The n-Category Café

I’ve long believed that Jim Dolan is the alter ego to whom John Baez assigns his more outrageous opinions, on e.g. capitalization.

Littlewood has a story in his Miscellany, of meeting someone who said “Oh, you really exist! I thought you were just a pseudonym that Hardy put on his weaker papers.” I give that person a 60%.

I think there should be a lot of good jokes involving various combinations of these people.

Like: “Osama bin Laden, Santa Claus and Pythagoras were sitting at a bar…”

I don’t really know what it means for a lot of these people to have existed. Does 5% mean there was a real person who did 5% of what the legendary figure is said to have done? Or that there’s a 5% chance that there was anybody at all that did any of it? Or that there’s a 5% chance that the current legend has a continuous history of retellings back to a completely different legend which mentioned the name of a real person?

Adam—0%. I don’t even know what it would mean for “Adam” to be real.

Gilgamesh—5%. I guess there might possibly have been a real king by that name, though the entire legend seems purely fictional.

Huang di—0%. I guess I should put him in the same category as Gilgamesh, but the time till the earliest evidence seems longer.

Moses—I suppose 30% seems vaguely reasonable for some possible core of reality at the centre of the legends.

Zoroaster—an author for the oldest part of the Avesta? Well, someone must have written it, so that would put him at 100%. I don’t know enough about Zoroastrian tradition (to put it mildly) to comment intelligently on legends.

Samson—0%. Everything about story this has the ring of folktale.

Hercules—0%. He’s pure mythology. He’s a god, his attributes and name are ultimately Babylonian. No way is he real.

Theseus—0%. Purely mythological.

Odysseus—0%. Local trickster god.

Agamemnon—5%. I can’t rule out the possibility that there was a real person of that name at the base of some of the legends.

Helen of Troy—0%. I suppose it’s conceiveable, that if Agamemnon existed, he may have had a brother who may have had a wife, but I don’t think that’s enough of a connection.

Homer—difficult. Do we count the author of the Iliad and the author of the Odyssey separately? It seems unlikely to me that they don’t each have single core authors, notwithstanding later additions and developments, so maybe 90% for each author separately, 20% for both together. But for all I know, maybe a Homer scholar could dismantle the narratives completely.

Buddha—as a core of the legend? 99%. As actor in all the legends? 0%

Lao Tzu—hmm. That some of the legends and philosophy trace back to a real person of some such name? 90%. That the Tao Te Ching was all written by him? 0%

Chuang Tzu—I’ll go with your 80%. I know very little about him.

Confucius—99%. He seems too well-authenticated to be unreal.

Pythagoras—99%. Though I don’t believe he had a golden thigh or slept for several years in a cave in Thrace.

Socrates—100%. It would just be bizarre for him to be a combined fiction of Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes …

Plato—100%. How would one arrange for the disappearance of Plato? Who would write the dialogues?

Jesus—98%. I don’t believe in the miracles, and his entire infancy seems to be obviously a fabrication, but that there really was a provincial reformist who told parables and founded a sect that became the Christians?—that seems pretty likely. I’ve heard the suggestion that he started life as the fictional center of a short set of moralising essays—kind of like Job—but the incidents of his life don’t seem to have the right kind of poetic or novelising feel to them, despite the obvious echoes and duplicates of incidents from earlier literature.

Mary Magdalene—uh, duh, I suppose 50% will do.

Paul the Apostle—100%. Yes, it’s theoretically possible he’s a construct, but it seems pretty far fetched.

Muhammad—100%. I won’t vouch for the authenticity of every hadith, and no doubt there’s a lot of legend in early Muslim historiography, but I don’t see how you could eliminate Muhammad and still have history turn out the way it did.

Brunhilde—0%. She just screams “mythological”.

King Arthur—0%. Well, OK, I suppose there may have been some historical figure of post-Roman Britain who got mixed up with the legendary figure, but I don’t think that counts.

Morgan le Fay—0%.

Robin Hood—0%. Pure folktale.

Shakespeare—100%. Too much historical evidence. And someone wrote the plays and poetry. And it sure wasn’t Francis Bacon—it’s not like we’re short of samples of Bacon’s writing.

Santa Claus—0%. Unless you mean the historical St Nicholas, whom I place more credence in …

Johnny Appleseed—I guess 100%, but I’d automatically discount large quantities of legendary stories …

Paul Bunyan—maybe, not being American, I’m missing something, but I don’t see how I could possibly assign him more than 0%.

