So imagine a guy washed up on a small desert island after a plane crash. Unfortunately during the plane crash he suffered a traumatic injury which caused him to completely lose his memory. He wakes up on the sure without the faintest clue about who he is or where he comes from. He doesn't even remember that there are other people in the world and that he was born of a mother and father. After sorting out his immediate survival needs, being a philosophical type, he begins to wonder about his own origins. He begins to speculate about the what conditions might have given rise to him and the island he finds himself on.
Without the benefit of the memory of any scientific knowledge, he is struck by the strangeness of the fact that the world he finds himself in seems so well-adapted to him - or he to it. Isn't it marvellous, he reasons, that when I feel this particular unpleasant sensation of dryness (which we, but not he, would call "thirst"), it happens that there is some abundant substance I can locate that, if conveyed into my mouth, relieves that sensation? Isn't it astonishing that I have these dextrous digital appendages that seem so perfectly made for constructing a shelter, or making and throwing a spear? How to explain it? Being more of a mathematician than a naturalist by nature, he reasons that perhaps the explanation is simply this: the ocean that he sees that appears to extend indefinitely in all directions is in fact infinite. And scattered across that infinite ocean there are other islands. He can see at least a couple from where he is, so if the ocean is infinite there would end up being an infinity of such islands. And if there are an infinite number of such islands, then all possible arrangements of matter will eventually form by chance. If they happen to form something conscious - and conscious enough to reason about its origins - then that conscious being will be required to be complex enough and well adapted enough to the stuff around it that it can maintain its own integrity long enough to form such deep thoughts. OK, there are still some holes in his Theory of Everything (where did the ocean come from?) but a man has to draw the line *somewhere*. He is smart enough to see the lurking possibility of infinite regress and skirt around it. With this he is satisfied and settles back to eat another coconut, convinced he has found a coherent explanation of his own existence... The problem with his impoverished account, of course, is that it misses a vast amount of structure in the world. The line he has drawn to stave off infinite explanatory regress is clearly far too high in the hierarchy of complexity, but because of the limited range of his experience, he is unlikely to see that. If he could witness mating and birth, for instance, he might start to wonder if he hadn't been a little hasty in his invocation of infinite permutation as an explanatory principle. With sufficient exposure to time and diverse biology, he might start to wonder about the role of an *evolutionary* process. It's clear how much better the evolutionary explanation is because, armed with it, he might be able to make predictions. He might be able to foresee, for instance, that his body should have robust mechanisms for dealing with normal environmental vicissitudes. Suffering his first minor wound, he might predict that the injury would heal. On the other hand, with the "infinite permutations theory", he could predict nothing at all. Though it offers a somewhat satisfying conceptual neatness, it also lacks any predictive power whatsoever. You can see perhaps see where I'm going with this. I tend to believe in a multiverse. But I also tend to believe that as an explanation of fine-tunedness *per se*, the combination of a multiverse with the anthropic principle is scientifically and philosophically bankrupt. I believe that we are like desert island amnesiacs, lacking the breadth of observation that we would need in order to see the correct picture of how fine tuning arises in our local environment. Lee Smolin's theory of an evolutionary universe gets closer, but suffers from the serious flaw that he sees universes evolving towards black-hole production, which is only incidentally or co-incidentally related to life-friendliness. My hunch is that the true explanation of fine-tuning (and hence of the physical laws we observe) is one that involves our universe being embedded in much larger multiversal structures and processes which we probably can't even guess at with our current technological and theoretical apparatus. The resort to "all possible structures" flattens out infinity to a single dimension the same way that the castaway amnesiac flattens out infinity to the level of the ocean. I suspect the truth is much deeper and more complex and that the fined universe we see is a result of a kind of deep computational process in the same way that biological complexity is the end result of a long computational process. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
