I saw a post that said the odds of being born are 1 in 400 trillion.
Could someone could break this down or provide another number?
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Probabilities can be interpreted as either how often would the given outcome occur if you repeated the same scenario many times, or as a measure of your uncertainty about a given outcome.
So, in the first interpretation, if you somehow ran the history of humankind many times, how often would you end up with someone that you’d recognise as you? Probably not often, right? Maybe once in 400 trillion times? But then, how often would you end up with _someone_ in a broadly similar situation to you? Pretty often. Maybe every time, depending on what you mean by similar
Okay, so the second interpretation; how much uncertainty do you have about your own existence? None at all. If you’re able to consider the question then you definitely exist with 100% probability
So, how surprised should you be that you exist? Not very
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