Zorro—0%. I’m not sure at what point exactly the joke began here, so I’ll just press on further into the swamp …

Jack the Ripper—99%. I suppose he could just be a statistical fluke …

Nicholas Bourbaki—100%. I take it you mean the French general …

Osama bin Laden—100%.

I seem to be much more certain than you! That makes me nervous. Maybe I just don’t know enough …

Well, bourbaki is only 100% if you are talking about the painting, representing general charles bourbaki instead of nicholas bourbaki…

Better give one hundred points/cent points to St Nicholas ;) at least his remains are conserved, a rigorous proof of existence according to catholic axioms :D

Anyone who really 100% believes that John Baez really exists and writes a weblog while being born long ago in the pre electronic age (1961)??? ;)

I like the fact that the only ones with actual photographs are Santa Claus, Zorro, and Nicolas Bourbaki.

I don’t like how most of you posting comments are too lazy to estimate probabilities on any of these people existing.

Here are some more to validate. What’s the chance the following “exist”:

* Schrodinger’s cat

* An Everettian in another world than this one

* A smart Everettian in another world than this one

* A man on the moon

* A man on the moon and on earth in superposition (this one you can actually calculate provided you guessed the previous one correctly)

* A string theoretician in the year 2100

Cheers, Bob.

Tim wrote:

How can there be a standard picture?!

As far as I can tell, there are two main ingredients people use in judging identity: continuous existence and close resemblance. If they’re both clearly present, people feel comfortable saying two things are the same; if they’re both clearly absent, people feel comfortable saying they’re different; and if one’s present and the other’s absent, or if they’re both present in a very weak, tenuous form, then people disagree and give contradictory answers.

I don’t see how philosophers could “discover” that one of these criteria is right and the other is wrong, or determine exactly how tenuous a connection may be before it ceases to be a connection.

I think philosophers actually can make progress on these issues — but their progress may be closer to ‘establishing handy conventions’ than ‘discovering the truth’.

For example, consider the word ‘or’. Does it mean ‘exclusive or’ or ‘logical disjunction’? In natural language there’s no real answer to this question: it means some messy mixture of the two, which we sort out by context. But in technical discussions, it really pays to establish a convention — say, that it means logical disjunction. Otherwise, mathematicians and logicians would eternally be having arguments. I’d say “You’re committing the fallacy of affirming a disjunct!” and you’d say “No, you doofus, I’m just using ‘or’ differently than you!”

I’m sure you have no objection to occasionally establishing handy conventions like this.

The problem seems to be that when people do this, it’s rarely clear what’s going on. To what extent are we choosing arbitrary conventions, to what extent are we discovering facts about ordinary language, and to what extent are we discovering other facts about the world?

I think there are reasons it’s rarely clear. One is that we don’t want our conventions to be completely arbitrary, far removed from ordinary usage. Otherwise we’d feel no qualms about defining ‘or’ to mean something like… ‘and’!

So, we’re trying to ‘regiment’ ordinary language without distorting it more than necessary.

Now, what about ‘exists’?

I can imagine historians getting really tired of arguments about what it means for historical/legendary characters to ‘exist’. I can imagine philosophers getting involved, trying to help them choose some handy conventions. And, I can imagine them settling on what Kenny called the standard picture.

But, I hope that in doing so they realized that to some extent they were regimenting ordinary language, not simply ‘discovering what it means to exist’. On that I agree with you.

Anyway, I think I’ve been using that standard picture without knowing it! This may account for some of our disagreements about the probability that Paul Bunyan and Zorro exist.

(Enough of the philosophical preamble! Let’s talk about something serious, like Paul Bunyan and Zorro!)

When I wonder whether Paul Bunyan existed, I implicitly follow the recipe Kenny outlined:

Suffice it to say, the standard picture these days allows for these people to have existed without doing any of the things listed (and even for the possibility of those things having been done by someone else of the same name!) The picture says that we should trace the usage of our name historically, figuring out the sources from which we got the name “Plato”, for instance, and seeing where those sources got their name (which was very often different, being in Greek for instance, or using a different nickname), and so on, until we either reach a real person, or someone blatantly making something up about a name they had never heard before, or if it was just an accidental combination of stories about different people that were accidentally stuck together. In the first case we’d say the person exists (even if the stories all turned out to be lies about this person — say Gilgamesh sitting around one day telling his grandkids about all the troubles he went through). In the second case we’d say the person doesn’t exist (even if, by some bizarre coincidence, someone else had done lots of similar things and no one ever noticed). In the third case, it’s hard to say.

