Somebody might have misunderstood the thought experiment.
Ok, mind is blown.
And also… I kind of think this double entendre was intended from the beginning.
There is a thought experiment that says: given enough time, a million monkeys writing on typewriters will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare.
This thought experiment is used to argue for and against a lot of things, often times in arguments surrounding evolution.
But the OP just explained that we are the evolved monkeys and we produced Shakespeare.
And this makes me think that whoever imagined the thought experiment, knew about this double meaning from the start.
So they basically just wanted to call Shakespeare a monkey with a typewriter.
kind of think this double entendre was intended from the beginning.
Well I feel dumb now for not having ever thought about it.
While sure it’s a funny joke, it also kind of misses the point of the original analogy. The monkeys are intended to be stand ins for entirely random inputs, which Shakespeare, and the human species as a whole, is not.
But to get Shakespeare it was random, all the wars and plagues and volcanic eruptions and his ancestors moving around the country and him being born in a time where writing plays was a viable career
Those won’t random acts though. They were decisions and actions from outside inputs. If you had enough data you could recreate the events from the big bang onwards in theory. Assuming human decision making is deterministic.
Random in this case means random as in if a particle decays or not. Not simply harder to predict as in human behaviour.
Yeah but the odds are only meaningful if someone was expecting Hamlett specifically to get written in the first place. Without that it ceases to be a significant event, and reduces to merely the event that happened. Just because one arrangement of molecules is unique doesn’t mean it’s special if any number of other arrangements is functionally the same. The same argument applies to any person. Yeah the odds of you in particular being born are astronomical, but that doesn’t make you special, because if it wasn’t you it would have been someone substantially similar to you. After all, your parents were making a baby either way.
Well someone did write Hamlet but we don’t actually know who. So the thought experiment holds up even better because it is a random person we don’t know much about.
As the owner of both an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of typewriters, I can tell you from experience that I have not gotten one single work of Shakespeare, but I have had to clean a lot of monkey poo off the walls.
To tell the truth, it is an infinite amount of poo. I just didn’t want to shock the readers.
