Debate Games.

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Originally Posted by Banefull

Not necessarily true. The message may not have been spontaneously created. The message is a combination of symbols that we interpret as having meaning. If at a given time there was only one symbol and the presence of that symbol had an influence on the formation of another symbol nearby it, then did not the message create itself? If the steps in the formation of the message are not independent events, then did it not create itself? The message could have very well been generated through pseudo random processes.

Although it could have been created by some random events, experience tells us that sequences of letters of not-insignificant length that follow familiar grammatical rules tend not to have been produced by random phenomena, but rather by some form of intelligence, whether human or algorithmic in nature; this logic can also be applied to the formation of the characters themselves, in that it seems unlikely that the pixels on the screen would randomly form such recognisable patterns, although just as all combinations of lottery numbers are equally likely, we tend to believe that recognisable sequences such as that of consecutive integers are less likely to occur at the moment of the balls being picked, and so we can conclude that it is indeed possible that the sentence formed itself despite such reasoning appearing to be counterintuitive and potentially diametrically opposed to the manner with which we fhjosdfsdh fhksjaf sd fhskfog of hsfksdfh 8fh ihasffsflkdfudsf............................

[Banefull]

Originally Posted by stdout

Although it could have been created by some random events, experience tells us that sequences of letters of not-insignificant length that follow familiar grammatical rules tend not to have been produced by random phenomena, but rather by some form of intelligence, whether human or algorithmic in nature; this logic can also be applied to the formation of the characters themselves, in that it seems unlikely that the pixels on the screen would randomly form such recognisable patterns, although just as all combinations of lottery numbers are equally likely, we tend to believe that recognisable sequences such as that of consecutive integers are less likely to occur at the moment of the balls being picked, and so we can conclude that it is indeed possible that the sentence formed itself despite such reasoning appearing to be counterintuitive and potentially diametrically opposed to the manner with which we fhjosdfsdh fhksjaf sd fhskfog of hsfksdfh 8fh ihasffsflkdfudsf............................

This proves that a specific sequence of characters can develop given an infinite amount of time; however, if the message formed in this way, then it did not assemble itself, it just occurred through sheer statistical probrability. For a message to truly assemble itself, its constituent parts have to influence the formation and arrangement of the other parts.

I used the term "pseudo random processes" because the formation of the message may appear to have occurred through random processes when in all actuality, each step in its formaiton was not independent. For ex: computers cannot truly generate random numbers. Each generated value is not truly independent of each other but the overall distribution of values of a large group of these numbers appears to be very close to true randomness.

The question becomes whether the message can influence its own process of creation and/or whether its parts can have a common pre-determined design goal.