Beautiful! Not very flattering to acceptors of the Theory of Everything though: you have to forget EVERYTHING to begin with. Then make up the WORLD from that fraction you experienced and format it into a Total. The hack with the rest... JM
On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 8:39 AM, Pierz <[email protected]> wrote: > 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. > -- 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. 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