Corona688

Still the same problem, though. Given certain numbers for universal constants we could rule out the existence of carbon and such, yes. But what other things COULD exist that we have no way of knowing about? We have no way to predict what would happen, other than in relation to things that exist in our universe. In short, I don't think it's possible to know the probabilities for other universes until we totally understand other universes, not to mention our own.

Jesse

But we don't have to consider universes with wildly different laws of physics, just ones with a few constants tweaked slightly, so you might still have atoms forming just like they do in our universe, but perhaps the formation of heavier elements like carbon would be extremely rare. Consider the "fly on the wall" argument from an article on fine-tuning by philosopher John Leslie:

triplew00t

The principle you are discussing is akin to Russel's car plate miracles. Next time you are on the high way, look at a car in front of you. See the numbers and letters? Now calculate how small the chance of seeing those number and letters are, with all the cars you COULD have seen. Wow! A miracle.

The universe operates in the same way. We have one universe that we know of. Say there were a trillion ways it could have developed. It had to develope some way, and each way was equally unlikely (1/100000000000000). This one developled. Its a miracle! Look at the odds! (Neverminding the fact that there were 99999999999999 other ways it could have gone that were equally unlikely statistically). And as for it being "lucky" that there can be life, why is that so lucky? If the universe developed one of the other ways, we may have had a giant quantum pink unicorn instead of life. Isnt that much more "unlikely"? We can't known, as we don't have a clue as to the other possible universes that could have develped had any of the constant values developed differently. We can only work with what we have, and postulating multiple universes is just as much rubbish as postulating Gods. Statistcally something had to exist. To ask why this specific universe is the way it is is stupid. It was this or one of infinate other infinately (and exactly equally) unlikely universes. We "lucked" out.

In Peace, Nero

JGL53

I have no problem with the rest of your post, but I would debate this specific claim. The universe we are a part of is a brute fact, apparently. There could be a multiverse of a huge number of such universes, all independent of each other.

For that theory to be correct, there would be no requirement for any new unprovable TYPE of entity. The multiverse, i.e., the other universes, would be a naturalistic brute fact.

Postulating the existence of eternal or timeless god(s) would be postulating the existence of an entirely new type of entity - an invisible, immaterial conscious super-person(s) that can, in effect, just think a universe into existence.

I would view the above postulate as a violation of Occam's Razor -multiplying (ill-defined) causes beyond necessity. I.e., the immaterial consciously- acting entity theory, i.e, god - do you know of any real life examples of this? I can give you an example of a universe.

triplew00t

Right you are. But because we have one, does not mean there are two. We have only proof of a single universe, and we have seen no empirical proof of having more than one. In that way, postulating multiple universes is just as irrational as postulating Gods. I see what you are getting at, but we have no evidence of either Gods or any other universe. That is simply my point. I suppose it can, as you have shown, be argued that multiple universes are more likely, as we have atleast one that we know of, but I still believe that both postulates are unreasonable, irrational and, as you have added about the idea of Gods, I also find the idea of multiple universes to violate the same laws of simplicity in explanations.

- Nero

Anti-Materialist

Simplicity in explanations is not a law - just a guideline to help narrow down the explanation process. It is a judgement call as to when such narrowing down is or isn't appropriate.

JGL53

Well, certainly we are just speculating - anything is possible, one supposes, even that which SEEMS impossible to all humans - theists, atheists, whatever.

But, just to simplify the debate to those postulates my finite mind can deal with, I would narrow down the TOE choices to these:

1. a god (or gods) did it - i.e., the universe was thought into existence by an immaterial super-mind.
2. our one and only universe just exists as a brute fact, and just happens to be "fine-tuned" to allow life, including intelligent life, to exist.
3. our one universe is a brute fact, but goes through an infinite series of bangs and crunches. Sometimes the physical conditions are conducive to life (as in this cycle), and sometimes not.
4. the multiverse is a brute fact.

Personally, I find #1 irrational and absurd (so sue me),
#2 as improbable as nature producing a watch by chance,
#3, for various reasons, e.g., the 'missing' mass, seems to be greatly out of favor among physicists at the moment. It's still possible, and it could be subsumed under #4.

I still find #4 the most compelling, for reasons previously stated, plus, here's a physicist who makes a case for indirect evidence for it:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?cha...A5809EC5880000

Jesse

triplew00t:
The principle you are discussing is akin to Russel's car plate miracles. Next time you are on the high way, look at a car in front of you. See the numbers and letters? Now calculate how small the chance of seeing those number and letters are, with all the cars you COULD have seen. Wow! A miracle.

The universe operates in the same way. We have one universe that we know of. Say there were a trillion ways it could have developed. It had to develope some way, and each way was equally unlikely (1/100000000000000). This one developled. Its a miracle! Look at the odds! (Neverminding the fact that there were 99999999999999 other ways it could have gone that were equally unlikely statistically). And as for it being "lucky" that there can be life, why is that so lucky? If the universe developed one of the other ways, we may have had a giant quantum pink unicorn instead of life. Isnt that much more "unlikely"? We can't known, as we don't have a clue as to the other possible universes that could have develped had any of the constant values developed differently. We can only work with what we have, and postulating multiple universes is just as much rubbish as postulating Gods. Statistcally something had to exist. To ask why this specific universe is the way it is is stupid. It was this or one of infinate other infinately (and exactly equally) unlikely universes. We "lucked" out.

