On 10/30/2015 5:39 AM, Pierz 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.
Interestingly, as Lawrence Krauss and Sean Carroll both mention in their
popular lectures, in the far future the accelerating expansion of the
universe will leave the Milkyway alone with no other galaxy within the
Hubble sphere. The universe will appear to our sucessors, if there are
any, completely empty with a lone island of stars and matter.
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.
An interesting viewpoint. However, I think that "fine-tuning" is a
problem that was invented to satisfy a solution. Smolin had an
interesting evolutionary theory of cosmogony, but it turned out to be
empirically falsified because this universe doesn't have the physical
parameters to maximize black hole production.
Hunches that there is a much deeper truth that we can't even guess are
like "brain in a vat" ideas in that they lead nowhere.
Brent
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