So, I’d say ‘Paul Bunyan exists’ if we could in principle track back the legends of Paul Bunyan, through a trail of ever exaggerated retellings, back to some actual guy. I wouldn’t demand that this guy was a lumberjack so tall that his footprints formed the lakes in Minnesota, nor that he owned a giant blue ox named Babe that was 42 axe handles high.

Nor would I demand that it took 17 storks to carry the infant Paul Bunyan to his home… nor that he dug the Grand Canyon by dragging his axe behind him.

As of now, it seems the Bunyan legends go back to James MacGillivray, an newspaper reporter who collected lumberjack tales for an article for the Oscoda Press in 1906. Could these tales, or many of these tales, ultimately emanate from stories about an actual guy? I don’t know — but I gave it a 5% chance.

Next, Zorro.

Before reading the Wikipedia article on Zorro, I guessed a 2% chance that the Zorro legend traced back to some actual guy… maybe Zoroaster. (Just kidding.)

Now I’m reading the article:

Zorro (often called “El Zorro” in early stories) was created in 1919 by pulp writer Johnston McCulley, and first made his appearance in The Curse of Capistrano, serialized in the pulp magazine All-Story Weekly.

But, maybe the authors of this article didn’t know that McCulley got the inspiration for Zorro from a historical figure. It’s only Wikipedia, after all. So, I’ll downgrade his odds of existence to 1%…

…but not Zero!

I should add that I threw in Santa Claus, Paul Bunyan, Zorro and Nicolas Bourbaki in part for normalization purposes: I wanted the cast of characters to include people who almost certainly didn’t exist, as well as some who almost certainly did. If one of you guys told me there’s a 100% chance that King Arthur existed, I’d find it very helpful to discover you also think there’s an 80% chance that Zorro existed.

I can’t even attempt to assign probabilities to some of those names, so I’ve taken the liberty of changing the rules somewhat, and also adding some names which John unaccountably overlooked.

Adam: legendary. But Science Acknowledges that one “Eve” existed Quite Some Time Ago, and she lived in Africa. As a matter of fact, science tells us that all men are women who underwent a sex change. I saw it on NOVA, so it must be true. Nyah, nyah— General Patton was a girl!

Gilgamesh: legendary, possibly inspired by historical characters.

Huang Ti: haven’t the foggiest.

Moshe: 5%. Funny thing, this “name” derives from the Egyptian “msh” (possibly pronounced in spoken Middle Egyptian something like “mosh”), which as a verb means “to be born, to be created”. The root “msh” appears in such kingly names as Rameses, Thutmose, and Ahmose.

Egyptologists agree that no one born in Egypt could possibly have actually been named “Mosh”— that doesn’t even make sense as a name, since it begs the question (answered by other Egyptian names incorporating this root): “born to WHOM? made by WHOM?” Some suggest “mosh” was a nickname, that the original name was longer. Or perhaps that’s just what the neighborhood kids called him: they say he was a foundling, so “born for (noman)” might have seemed appropriate. Kids can be so mean…

In monumental script, “mes” can be represented by several different glyphs, one of which is rather explicit: a squatting woman giving birth. By the way, I can’t believe humans are still doing that— the ones who remained women, I mean. Letting something grow inside of you, feeding off your blood— that’s disgusting! This paragraph has been brought to you on behalf of ten year olds everywhere.

The sign probably intended here is more abstract, resembling a trident but thought to represent the rafters of a “great hall”. As far as I know, only two names which are still in common use derive from ancient Egyptian roots. The other is “Susannah”.

Moroni: 0.001%. Things made up in school one day, as they say in Wikipedia. None of Joseph Smith’s tale has the least iota of plausibility, taking account of archeological and linguistic evidence.

Xenu: notation fails me.

I credit to Walt Pohl the suggestion that all religious scriptures began as a joke that took a serious turn.

Speaking of DNA evidence, the huge popularity of evening entertainment like “CSI” demonstrate that, while humans are certainly not losing their fear of death, increasingly they prefer to obliquely confront this fear through “scientific drama” rather than scriptural stories. So I figure it’s safe to slaughter some sacred cows, all in the spirit of family fun. I mean, the Church of Scientology is known for its boisterous sense of humor, right? Zowie! Jump the couch!

