to be a six. |
| The Modern Paranormalist |