Statistics, probability

Throughout the night last night I was infatuated with probability. I seem to not sleep very well for some reason because whenever I would half way awake my mind would be filled with what it means that there is a 40% chance of rain.

What exactly does that mean?

It’s some sort of problem that my mind just started riding upon.

I’m not really sure what it means.

I know it does something for me, but I’m not really sure it means anything. It’s like an empty statement: “there’s a 30% chance that this person will open the door.” It really describes a state of being too pretty much nothing at all. For what is the state of existence that it “could happen 30% of the time”? Or that “there’s a one in three chance”.

It is such a strange statement, and even more strange is that somehow I feel that it describes something for me. I feel like it describes for me a state of nothingness. I keep repeating that over and over again in my head. There’s a one in three chance that something will happen pretty much means… Nothing.

As something that exists, I would have to say it compels me to think a certain way or to believe something or to act in a certain way, but I’m not really sure it gives me anything that actually exists. It’s like a fantasy that we have faith that it’s going to… I don’t know, I’m not sure what is going on there. 

It’s such a conundrum I just keep coming up with the word “nothing” to describe what it is. Lol

Let me see if I can describe to you what I’m coming upon and maybe you readers will have a better word or a description for what’s going on with me around it.

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Let’s say there is indeed a one in three chance that something will occur.

If indeed the event occurs then it indeed occurred not one in three times, but indeed every time, in fact, the only time it occurred was the time that it occurred.

This is where the statistical part comes in because indeed I can lay out in front of me a bunch of situations and I can maybe count how many times something comes up red as opposed to how many time something comes up blue and say that statistically one out of three is red, say. But what does it really mean to then predict into the future to say that 30% of the time this situation will end up red?

I think it only comes out of my thinking. It’s not really saying anything about what exists or what does not exist or what can exist. I think it ultimately frames a situation so I may think a certain way about it, so I can cater activity around it.

Just because something occurs or is predicted occur one out of three times does not mean that there’s a 30% chance that it’s going to occur. That translation is non-Sequitur if we really think about it. A 30% chance of rain, does that mean that one out of three times it’s going to rain? How do we determine the framework of this 30%? Do we measure it by an hour, by a minute, by five days, by a month? If there’s 30% chance that it’s going to rain today, does that mean that eight out of the 24 hours it’s going to rain for sure? Or does it mean for this microsecond that it will have rained a third of the time, hence that because the microsecond is divisible infinitely that it indeed did rain a third of that moment., And that I just didn’t perceive it in that instance. But then if I I am indeed experiencing it raining does that mean that the infinite division of microseconds has revealed that a third of that infinity is manifesting it south for me now such that I occupy that one in three chance?

It is so ridiculous to think about things and this way I think that’s why I call it “nothing” because in itself it really is just this fantasy that I am involving myself with in order to determine or make sense of how I might be behaving at any time or making choices.

One might even be able to entertain the idea that in the realm of probability I’ve left the Kantian World of our priority categories, and entered the world of posterior faith, Of habit.

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And I’ve been going over Michelle Foucault Recently. And it seems to me that much of the way that people have interpreted him, and indeed with one can read into his work itself, is that he was deeply invested in this habit. Hence all of his writings reveal that the knowledge-power is at work most likely though because he is having faith in what is left out of it; namely, “nothing”. It seems like he’s talking about something significant, but then when you really think about how it could even be possible for him to develop such a discourse of power-knowledge, Just to say, in the way that he does, the meaning that he’s putting forth, one really hast to realize that he’s really talking about nothing at all, and that the extent that he might be talking about something significant actually in reality, we would be implementing a sort of faith within that Knowledge-power for even it to have any meaning whatsoever in our lives.





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