"I doubt that 'trying and failing' will do the trick. After all, many times we try to do something, fail at it, and yet - for whatever reasons - do not conclude "I can't do it." (It happened to me recently. I was trying to install a new pump on a dishwasher and was having no success, indeed I was failing miserably. I stopped for a while, tried again, and succeeded.) I am absolutely convinced that there is no phenomenological, introspective, felt (call it what you will) difference whatsoever between failing to do something which is possible (e.g. installing a dishwasher pump) and failing to do something which necessitarians call 'nomically impossible', e.g. flapping my arms and flying.

What do I feel when I find that I repeatedly fail to do something? Disappointment, remorse, anger, sadness, annoyance, irritability, fury, etc. Do I experience (physical or nomological) impossibility? Not that I can tell. I would not know how to recognize it if I did. I can experience that I have not done what I wanted; that I have tried especially hard; etc. But I do not see that I have experienced that I cannot do it. I may say, "I can't do it." But I have not experienced anything more than failure." -Norman Swartz

What evidence do you have that we experience something more than failure?

You really think you don't know it is physically impossible for you (or any human) to jump 300 feet in the air? How about 1,000 feet? It is not, of course, only experiencing failure. It is what we know about human physiology, and the force of gravity, that supports our knowledge that we cannot jump that distance.

It is the failure which indicates why it is physically impossible

I don't know that it's impossible. I only know that I've never seen it happen.



Presumably, you would claim we fail at things that aren't physically impossible. How do you tell the difference then?

You don't know enough about the human body to know it is impossible to jump 1,000 feet into the air? That is unbelievably sad.

Well, I'm wrong? I'm convinced.

I don't see how you can say, "pushing on the brake pedal before stopped my car therefore I think it will again", since it is that logic that is exactly what you arguing against.

What evidence do you have that we experience something more than failure?

Randomness doesn't mean that the next result will be different from the previous. That's a common misconception of people that haven't studied randomness.

I'm not arguing against regularities.

"Presumably, you would claim we fail at things that aren't physically impossible. How do you tell the difference then?" - Satan

By learning the difference of course. Are you seriously asking how we have decided that jumping a 1000 feet straight up is impossible while fixing some instrument around the house only "feels impossible" i.e. frustrating? I know that this is what you are asking, but are you serious? The answer is by learning the difference. That is something which you are claiming is philosophically misguided because we can never know the difference because there is no such difference i.e. what was true yesterday might not be true today and every once in a while we should try jumping one thousand feet in the air, or turning to a frog by clapping our shoes together or making money grow on trees. Drinking a case of wine without becoming intoxicated etc etc

I appended my previous post, do you see?

As for this "test" - One of the two is fictional, one is the factual recording of 100 flips. The factual record was made by a person, while the fictional one was made by a person who just marked the paper as he liked?

No, I can't tell the difference. I have one for you now. I have dealt out a sequence of playing cards. Can you describe to me the order in which they were dealt by suit? I'll get you started. It goes Spade, Diamond, Spade, Heart...This is more fun than talking.

I'd guess that A is the random one. B looks suspicious because there are no long runs of consecutive heads or tails.

But it's not all heads or tails in A, is it?

The only thing that's sad is your lack of argument and the growing list of fallacies that you're engaging in. I suggest you read up on these topics and get back to me when you've got an argument instead of this "gosh golly gee" routine of incredulity.

I don't expect deep philosophical issues to be intuitive to your common sense view of the world nor care if they are.

I can't help it that I understand the difference between possibility and probability.

What has that to do with it? Some physical possibilities are probable, and some are improbable. But some logically possible physical events are just physically impossible, which means, as I already pointed out, that they are inconsistent with laws of nature. All improbable events are logically possible and physically possible. For all improbable events are consistent with laws of nature. And no impossible events are.

A is indeed the random one. It's also only 100 coin flips. Though if you notice even in 100 coin flips there was still a series of 7 heads in a row. If you blow up this 100 flips to a cosmic scale then you can imagine a million years going by with nothing but heads. For someone to experience that happening they would excitedly claim that it couldn't possibly be random. That's my point. Thanks for allowing me to make it.

An event that has never happened before is rare, not impossible. There is no way to make the leap from rare to impossible by observation.

In other words, you seem to be saying: