On Sat, Oct 31, 2015 at 5:19 AM, Pierz <pier...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Saturday, October 31, 2015 at 1:01:08 PM UTC+11, Brent wrote: >> >> >> >> 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. >> > > Maybe so. But there's an element to my thought experiment I didn't quite > spell out. The castaway faces a similar problem in explaining his > organismic adaptation as we face in explaining "fine tuning" (which I don't > agree is a pseudo-problem - there are many physicists who remain resistant > to the multiverse + anthropic principle explanation). A developmental or > selection hypothesis makes some predictions about adaptation - wound > healing is an example - which the infinite islands hypothesis does not. > Similarly the multiverse explanation of fine tuning always explains exactly > what *is* and nothing more. It explains all the fine tuning we've > discovered, but none that we might discover in the future. For example, it > is quite incredible that there happens to be a substance with all the > life-supporting properties of water, and an element carbon that is capable > of such extraordinarily complex chemical combinations. By the > multiverse/anthropic explanation, we'd expect to find more than a few such > remarkable coincidences in any life-supporting environment. But now let's > imagine a society far in the future which has discovered a whole range of > further remarkable fine-tunings which have supported or enabled a much more > advanced society. They might find for example a certain fine-tuning > principle which shows that the probability of a planet being hit by a > mass-extinction-causing asteroid is finely tuned to support the development > of intelligent societies. Perhaps evolution tends to follow a trajectory > towards the evolution of oversized predators which are then typically wiped > out by collision events because they do not have the intelligence to > prevent them. This then allows the development of an intelligent species > which is capable of predicting and preventing such collisions. Now of > course I'm not suggesting this *is* the case, or that it necessarily > makes a heap of sense as an example (I made it up just then), but if we > were able to visit many, many inhabited planets and we saw the same pattern > over and over, we might then start to say, "Wow, it's kind of remarkable > that there always seems to be enough time to develop a society capable of > gravitational towing technology. If there was just a slightly higher > frequency of collisions in a typical solar system, then most intelligent > species would be wiped out like the dinosaurs before they reached the stage > to be able to prevent it." So there you have an example of a newly > discovered piece of fine-tuning that we would not predict from the theory > today. On its own it might not be all that convincing, but if enough > similar examples accumulated, one might start to find it fishy and wonder > why we kept getting so "lucky". This would point to something beyond the > huge sample + observer selection hypothesis. It would suggest that the > universe was an example of something that had been selected or evolved, > with life central to that selection process. So, my idea might not lead > nowhere after all. It will take a long time to verify, but my hunch is that > fine tunings of precisely the nature I've described (well, not the specific > example) *will* be found. A sufficient number would ultimately falsify > the purely anthropic explanation of fine-tuning. >
Hi Pierz, This is really interesting stuff. I also tend to think that evolution will turn out to be superseded by some more general theory, in the same fashion that happened to classical physics. It will remain viable in a narrow sense, but not the whole story. But to play devil's advocate, this sort of intuition seems to come from a sense of vastness of the universe and even greater vastness of a multiverse. Something I sometimes think about is that this sense might be misguided. It is true that there enormous distances and mind-blowing numbers of galaxies with mind-blowing numbers of stars, but what if we are taking the concepts of distance and repetition too seriously? What I mean is this: instead of looking at the universe spatially, what if we looked at it in terms of information content? Suppose we wanted to store the current state of the universe in some very powerful computer (that would, of course, have to exist in some other, larger universe, whatever that means -- this is just a thought experiment). We could apply a compression algorithm. There is not need to represent large amounts of empty space or repetition as a dense matrix. Instead we could do something similar to what is done to compress images or sound. In this compressed information space, I wonder how much the perceived "sized" of the earth in comparison to the rest of the universe would change. I suspect that, from this perspective, the earth is actually huge, because it is so complex. What if, looking at things through this lens, the earth turns out to be "most of what there is" in information space? Would this change your intuitions somehow? Best, Telmo. > > >> >> Brent >> > -- > 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