Zoroaster: 50% sounds about right.

Samson: legendary. All communities in all ages have traditions of strongmen.

Hercules: the same.

Theseus: legendary, but possibly based on a historical person (compare Billy the Kid). All communities in all ages have told tales of adventurers.

Odysseus: legendary; all communities in all ages have traditions of wily tricksters. In our time we tell tales of a fabulist called Nabokov. Curiously enough, Nabokov is said to have lived in Ithaca. See what I mean?

Agamemnon: composite of earlier oral traditions concerning various historical chieftans. Too bad he wound up Just Another Dead Guy on 48 Hours Mystery. Agamemnon for President! Anatolia, here we come!

Helen of Troy: all communities in all ages have traditions of great beauties. In our time we speak of Marilyn. NASA insiders insist that the first named road on the Moon will be called Mulholland Drive. The key is indigo.

Homer: composite of bards who sang and improved early versions of the “Homeric” epics.

Gautama Buddha: 100%. I know someone who met him in Crown Heights. Disappeared under mysterious circumstances on the night of July 13, 1977, hasn’t been heard from since. Reportedly sought by the FBI for questioning in the Jimmy Hoffa case.

Lao Tzu: 50% sounds about right.

Zhuangzi: not a clue.

Confucius: 80%.

Pythagoras: 50%. Possibly the fictional alter ego of a writer whose name is lost to history: Mel Brooks.

Socrates: 70%. Just because Plato told dozens of memorable stories about thim doesn’t prove he existed. I believe Chaucer existed because he was not only a prominent citizen well attested in the written record, we even have autographs. But show me the warrant for the execution of Socrates!

Plato: 90%. Show me a deed with the name of “Plato the philosopher”.

Yeshua: 40%, but if any such person ever existed (at best, there exists only brief and ambiguous historical attestations in contemporary writings), he was only a minor agitator/terrorist associate (to the Romans— that fellow Iscariot being the reputed terrorist with whom Yeshua associated) or a spiritual leader (to a handful of followers) or the kind of pamphleteer you cross the street to avoid (to modern urbanites). Scholars agree that the character of this person, if he existed at all, was completely “reinterpreted” by later writers, particularly Paul.

Mary Magdelene: legendary. All communities in all ages have had their harlots with a heart of gold.

Paul the Apostle: 95%. His letters are too obviously the work of a highly disturbed individual to be historical fictions. Actually, he creeps me out. Let’s change the subject.

Mohammed: 90% sounds about right. He fought and won battles, after all — people don’t lie about serious stuff like that, although details can be changed. C.f. the Battle of Megiddo. You can’t believe everything you read on some temple wall. What, you think Tjaneni was going to write anything suggesting that Thutmose was caught napping in his tent? That, but for the grace of the Gods, things could have taken a very nasty turn? I think not — he knew from whence he got his bread and beer.

Brynhildr: legendary, but possibly a composite of oral traditions about earlier historical figures.

King Arthur: ditto. I have read books on this tired subject and despite valiant efforts by some authors, there has never been the slightest historical evidence for such a person.

Morgaine: ditto.

Robin Hood: ditto. All communities in all ages have had their trickster legends.

Shakespeare: 80%. I’ve seen deeds and wills involving a prominent citizen in a minor town by that name. But show me the autograph manuscript of a play or a poem.

Santa Claus: legendary.

Jonathan van Post: 0%. Sure, he exists, but I happen to know he’s an advance scout for the Mucoid Invasion from Gliese 581. Keep your pod repellent handy. I have Yogi Berra on speed dial — I figure he’s the one I want negotiate with any aliens.

Chris Hillman: at the event of writing, I’ll grant the existence, but I utterly reject the “person”. But I could be wrong, so I’ll give it 3%.

James Kibo Parry: 100%. He posts, in utterly inimitable style, therefore he exists. Duh!

When I was at university, I shared a flat with two guys. One night, I don’t know how, one of them and I got into a discussion about whether Moses existed. The other guy apparently wasn’t impressed by the topic and started improvising a song on guitar with a what-is-the-meaning-of-it-all theme. The chorus was simply “Did Moses exist?” repeated a few times. The only verse I remember was:

Did he carry the Torah
From high above
Or is it just Charlton Heston
I’m thinking of?

