Malaclypse the Younger

Not only that, but because the argument from design is internally incoherent (as the designer requires the same sort of explanation), it is nonsense on infinitely long imaginary stilts that act like purple!

[ March 31, 2002: Message edited by: Malaclypse the Younger ]</p>

tronvillain

Well, since the piece of my argument HRG took issue with doesn't depend on knowing the probability distribution, I'm not sure how that's relevant. I was making a fairly abtract point.

Malaclypse the Younger:
While what I am saying is that there is only one valid way to choose the lines, and that there is only on probability distribution as a result. By an interesting coincidence, it happens to coincide with the empirically derived value (or at least I hope it does).

99Percent

1. There is some aspect of existence--call it A--that makes our facts happen one way and not another. This may be the reason our laws of physics are what they are, or the laws themselves.

No. the facts happen one way only. Not another possible way. That you can imagine a fact happen another way does not mean that it actually happens. There is no reason for existence. Existence just is, including the laws of physics. That you can imagine there are reasons behind existence is because you have the human ability to determine reason of existence in the practical way (eg, laws exist is to prevent crime). The confusion arises because you are trying to determine reason of existence in the philosphical sense (The reason I exist is because...)

2. All A can be classified into those with an intelligent being, and those without.

Define intelligence.

3. The vast majority of possible A without an intelligent being will result in a universe unfriendly to life.

So? In any universe unfriendly to life, there would be no life, and there would no wondering about reason of existence.

4. A much greater proportion of possible A with an intelligent being will be friendly to life. This is so because there are plenty of reasons intelligence would want to create more intelligence.

True, but where would the original intelligence come from then?

5. The universe is life-friendly.

A very small part of the universe is life-friendly, agreed. But again if there were no life, then there would no one to wonder about existence and its Platonistic reasons behind it.

6. So the universe we have would be produced by relatively many A with an intelligent being, and relatively few without one.

There is only one A. The many A you imagine are just pure useless philosophical speculations. A=A.

HRG

Actually, your probability would be undefined. You'll have to explain why an infinite sum of zeros can be 0.25.

You might be thinking about some limit of the probability of picking a white domino out of a finite sequence of N dominoes as N goes to infinity, but this limit process does not converge to a probability measure on the set of all integers. That you can speak in some sense of the probability of the set {4,8,12,16 ....} - that what your example amounts to - is not sufficient since a probability measure must be defined for a large class of sets (a sigma-algebra, to be technical) and not only for a single set

The situation is worse for fine-tuning since this argument assumes that physical constants can be fine-tuned continuously, and not only in discrete steps.

Regards,
HRG.

Wyrdsmyth

Everything about Fine Tuning hinges on this observation that our universe is "life-friendly." But this is an awfully subjective statement. It is a very narrow band of the biosphere on planet earth that is "life-friendly," if you even want to call it that. And even in that narrow band, there are extreme conditions such as volcanism, hurricanes, tsunamis, blizzards, etc. that periodically wipe out life.

To me, and this is just my subjective opinion, it doesn't look at all like earth was "fine tuned" to be friendly and hospitable to life. To me, it looks like life has overcome great odds, great obstacles, to spread and adapt to what are often very extreme and harrowing conditions. Antarctica doesn't look "fine-tuned" to be the perfect environment for penguins -- it's just the opposite; penguins look to me like they've adapted to Antarctica.

Jayhawker Soule

I agree. As someone who has enjoyed tinkering with Drake's Equation in the past, about the very best one can say is that the universe is life-permissive. It seems to me that 'Unintelligent Design' would be a more defensible hypothesis. But, as they say, 'God only knows' how one gets from such a sloppy designer to the sadistic flake portrayed in the Bible.

[ April 01, 2002: Message edited by: ReasonableDoubt ]</p>

bd-from-kg

tronvillain:

Well, if you did so it might well converge – presumably to the specific value of ½. But if for Macalypse it might converge to the value ⅓, while if I did it the value might be ¼. It all depends on how we went about deciding which line to draw each time.