In Peace, Nero

Did Russell also use a licence plate example? I’ve always seen that one attributed to Feynman, like on this page:

That said, clearly it is not always wrong to say that a particular outcome seems "unlikely". For example, if Feynman had thought up the licence plate "ARW 357" before observing a car with that exact licence plate number, we could indeed say that this was a rather astonishing event, one which might lead us to suspect he had seen the car earlier. And even in cases where one did not make a prediction in advance, it still sometimes makes sense to talk in a rough way about events which seem too unlikely to have been a product of pure chance. For example, imagine I have a random-letter-generator which generates long strings of text, and on one run I happen to see that it generates the complete works of William Shakespeare, word-for-word. It’s true that that particular string of text is no more or less probable than any other exact string of text, but at the same time it’s vastly more probable that the random-text-generator will generate nonsense than meaningful english text (and even more improbable that it’ll generate a known piece of text), so one would have cause to suspect someone had tampered with the machine in this case, unlike if the machine had produced a nonsense-text.

Talking about the "unlikeliness" of a particular outcome in retrospect, as opposed to cases where you make predictions in advance, is fraught with peril, as Feynman’s example shows. But a good way of thinking about whether this type of reasoning is valid or not is to imagine how you would have reacted if the outcome had been different, and to see if there would be something like "conservation of unlikeliness" across all possible worlds in which all the different possible outcomes occurred. For example, if Feynman looked at the licence plate "ARW 357" and said that it was extremely unlikely and amazing, a 1 in 17,576,000 chance, we can infer that he probably would have said the same thing about all 17,576,000 possible licence plates he could have seen instead of that one, which means that in 100% of possible worlds he would claim the outcome he saw had an unlikeliness of 0.0000057%, which violates "conservation of unlikeliness". On the other hand, suppose I randomly generate a text string 4 letters long, and get the string "TEXT". Noticing that this is a valid english word, I calculate the probability of getting an english word randomly—out of 456,976 possible sequences, let’s assume for the sake of argument that there are 1000 english words four letters long ( this page says there are 341 four-letter words on a list of ‘rare and obscure words’), so I claim this event had an unlikeliness of about 0.02%. If I assume that I would not have commented on the unlikeness of any text string that was not an english word (if I had gotten the spanish word ‘GATO’ for example), then it would be the case that in only 0.02% of possible worlds would I say that the outcome had an unlikeliness of 0.02% or lower, so "conservation of unlikeliness" would be preserved and my comment about the unlikeliness of the actual outcome "TEXT" would be valid.

Of course, that’s a big "if". Normally it’s difficult to psychoanalyze exactly how a person would have reacted to all possible outcomes and to be sure that they would not have commented on the unlikeliness of some other possible event which doesn’t fall into the same class as the one that actually did occur (like calculating the probability of getting a spanish word because the outcome was ‘GATO’). However, in the case of anthropic coincidences, this problem is greatly simplified simply because we know that no one will be around to comment on the unlikeliness of anything in a universe with no intelligent life! So "conservation of unlikeliness" would be assured here…thus, I’d say if there are any cases where calling a particular outcome unlikely in retrospect is valid, then the case of anthropic coincidences is surely one of them.

If this argument seems questionable, consider my analogy from a previous post:

Let’s make things even more specific here by saying we know from the way the machine was built that there was a 50% chance it would fail after the first run, and a 50% chance it would go on for exactly 100,000 runs before failing. If it runs only once, the probability of producing at least one adult human is 0.00001, but if it runs a million times the probability is 1-(0.99999)^100000 = 0.63 . So, given knowledge of this scenario and given the knowledge that I was a product of the machine, I would use Bayesian reasoning, specifically the formula P(A|B)=P(A,B)/P(B), where B is an event that we know occurred and we want to know the probability that A occurred given B—here, B would be the event "at least one adult human was produced" and A would be the event "the machine made 100,000 runs". Since we know a priori there’s an 0.5 chance of 1 run and an 0.5 chance of 100,000 runs, the a priori probability of B is (0.5)(0.00001) + (0.5)(0.63) = 0.315005, and the a priori probability of both A and B is (0.5)(0.63) = 0.315 . So, I’d say that knowledge that the machine produced me would cause me to revise the a priori estimate of the probability that there were 100,000 runs, 0.5, to a probability of 0.315/0.315005, a near-certain probability of 0.999984.

Note, though, that this is not entirely kosher as a piece of Bayesian analysis, since I didn’t predict anything in advance—once again, we’re dealing with the problem of retroactively calculating the probability of an event I already know happened (namely the fact that the machine produced a viable human). Modifying your criticism of inferring anything from anthropic coincidences, one could say that every single run of the machine would produce an outcome that was "unique" in some way, even if it was very unlikely that any run would produce a viable human capable of thinking about probabilities. So suppose you found yourself in this scenario—would you refuse to reconsider the initial 50-50 probability that the machine ran one time vs. 100,000 times, even in light of the fact that you knew it produced you? Would you say that anyone else in this situation who did conclude it was a lot more likely the machine ran 100,000 times was falling prey to Feynman’s licence plate fallacy?

Majestyk

Pain, suffering, emotional loss, disease, morbidity, hatred, jealousy, insanity, cruelty, death.

The premise, that a creator was necessary for existence to be is, as far as I know, without merit. The desire for a such creator's existence can usually be traced back to our fear of our own mortality and the realization that our own existence is irrelevant and our efforts futile. The overwhelming acceptance of this delusion is a testament to the inherent trait of our species known as, insanity.

Anti-Materialist

Dude - that was a really good argument!

Here is one that is a wee bit less complex. Suppose Feynman's license plate had said "Spank-me". He would be inclined to think that license plate was designed - because it has an obvious purpose. It advertises to the world that the owner of the vehicle enjoys a good spanking now and then.

By analogy, a universe that gives rise to complex molecules that eventually evolve into life - when many many other possibilities could also exist - could be reasonably thought to have been made that way on purpose.

Sure - the "spank-me" license plate could be on accident - it just seems unlikely. The same goes for a life generating universe, in my opinion.