He’s now a representation theorist.

Besides actual existence there is also an issue of multiplicity of existence:

* More paintings are attributed to Rubens than one man could have ever produced in his life.

* On the other hand, there is the case of two copies of the same painting being made by two different Breugels .

* One thing which is certain is that there is of course more than one John Baez producing all these writings!

Fairly resilient (that is, it would take a lot of evidence to shift my probability)
Adam: 0
Moses: 50
Hercules: 5
Theseus: 10
Odysseus: 20
Agamemnon: 60
Helen: 30
Homer: 50
Buddha: 90
Confucius: 95
Pythagoras: 90
Socrates: 70 (I would have put this lower, but an earlier comment mentioned that Plato’s not the only one that talks about him)
Plato: 95
Jesus: 95
Paul: 95
Mohammed: 99
Arthur: 20
Morgan le Fay: 15
Robin Hood: 40
Shakespeare: 100
Santa Claus: 0
Johnny Appleseed: 100
Paul Bunyan: 1
Zorro: 0
Jack the Ripper: 90 (this is coincidentally one of the examples Kripke discusses many times in Naming and Necessity)
Nicolas Bourbaki: 0
Osama bin Laden: 100

Fairly unresilient (that is, some very slight evidence could shift my probability here greatly)
Gilgamesh: 10
Huang Ti: ??
Zoroaster: 80
Samson: 10
Lao Tzu: 90
Chuang Tzu: 95
Mary Magdalene: 80
Brunnhilde: 10 (I was only familiar from Wagner - her existence in Icelandic sagas might increase my probability here)

This is fun! I include only those I have enough knowledge of to give something that is not a complete and utter guess:

Adam: 0%
Moses: 60% (in the bare sense of an early leader of the Hebrews, without assuming the truth of most elements of the story)
Samson: 20% (likely folktale, but may be an historical figure in the background)
Heracles: 20% (ditto)
Thesseus: 20%
Odysseus: 40%
Agamemnon: 50%
Helen: 20%
(I think there likely was a Toyan War, and if there was a main Greek commander it might have been Agamemnon. Helen is probably an embellishment)
Homer: 40%
Buddha: 85%
Pythagoras: 85% (Though most things believed about him are false, I think there was very likely a real man who originated the stories. He is too recent to be fully legendary IMO.)
Socrates: 97%
Plato: 100%
Jesus: 92%
Paul: 96%
Muhammed: 92%
Arthur: 60%
Morgaine: 10%
Robin Hood: 70% (in the sense of a real outlaw and his band as starting point for stories; he almost certainly did not live in times of King Richard or have a wife called Marian)
Shakespeare: 100%
Santa Claus: 0%
Zorro: 0.2%
Jack the Ripper: 90%
Bourbaki: 0%
Bin Laden: 99%

I love this post! And some reactions are so funny. Here are my probabilities for the persons I can make a reasonable estimate of…

Adam: 2%
Moses: 30%
Samson: 10%
Heracles: 30%
Odysseus: 30%
Helen: 30%
Homer: 60%
Buddha: 85%
Confucius: 85%
Pythagoras: 95%
Socrates: 99%
Plato: 99%
Jesus: 99%
Mary Magdelene: 50%
Paul: 50%
Muhammed: 99%
Arthur: 20%
Robin Hood: 55%
Shakespeare: 99%
Santa Claus: 0% (he is based on the archbishop of Mira though - so that would be a 99%)
Zorro: 10%
Jack the Ripper: 99%
Bourbaki: either 100% or 0%
Bin Laden: 99%

May I request a joke starting with “Pythagoras visits his doctor…”?

Those of you who assign a nonvanishing probability to the existence of “Adam”: what exactly is it you think has a nonvanishing probability to have existed?

I’d put Socrates at about 99.9%; reading Plato’s Apology, many of Socrates’ arguments are rather weak, and quite transparent, too. So much so that I can easily believe the text recounts an actual event, rather than a made-up legend to tell of visionary greatness.

On the other hand, I feel at risk of succumbing to “Wag the Dog”-inspired fears for historians to come; e.g. the most direct evidence I have ever seen that George Bush exists/is a real person is in the form of short video clips from TV. I might have to rate him around 85%.