You appear to have a specific method in mind and are under the impression that this is the only “reasonable” way to go about it. Perhaps what you have in mind intuitively is that you would first “spin” the circle (or otherwise choose a direction for the line), then choose one of the lines in this direction that intersects the circle using a uniform probability density function. OK, that’s your way. Macalypse’s way is to pick a point on the circumference, then choose a direction using a uniform density function. My way is to pick a point in the circle using a uniform density function and draw the line for which this point is the center. Why is your way “objectively right” and our ways “objectively wrong”?

To see how closely tied your notion of what’s “natural” is to a particular mental image of how you would go about selecting lines, suppose that I have a computer program that immediately “draws” the line for which a given point is the midpoint when I put the cursor over that point and click the mouse. If I happen to be accustomed to using this program, “choosing” a line by clicking on its midpoint will seem far more “natural” and “intuitive” than choosing a direction and then picking one of the lines that lie in that direction.

On the contrary, to someone familiar with probability theory it will not only make sense that there is more than one “right” answer, but it will make no sense to assert, in the absence of a specified probability density function, that there is one uniquely “right” answer. Until a probability distribution is defined there is no “right” answer, because there is no well-posed question.

Here’s another example. Suppose that a computer program has to find the real solutions of a cubic equation (A + Bx + Cx² + Dx³ = 0) given the coefficients A,B,C,D. My job is to test the program. Each of the inputs can be zero or a real number between 10**-293 and 10**322, or the negative of such a number. I could use a “random number generator” to produce numbers uniformly distributed between the specified limits. Unfortunately almost all of the resulting numbers will be extremely large; I will get no indication of how the program works on ordinary numbers, or very small numbers, or various “mixes” of these. The correct method is to use a “random number generator” to produce numbers uniformly distributed between log(10**-293) and log(10**322), take the exponential of each one, and take the negative of half of them. (For technical reasons I’d also “skew” the distribution in various ways, like throwing in some zeroes, but we’ll ignore that for now.) Is the resulting distribution “natural” or “intuitive”? Well, it seems so to me; I’ve used this kind of distribution many times. It’s the “natural” one for this type of problem, and there are a great many problems of this general type.

Now if someone who was not familiar with my method of generating test cases were asked how likely it was that a given coefficient would lie between 10**-293 and 10**-292, he might well say confidently that this probability was very low indeed – on the order of 10**-614. But he would be wrong. The actual probability would be on the order of 1/1200. Thus he would be off by about 611 orders of magnitude.

The bottom line is that is it not possible to say anything meaningful about the probability of something unless the “something” is a subset of a set on which a probability distribution has been specified.

[ April 01, 2002: Message edited by: bd-from-kg ]</p>

tronvillain

bd-from-kg: I don't think that any of those methods are "objectively wrong", I just think they'd all converge to the same answer.

tronvillain

Never mind, I see your point.

Proxima Centauri

In a very large multiverse with varying parameters life will always be possible somewhere.
Andrei Linde explains that in his paper, THE SELF-REPRODUCING, INFLATIONARY UNIVERSE printed in the Scientific American. Pity it ends in mid sentence. Here is the URL.

<a href="http://www.sciam.com/specialissues/0398cosmos/0398linde.html" target="_blank">http://www.sciam.com/specialissues/0398cosmos/0398linde.html</a>

Linde is Professor of Physics at Stanford University.

Victor Stenger is a Particle Physicist and Professor of Philosophy at Colorado University. He wrote the following among many other papers on alleged fine-tuning.
THE ANTHROPIC COINCIDENCES, A NATURAL EXPLANATION. Here is the URL.
<a href="http://www.freethought-web.org/ctrl/stenger_intel.html" target="_blank">http://www.freethought-web.org/ctrl/stenger_intel.html</a>

These are both good for the scientifically minded. Happy Reading.

[ April 24, 2002: Message edited by: B.Shack ]</p>