Most people don’t get the thought experiment at all.
I’ve seen 300+ deep comment chains on reddit with people arguing bitterly back and forth if a monkey could even operate a typewriter, and how it’s absolutely impossible to get monkeys to type out a book, etc, etc, etc.
I think too many people don’t consider the monkey is not supposed to be making decisions, it’s just supposed to be inputting anything, literally anything, on a typewriter.
Like a random value generator, for typewriter keys.
You could get the same result throwing an infinite number of typewriters down an infinitely long mineshaft, but there will be even fewer people who would understand it 😭
I have argued with plenty of theists, they tend to cherry-pick parts of every idea to validate their extreme fear of death/God, so they hyper-fixate on the idea that “fantastic things” can happen with infinities, without addressing the problems that also come from infinities.
The idea behind the monkeys/typewriters thought experiment is to highlight just how problematic actual infinities would be in our universe, it’s an argument against things like gods occuring, because in an infinite, unbounded universe there would be an infinite number of infinitely powerful beings negating each other all out over large enough scales.
Even if you have countably infinite monkeys typing countably infinite strings for an infinite period of time, there will be an infinite number of strings that the monkeys haven’t typed, that will never be in the set of completed typed strings.
Most people don’t get the thought experiment at all.
I’ve seen 300+ deep comment chains on reddit with people arguing bitterly back and forth if a monkey could even operate a typewriter, and how it’s absolutely impossible to get monkeys to type out a book, etc, etc, etc.
I hate it here.
I think too many people don’t consider the monkey is not supposed to be making decisions, it’s just supposed to be inputting anything, literally anything, on a typewriter.
Like a random value generator, for typewriter keys.
You could get the same result throwing an infinite number of typewriters down an infinitely long mineshaft, but there will be even fewer people who would understand it 😭
Worse, creationists use the “watch maker’s paradox” as evidence of creation. Same idea but watch parts in a washing machine.
I have argued with plenty of theists, they tend to cherry-pick parts of every idea to validate their extreme fear of death/God, so they hyper-fixate on the idea that “fantastic things” can happen with infinities, without addressing the problems that also come from infinities.
The idea behind the monkeys/typewriters thought experiment is to highlight just how problematic actual infinities would be in our universe, it’s an argument against things like gods occuring, because in an infinite, unbounded universe there would be an infinite number of infinitely powerful beings negating each other all out over large enough scales.
The funny thing is, if you truly have infinite monkeys, it doesn’t matter if they’re using it correctly or not. There is an infinite amount of them.
Some infinities are bigger than others, though.
Even if you have countably infinite monkeys typing countably infinite strings for an infinite period of time, there will be an infinite number of strings that the monkeys haven’t typed, that will never be in the set of completed typed strings.
Cantor’s diagonalization proves it.