“For example: did you know Homer didnt write the Odyssey and Illiad? They were actually composed by another guy with the same name!)”

I think that a little research will show that almost all the great works of fiction were actually written by someone with the same name as the author.

Belatedly having read this, I was struck by the ‘into a bar’ jokes. I’m now reading ‘Plato and a platypus go into a bar’.
It’s a hoot, all the jokes being an excuse to discuss philosophy - or vice versa!

Used copies available from Amazon.

David, comments?

There’s an article (here) in the New York Times about some philosopher who thinks there’s 20% chance that our universe is a computer simulation being run in another universe.

Now, to all those who cavalierly assigned probabilities to existence of historical figures, what do *you* think is the probability that our universe is a simulation?

Come on. Don’t be shy.

IMHO, Nature is obviously concurrent… Whether it is fundamentally concurrent is another story. If true, all phenomena that we observe would be an emergent result from such a fundamental concurrency…

Sorry, it wasn’t until after my previous post that I noticed the fascinating paper posted today, which is relevant to the Cosmic Simulation matter AND to the roots of learning algorithm threads.

Fri, 17 Aug 07

arXiv:0708.1362
Title: Physical limits of inference
Authors: David H. Wolpert
Comments: 36 pages, 2007 CNLS conference on unconventional computation
Subjects: Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech); Computational Complexity (cs.CC); Information Theory (cs.IT); General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc)

We show that physical devices that perform observation, prediction, or recollection share a mathematical structure. We call devices with that structure “inference devices”. We present existence and impossibility results for inference devices. These results hold independent of the precise physical laws of our universe. The impossibility results establish that Laplace was wrong to claim that even in a classical, non-chaotic universe the future can be unerringly predicted. Alternatively, they can be viewed as a non-quantum mechanical “uncertainty principle”. The mathematics of inference devices is related to the theory of Turing Machines (TM’s), e.g., some impossibility results for inference devices are related to the Halting theorem for TM’s. Furthermore, one can define an analog of Universal TM’s (UTM’s) for inference devices, which we call “strong inference devices”. We use strong inference devices to define the “inference complexity” of an inference task, which is analogous to the Kolmogorov complexity of a string. A task-independent bound is derived on the difference in inference complexity of an inference task performed with two different inference devices. This is analogous to the “encoding” bound on the difference in Kolmogorov complexity of a string between two UTM’s. However whereas the Kolmogorov complexity of a string is arbitrary up to specification of the UTM, there is no such arbitrariness in the inference complexity of an inference task. We informally discuss philosophical implications of these results, e.g., for whether the universe “is” a TM. We also derive some graph-theoretic properties governing sets of multiple inference devices. Next we extend the framework to address physical devices used for control, and then to address probabilistic inference.

Well, I can’t deny that I’m a little disappointed. As far as I can tell (though I confess I haven’t read every recent comment here), I only got two responses to my question of what people think the probability $P$ is that our universe is a simulation:

Rolfe Schmidt said $P=0$ if the simulation is also required to be run by one of his ancestors.

John Baez said there exists a positive integer $n$ and a real number $p$ between 0 and 1 such that $P=p^n$.

My own feelings on the matter are basically the same as with the question of whether Moses existed. I can imagine someone coming up with evidence that convinces us that Moses existed, or that our universe is a simulation, or that Gods exist, but I can’t imagine how anyone could ever hope to prove the contrary. So I’m not really sure what it means to speak of the probability of such a thing. I’m imaging some kind of betting game or something.

A couple of months ago, when this thread was going strong, I tried for a few minutes to think of some completely unanswerable questions, like What is the probability that some given Turing machine $X$ halts. But with every example I came up with, I could actually imagine someone coming up with some reasonable probabilistic statement. But then I saw the question of simulated universes in the New York Times, and it seemed like the ultimate in ridiculous things to assign probabilities to, so I thought I’d test how willing the people here were to do it.

To everyone’s credit, no one gave an actual answer. But now I have a new question—what is it that makes you willing to assign a probability to the existence of Moses, but not to our universe being a simulation?

Here someone who managed to exist and exist not simultaniously, acc. to the way of his teaching.

Winston Churchill didn’t really exist, say teens

(I wouldn’t bet anything on the reliability of the survey quoted, but still it’s amusing.)

I know, this is five years old, but I had a new thought:

Adam - 100%

…because Mitochondrial Eve must have had kids somehow…