On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 07:18:16PM -0800, Brent Meeker wrote: > > I think "fine-tuning" is problematic in another way which Stenger > didn't discuss: in general there's no measure for the parameters > alleged to be fine-tuned. If I showed that X, which is observed to > be18, must be between 19 and 20 for life-as-we-know-it to exist, is > X fine-tuned? Suppose it can be between 10 and 30? Is that > fine-tuned - after all the interval [10, 30] is of measure zero on > the real line. Any finite range of values is of measure zero - so > everything is "fine-tuned" - which is the same as saying nothing is. >
That certainly seems to be the elephant in the room. I faced exactly this issue when trying to compute the ecosystem complexity of a generalised Lotka-Volterra ecology (see my 2002 paper "Diversity Evolution"), which failed for precisely the reason you mention. Interestingly, I came up with a successful approach last year (see "Complexity of Networks (reprise)") which is currently under peer review. It successfully extracts a network structure from something with continuous weights, and gives a quite non-arbitrary complexity measure (which is essentially the logarithm of inverse probability). I wonder if such an approach could be applied to the fine-tuning problem? -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Mathematics UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [email protected] Australia http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
