On 12/9/2012 12:08 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
This reminded me a bit of "The Presumptuous Philosopher" thought experiment:
It is the year 2100 and physicists have narrowed down the search for a theory of
everything to only two remaining plausible candidate theories, T1 and T2 (using
considerations from super-duper symmetry). According to T1 the world is very, very
big but finite, and there are a total of a trillion trillion observers in
the
cosmos. According to T2, the world is very, very, very big but finite, and
there
are a trillion trillion trillion observers. The super-duper symmetry
considerations
seem to be roughly indifferent between these two theories. The physicists
are
planning on carrying out a simple experiment that will falsify one of the
theories.
Enter the presumptuous philosopher: "Hey guys, it is completely
unnecessary for you
to do the experiment, because I can already show to you that T2 is about a
trillion
times more likely to be true than T1 (whereupon the philosopher runs the
God’s Coin
Toss thought experiment and explains Model 3)!"
One suspects the Nobel Prize committee to be a bit hesitant about awarding
the
presumptuous philosopher the big one for this contribution.
Which is why the anthropic principle is useless until you have something else determine
the ontology.
Brent
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